The Lebanese dream dreams. But in Beirut they also suffer some of the Middle East’s most titanic traffic jams. Why not an electric rail between the northern city of Tripoli and Tyre in the far south? With Beirut Central Station built, as was once planned by the French after Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war, beneath the Virgin Megastore at one end of Martyrs’ Square? With its mountains, Roman ruins, crusader castles, snow and beaches but with a hopeless sectarian system of government, Lebanon may be a Rolls-Royce with square wheels but it could at least have trains.

Of course, the first steam loco chugged across the mountains to Damascus 120 years ago. This week the auditorium of the Unesco palace in Beirut echoed to the hoots and wails of French 0-8-0 steamers and Swiss rack-and-pinion trains as they huffed and puffed their way on film to Tripoli, Homs and through the snow-blanketed heights of Dahr el-Baidur to the Bekaa and Syria. Up to 800 young NGOs and civil servants – an extraordinary number for a bleak, rainy weeknight in Beirut – applauded the new putative age of Lebanese rail.

Trains once ran to Syria and beyond to Baghdad

Pity it doesn’t exist – yet. But could it? Every photographer, filmmaker and reporter has made their pilgrimage to the rusted tank engines and broken carriages and delicate French cut-stone railway stations that still litter Lebanon. There are coffee-table books about the country’s railway heritage, from the Swiss Winterthur locomotives that the Ottomans brought to Lebanon in 1895 to climb its mountains, to the big French Cail engines that still rot in the old railway marshalling yard at Tripoli, their oil bleeding – even to this day – onto the old tracks, onto the bushes and the pink flowers embracing the drivers’ cabs.

So there was something rejuvenating about the speakers who introduced Zeina Haddad’s painstaking documentary on Lebanon’s old railways. A German diplomat extolled the international background of the railways and proudly announced that the big G-8 loco on the poster for the accompanying exhibition was manufactured in Germany. Alas, he diplomatically avoided mentioning that these particular engines were 1919 war reparations handed over by the Kaiser’s Germany to France after the First World War and then shipped by the French victors to their Lebanese mandate.

Eugene Sensenig-Dabbous, an Austrian politics professor at Notre Dame University in Lebanon and engineer by profession, told his Unesco audience that “railways are a regional, international issue because infrastructure development is one of the keys to the future of the Middle East”.

Talking later, he was more specific. “The majority of the freight for re-launching Syria after the war will obviously go through Beirut. The Syrian port of Lattakia is too small. The reopening of the old Tripoli-Homs train line, which is still relatively intact, could be done quite quickly.

SOURCE:   http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/despite-regional-conflict-lebanon-is-planning-to-become-a-railway-powerhouse-once-again-10255466.html