All Aboard? Without the railway, Sawfar may never have existed. Just a few... (Sawfar, Mont-Liban, Lebanon)
July 18, 2017 by wsinghbartlett
All Aboard? Without the railway, Sawfar may never have existed. Just a few kilometres from the pass down into the Beka’a Valley, getting up here before the steam engine took at least a day, if not more. It wasn’t the kind of journey you’d make without a reason. But when the Beirut to Damascus line was completed in 1895, the stop at Sawfar (or Sofar, depending on how you transliterate) was only 3 hours from town and so it was suddenly possible to come up here for the day – an especially pleasant prospect in the summer, when Sawfar is at least 10C cooler and considerably less humid. For a while, the locomotive’s star shone brightly but failure to improve the track (Lebanon’s narrow gauge lines limited speeds) meant that even before the war, trains were losing ground to the car. Then came the war. What wasn’t misappropriated by militias or occupied by the Syrians, was wrecked by the Israelis during their 1982 invasion. Now all that remains are ageing stations like this, a few coastal and mountain tunnels and the overgrown factory/interchange in Riyaq. Most of the tracks have been ripped up, stolen or buried beneath tarmac. The last time a train ran in Lebanon was in October 1991, when for a just over a month, the ‘Peace Train’ ran between Dora and Byblos. There’s talk, sporadically, of resurrecting the railways and while it would be a very expensive business, what with the property the State would need to requisition to lay new lines, being able to travel from Beirut to Tyre or Tripoli in 40 minutes or less must seem as magical a prospect to today’s gridlocked motorists as the steam engine did to 19th Century Beirutis gasping for a weekend whiff of fresh mountain air.
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