Over ten years in the making, Israel’s high-speed trains have begun running; in a few months, it will be possible to ride them from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Matti Friedman reflects on the old railway, built in 1892, that will soon be obsolete:
[When the new trains are operational], passengers will board fire-engine-red carriages in Tel Aviv and be whisked on electrified track over the country’s longest bridge, then over its highest, and through the longest tunnel, and finally into a new station 260 feet under Jerusalem. The trip, about 35 miles, will take less than 30 minutes, making it, by a wide margin, the fastest way to get between the country’s two most important cities. . . .
But progress has its victims. And here [the victim is] the old country—a small, inefficient but compelling place that Israelis call the “good old land of Israel.”. . . Like the old Israel, the old train is sporadically functional. It can take four times as long as the new service and twice as long as driving. It’s so impractical for most commuters that even before the appearance of its flashy rival, it was nearly empty much of the time. . . .
An early account of the train was written by Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, who rode it in 1898 from the port of Jaffa, adjacent to modern-day Tel Aviv. At the time, the train was the only one in this remote and impoverished corner of the Ottoman empire. Herzl, a Viennese journalist who’d come part of the way east on the luxurious Orient Express, thought it was awful. “It took an hour merely to leave the Jaffa station,” he wrote. “Sitting in the cramped, crowded, burning-hot compartment was pure torture.” One day, Herzl thought, there would be a modern Jewish state here, and a wonderful network of electric rails. (The new train, 120 years later, is Israel’s first electric line.)
The train’s birth, six years before Herzl boarded, was the doing of a Jewish businessman from the old Sephardi community of Jerusalem, Joseph Effendi Navon, with the help of Swiss and French investors and the blessing of the sultan in Istanbul. . . . Jerusalem’s residents were Jews, Muslims, and Christians who tended to be pious and poor. Many had never seen a train. When the first one arrived on August 27, 1892, an elderly Jewish woman at the station declared the smoking, clanking behemoth to be “possessed of the devil,” a reporter noted, and a frightened group of Muslim kids nearby agreed.
Read more on New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/opinion/matti-friedman-jerusalem-train.html