The Hejaz Railway

For the better part of a century the Hejaz Railway has been known for Lawrence of Arabia's celebrated desert campaign, fighting alongside the bedouin in the Arab Revolt during the First World War. Yet perhaps the reputation that it truly deserves is for the epic story of its construction, a monumental feat of engineering, requiring enormous imagination, skill and resolve. Here was something breathtaking, combining the romance of steam locomotion with the grandiose vision of the last years of the mighty Ottoman Empire.
Conceived in the dying days of the nineteenth century and constructed under the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II, the railway followed the overland pilgrim trail from Damascus deep into the heart of Arabia to reach the holy city of Madinah. It was to lay its tracks across pitiless, wadi-fissured deserts and the unforgiving mountains of the Hejaz, from which the line would earn its name.