An introduction to the book

At the dawn of the twenty-first century railroads are enjoying a major revival worldwide. Railroads relieve congestion on the highways, reduce the number of casualties from traffic accidents, and are environmentally friendly. In many cases their expansion, refurbishment and modernization, including replacement of worn track and rolling stock, and the introduction of advanced signaling, is long overdue. This is the situation also in Israel, where highways are three times more congested than in other developed countries, and until the 1990s the rail network, apart from some freight services, was neglected. Moreover, passenger by passenger and mile by mile the railroad is the safest form of ground travel.

The aim of this monograph is to document the development of the railway that was built to exploit the growth of tourism in the Holy Land at the end of the nineteenth century. Since it also integrates an account of the traffic that justified the construction of the railway, namely tourists and pilgrims, the story commences at mid-century. Though it finishes in the early 1920s, it does not neglect the mandate period and the foundation of the State of Israel. Included are the proposals of Theodor Herzl related to railroad construction in the Jewish homeland.

With regard to sources, those documenting the growth of tourism to the Holy Land in the nineteenth century are limited. Both consolidation and failure of some companies in the travel industry have meant the loss or destruction of company records. Even less information is available on the history of the meter-gauge railroad that in 1892 connected Jaffa with Jerusalem. Most records were burned or removed by the Turkish authorities during the winter of 1917-1918. Some surviving annual reports of the railroad company are found in the Central Zionist Archive. Potentially valuable British consular reports held in Jerusalem were destroyed in 1914, though copies of many are held at the National Archive, at Kew, near London. The correspondence of Conrad Schick held at the Palestine Exploration Fund London has been invaluable, as have documents held at the Israel Railway Museum. British and American consular reports were adapted for publication in the early 1890s. Apart from firsthand accounts by early travelers, Paul Cotterell's The Railways of Palestine and Israel and R. Tourret's The Hedjaz Railway provide useful descriptions of the railroad, its route, and equipment. Some of their information, as here, is based on the article by A.Vale that appeared in the The Railway Magazine during 1902.

This documentation, first-hand accounts by visitors on pilgrimages, journalists and travel writers, as well as guidebooks, are the main sources. Since travelers and pilgrims provide the starting point for this chronicle on the history of the Soci?t? du Chemin de Fer Ottoman de Jaffa ? J?rusalem et Prolongements, or the Jaffa-Jerusalem Railway, the borrowings from their writings are liberal. For the decade or so after the opening of the railway they provide the best, and sometimes only, surviving reliable historical facts.

The most important resource that captures the spirit of the Jaffa-Jerusalem Railway consists of the magnificent photographs taken between 1891 and 1914. The early photographs in this book have been supplemented with those taken by British forces from December 1917 on, and a number of color images dating from the mid-1980s. Sources of illustrations and photographs include: The Palestine Exploration Fund, London; Thomas Cook UK Ltd, Archive, Peterborough, U.K.; Dr. Yermiyahu Rimon; Israel Railway Museum (Haifa); Eran Laor Cartographic Collection, Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem (JNUL); Manuscripts and Archives Division, JNUL; Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Imperial War Museum, London; National Archives, Kew, U.K.; The Library of Congress, Washington D.C. (Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection); Firestone Library, Princeton University, New Jersey (Rudolf-Ernest Brunnow Papers, Rare Books and Special Collections); Fine Arts Library, Harvard College; Deutsche Bundesbahn Direktion, Nuernberg; and the Australian War Memorial, Canberra.

ANTHONY S TRAVIS, PhD, is deputy director of the Sidney M. Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and of the Jacques Loeb Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. He is also a senior research fellow at the Leo Baeck Institute London. He has published extensively on the history of chemical technology in the 19th and 20th centuries. He is recipient of the American Chemical Society's History of Chemistry Division 2007 Edelstein Award for achievement in the history of chemistry. Other interests include the history of civil engineering and railroads.