Maps and Stations

Maps of the Hejaz Railroad

Note: Regarding Map: Saudi Railway.gif

(Halet Amm’ar to Madina Station) The names of 41 stations / stops are taken directly from the name plates except for a couple of locations where they have been taken from government issued maps. This is because the physical location had no name plate and some (like Bir Nasif) have been removed. The stops that don’t have name plates are: (halet ammar, that al haj, al uthealy, birk, qurayn ghazal, al mustabgha and bughaz). The rest of the name plates were in location, at least at the time of writing this: March 2005. Some of the forts are not related to the railroad but they are located near the railroad. Most of these are older in construction than the railroad (like al swara) The problem with the names originates from the fact that the Ottomans used to write in Arabic but the pronunciation was in Turkish. (i.e. Turkish language written with the Arabic alphabet). The problem with the name: Ralid Raad is that it doesn’t sound meaningful in Arabic nor in Turkish. If a Turkish person reads this, perhaps they could contact me with help with this name. (If you can offer some help, please contact the webmaster of Nabataea.net here.)

M. Nagshabandi (Saudi Arabia)

Principal Stations of the Hejaz Railroad in 1914

Ottoman Stations Names by Osman Levend

I believe the list of stations as published in the Ottoman Year Book of 1910 should be of some help to your readers. Apart from several Ottoman State Year Books (Sâl Nâme) where all rail facilities of the Empire are well documented as to distance as well as to inauguration dates; I benefited enormously from an itinerary reference book entitled “Stations [or ‘Stades’ if you will] on the Most Exalted Pilgrimage” (i.e. Menâsik el Hacc’ es Serîf) published in the Old Turkish Script and in Turkish (obviously !) at Boulaq Works in Cairo during the 1250th year of the Hedgira or 1833 of the Gregorian Calender to be exact. The reason for this interest of mine was based on the fact that the reigning monarch of the day and the most important benefactor of Hejaz Railway, i.e. Sultan Abd el Hamîd the Second; had implicitly ordered his engineers that the tracks should follow the age old Route of the Hajj’ to al Maqqah. This is one of the reasons why the original Terminal of the Line was built at ‘Qadam ash Sharif’ (i.e. the Exalted Step) instead of ‘ad Dimashq ash Sham’ since the former was the initial encampement where pilgrims from the Balkans and Anatolia as well as those from the Eastern Provinces gathered to begin their long and arduous journey. A further note on the inauguration dates of all finished sections of the Line as well as the final ceremony day when the tracks reached al Madinah is that they were always on the 19th day of August in the Julian Calender (i.e. the 1st Day of September in the Gregorian Calender); the said date being the day when the Sultan had ascended to the throne of the Ottomans in 1876.

The “Hejaz” Railway Stations according to the Ottoman State Year Book published in 1910 are as follows:

It should be noted that the original Hejaz Railway starting point was as at Qadem which was to be connected to Damascus only by 1911.

Abbreviations:

• jrn - Jordan
• sar - Saudi Arabia
• syr - Syria
• ysr - Israel