No trains into Istanbul

[MARC Rider]

I was surfing around the "Man in seat 61" site trying to show my wife weird exotic train trips we could take, and when I looked at the Paris-Istanbul services, it seems that both of the rail terminals in Istanbul will be closed to inter-city rail service for almost 3 years while they do construction work on Istanbul-Ankara high speed rail and a tunnel under the Bosphorus. When they reopen, they'll have a new intercity rail station, and the historic terminals will be used only for commuter trains. The equivalent in the US would be to shut down the NEC, the Empire Service, the Silver Service, the LSL, Maple leaf, Adirondack, Vermonter, and Ethan Allen while they do the construction work on the Manhattan Gateway or whatever they call the new tunnels as well as the new NEC high speed line, while keeping NYP open for NJT and LIRR. And for 3 years!

I hope the Turks know what they're doing, it seems to me like they run the risk of losing customers by suspending all service for 3 years. On the other hand, you've got to hand it to them, doing an infrastructure project on a scale that we in the States can only dream of. (Of curse I don't know how long it took them to get this project to the shovel-ready stage.

Anyway, I guess trying to retrace the Orient Express, even by taking 3 separate trains, is out of the question until the work is done. If you do it, the Bucharest-Istanbul leg ends at the Turkish border in the middle of the night, and you get bustituted into Istanbul. However, once the work is done, a trip to Turkey to ride trains might be in order.

 

[jis]

The Engineering Works notice says Hayderpasa will be closed to long distance trains. It does not say anything about Sirkeci, which is the terminal on the European side. Did you see anything about Sirkeci being closed? If Sirkeci is not closed then you should be able to retrace the route of the Orient Express irrespective of what is happening to Hayderpasa. The Orient Express never went to Hyderpasa since it had no way to cros the Bosphorus. The new tunnel will make it possible for the first time in history for that to happen potentially, if there were an Orient Express.

AFAICT the Borphorus Express and the Balkans Express are still running to Sirkeci.

 

[MARC Rider]

The Engineering Works notice says Hayderpasa will be closed to long distance trains. It does not say anything about Sirkeci, which is the terminal on the European side. Did you see anything about Sirkeci being closed?

According to seat61.com, Sirkeci is, indeed closed to mainline trains:

http://seat61.com/Turkey.htm

(scroll down to "Important update 2013"

 

[jis]

Ah so the international trains are still running. It is just that the last 27km is bustituted. OK. Thanks for pointing that out. I had missed the bit about Sirkeci.

Such closures for major constructions do take place at various places. For example The extremely busy Howrah Station in Kolkata, India was closed for several days when they ripped out the old signal and control system and replaced it with electronic interlocking. Trains terminated short of it or were diverted to other stations and bus connections were provided to typical final destinations from those alternate temporary terminuses. Moves the work along faster and completes the work quicker costing less overall, than carrying on interminably while trying to maintain service to no ones satisfaction.

 

[cirdan]

wasn't there a ferry / barge until not too long ago that assured that connection. Prior to WW2, here were even through sleeper/Pullman cars from Paris to Cairo that went via Istanbul.

The Orient Express never went to Hyderpasa since it had no way to cros the Bosphorus.

 

[jis]

Yes, there were car ferries, and some cars may have been transfered. But I don't believe the entire train ever went to Hayderpasa.

Prior to WW II there could not have been a through car to Cairo, since the through railroad to Cairo existed only briefly during the second world war (1942 - 1948), and even then never carried through civilian traffic. The standard gauge link between Tripoli, Beirut and Haifa (via Rosh Hanikra and Kiriyat Motzkin) connected up with the already extant standard gauge line from Haifa to Kantara on the Suez Canal (via Tulkarm, Ras el Ein, Lydda, Gaza, Rafa (where the Rafa Crossing between Gaza and Egypt is located today)) This last link from Tripoli to Beirut and Haifa, called the HBT Railway was built during the second world war by the various Commonwealth Army Engineering Corps, Australia and New Zealand playing a significant role, and put into service in 1942. This established an unbroken rail route from Europe to Cairo involving a couple of ferry crossings.

