Sultan's dream restored to faithful

Riding the Iron Road: Syria is confident of reviving the pilgrims' railway from Damascus to holy cities, writes Robert Fisk

Damascus - The Hijaz railway station was a brief dream, the last, short fantasy of the Ottoman empire, the final vision of the Sultan Abdul Hamid to send his Muslim pilgrims from Damascus on the best train Western technology had to offer. From their terminus in Syria - all cut-stone porticos and painted-wooden roof, the booking halls hanging with brass lanterns - the great German steam locos of the 19th century would haul the faithful through a land without frontiers to the holy cities of Arabia. Even today, above the booking windows, you can read the words in carved wood: "In the name of God, the Most Merciful".

He did not cast His most benevolent light upon the fruits of Sultan Abdul Hamid's imagination. In little more than a decade, the Turks were using the 1,000km track to ferry their troops into the peninsula and TE Lawrence's warriors were tearing up the rails and blowing up the fine, wooden-carriaged trains. In what is now Saudi Arabia, it is difficult to identify the old permanent way; in Jordan, a new industrial line has replaced the route to Jebel Dabbagh. And outside the Hijaz station in Damascus, where the brass train bell still hangs above the narrow-gauge metals, a single Hungarian- made rail-bus, its Communist-era windows covered in fingerprints, waits to trundle the few miles down to Deraa, the grubby marshalling yard in which Lawrence met his personal nemesis at the hands of a Turkish officer. Railways often take longer to die than empires.

Mount the gilded staircase of the Hijaz station, however, and you will find Engineer Salah al-Ahmed, director of the Hijaz railway - a gold-painted bust of President Hafez el-Assad of Syria to his right, a history of Syrian state railways in front of him - ready to give proof of reincarnation. Of Syria's 17 German and Swiss 19th-century steam locos, seven have been restored in the past two years and are fully operational. Four of five Romanian diesels are now working again, and two of the six Hungarian railcars. "We have even renovated the personal carriage of the Sultan Abdul Hamid," says the moustachioed director.

And when I bound back down the stairs, there it is, with a Swiss loco in green and red livery coupled to the carriage and a second car - ignominiously labelled "Bar", but of equal vintage - tacked on behind. In their enthusiasm to gloss this most exotic of trains, the Syrians have painted on to its flanks the names of the cities through which the equally famous Orient Express once travelled on its way to northern Syria. "Paris, Vien, Beograd ... Alep ..." But the Sultan's carriage still contains a private bathroom and the Winterthur locomotive, all iron and brass, has its nameplate and number to show that it once climbed the great pass from Damascus to Beirut. It waits for tourists. On the next track, the Hungarian railbus symbolises reality.

Engineer Ahmed has co-authored the history of Syrian railways and he reels off the dates of the epic Hijaz completion with the enthusiasm of a sergeant major, as if he had overseen its construction. "Damascus-Deraa was completed in 1903. Damascus-Haifa the same year. Saleh-Medina was in 1908. The Sultan Abdul-Hamid wanted to help Muslim pilgrims to travel to Mecca safely instead of riding on horse and camel through the desert with the danger of thieves and disease. Half the money was raised by public subscription. This station here in Damascus was finished in 1914." Not a hint of irony enters his voice as that fatal year - alph wa tisr-mille arba-tash in Arabic - echoes across his magnificent office, the year of Sarajevo and Mons and the final, fatal commitment of the Ottomans to the Central Powers. The Arab Revolt was less than two years away. So was the end of the Hijaz railway.

But you have to admire the efforts of Engineer Ahmed's 600 railwaymen to resurrect their end of the line. Over the past three years, they have not only restored the locos - "with only Syrian expertise, no foreigners, and we can now make any working part in our sheds", the director insists - but renovated the old railway line from Deraa to Bosra, from Damascus to Qatana and to Bloudan. Every Friday, another Winterthur tank engine, blowing its whistle amid clouds of brown smoke, can be seen hustling its carriages over the motorway behind the Sheraton Hotel en route to the mountains along the Lebanese border. The reconditioned terminus is a masterpiece of art, its facade now decorated with a massive portrait of the man who will always make the trains run on time, President Assad.

To the north, Syria boasts a new track to Aleppo and a Romanian-built railway of stunning viaducts and Stakhanovite tunnels to Lattaqia. But it is the Hijaz that has captured the emotions of Syrian train-lovers, along with its palace of a station where the pigeons swoop below the painted rafters and the great Turkish candelabra. Every Syrian museum has its archival pictures of the terminus. In some, it reflects the late autumnal heat of 1915, robed merchants and servants talking in the concourse. Others show British and Australian cavalry riding past the station in the flush of General Allenby's victory. No train would ever again leave for Medina. Lawrence, along with the cancerous frontiers drawn by the British and the French would see to that.

And yet. Syrians are returning to their trains - at an average ticket cost of pounds 2 for every 160km covered, the advantages are hard to conceal - and Engineer Ahmed sees no technical reason why the Hijaz should not be restored in its entirety through modern-day Jordan - which maintains the track to Amman - and deep into Saudi Arabia; there have been two abortive efforts to do just that in the past half century. "We are hoping this will come to pass," he says. "We have done a lot of work at our end, without any foreign help. We have done our share. Now we are waiting for the others to do theirs."

This is the latest in our summer series on railway journeys.