Rail Transport in Israel - History

History

Rail infrastructure in what is now Israel was first envisioned and realized during the Ottoman period. The Jaffa–Jerusalem railway, initiated by the Jewish entrepreneur Joseph Navon and built by the French, was opened in full in 1892 at 1 m gauge. The Ottomans soon built the Hejaz railway, which had an extension to Haifa called the Jezreel Valley railway. It was inaugurated in 1905. Major railway development was undertaken by the Ottomans, with German assistance, in the Sinai and Palestine Campaign of World War I, which saw the construction of the eastern and southern railways.

When the British Empire was advancing on the Ottomans, it too built and repaired numerous railways to help in the war effort. Starting in 1917–18, the British converted the Ottoman 1.05 m gauge southern, eastern and Jerusalem railways to standard gauge, though not the Jezreel Valley railway and some of its branches which remained narrow gauge and thus incompatible with the rest of the railways in Palestine. The British also extended some of the existing railways and connected them with adjacent countries and built 600 mm gauge lines in Jaffa and Jerusalem. After the First World War ended, the British nationalized all railways in the Palestine mandate and created the Palestine Railways company to manage operations.

When Israel gained independence in 1948, the state created Israel Railways as a successor to the British company. During the 1948 War of Independence, much damage was done to the railways in the country, especially the Jezreel Valley railway, which was not rebuilt due to financial constraints and its incompatibility with the rest of the rail network.

In the first years of Israeli independence, rail passenger traffic grew rapidly, reaching about 4.5 million passengers per annum during the early to mid-1960s, at which point traffic began to slacken due to improvements in the road infrastructure, increases in the automobile ownership rate, lack of investment in the rail network, and a continued favoring of public transportation using buses over trains. This trend reached a low point of about 2.5 million passengers in 1990, which on a per-capita basis represented about a 75% decrease from the heyday of the 1960s. Then in the 1990s, a wave of railway infrastructure development began, leading to a resurgence of the railways' importance within the country's transportation system.