Incidentally, the swing bridge across the Suez Canal at Firdan connecting the Palestine Railway to the Egyptian Railways was also commissioned in 1942 thus making a single seat ride possible from Haifa to Cairo (and hence theoretically also Istanbul Haydarpasa to Cairo) for the first time. This is where the only connection with the name "Orient Express" comes in. Egyptian State Railways in all their enthusiasm painted that name on three locomotives which were used on the Cairo to Kantara service. They never ever got any closer to Europe than Kantara.

One of the few remnants of that route can be found at the Israel-Lebanon border today at Rosh Hanikra where the railroad crossed the border through a pair of tunnels and a birdge through the chalk cliffs of Rosh Hanikra. The route was destroyed in 1948 by the Hagana to keep the British from sending supplies to their troops in Palestine by rail. I have been to the Rosh Hanikra tunnels which are beautifully preserved on the Israeli side. The northern of the two tunnels is sealed off by a thick wall at the border with Lebanon. It houses a very interesting museum. The southern tunnels houses a cafeteria. You take a short cable car ride down from the top of the cliff where the Israeli border station is located and where the road ends, down to the railroad bed. There are some interesting grottoes in the cliff with interesting wave action in them, which is what most people go to see at Rosh Hanikra. It is only the likes of me and descendants of those that served in Palestine during the war, who get into the railroad history of it.

For more on all this see "The Railways of Palestine and Israel" by Paul Cotterell, a book that has been out of print for quite a while, but is available in the second hand market for highly variable prices ranging from $30 to $200 or so. This book is considered to be one of the most authoritative source for information on the history of the railways of Palestine and Israel. This book claims that this line was never used in its entirety for civilian service. It also says that parts of the RoW are used today by the Israel Railway. The parts still in use are Nahariyya through Haifa upto Biniyamina, and in the south from Rosh Ha Ayina through Lod to Ashkelon.

 

[cirdan]

I visited Israel in 1988. I was part of a group who basically toured from location to location in a bus under the leadership of a guide. When our tour guide found out I was interested in trains he went out of his way to show me stuff and sometimes our bus would depart from the main road and follow narrow dirt roads to some ruined station on an abandoned lined in the middle of the desert, or on another occasion the location where Laurence of Arabia blew up a Turkish train. Sometimes he would sit next to me on the bus and he talked about his father who had been an early Israeli railroad worker (and the source of all this knowledge) and he talked about the different lines that no longer existed and the trains that used to run on them and anecodtes that had happened on those trains and the different phases in the development of the rail system in that area, not only for Israel but of the entire broader region.

He was the one who told me about through coaches to Cairo. But it could be his was mistaken of course.

 

[jis]

Indeed I heard all sorts of stories from various tour guides in Israel, and got curious. That's what got me started researching this. It took me over a year to get hold of a copy of Cotterell's book. And when it rains it pours! When I found it I found two and due to circumstances I landed up with two copies, one from Motor Books of London and another from some obscure outfit selling through Amazon!

Even my israeli friends were quite astounded to see how folklore differs from historical facts in many areas when it comes to the Railways of Palestine!

BTW, let me hasten to add that it is entirely possible that the British military at some point ran a car through all the way just to make the point that they can, and that may be the basis of the folklore. All that I was saying is that there is no evidence that this was available as a general service at any time for civilian use.

Yes, the Hejaz Railway did have a branch from Dera'a to Haifa and Acre (1.05m gauge) which operated through WWII. The Turks also built a line upto Beersheva. But they never went south/west of Kusseima in Sainai and the British were advancing from Egypt building their Metre gauge and standard gauge line north. The front between the adversaries was just south of today's Gaza City in 1917. The Haifa to Kantara standard gauge line was built during WWI as the British advanced north, but there was no standard gauge connection to the north before WWII. The only connection to the north was via the Hejaz Railway 1.05m line connecting to the British standard gauge line at Haifa. Indeed the history of railroads in Palestine around WW1 and soon thereafter is complex. But any through car from Istanbul to Kantara would have required at least two gauge changes on the way, and of course it also meant traversing territories held by the two adversaries that were at war too.

I find the history of railroads of that period in that area quite fascinating.

And of course, this is all just based on what I have learned so far. There is always a possibility that there are things that I have missed too.