Israel Railways is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the operation of the first railroad in Palestine.
A steam locomotive, operated by the Turkish authorities then in control of Palestine, brought the first string of passenger carriages over a newly completed rail line from Jaffa to Jerusalem on the evening of Oct. 22, 1892, in a journey lasting nearly four hours.
At a ceremony held Wednesday night, diesel locomotives pulled a series of new carriages purchased for operation on the still-to-be completed Tel Aviv metropolitan area suburban railroad.
The special train carried hundreds of VIPs and invited guests from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on a trip lasting half the time the first train took, although considerably more than the road journey between the two cities, which can be made in some 45 to 50 minutes.
The trip from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, uphill all the way, over numerous mountain curves, cannot be appreciably reduced until an entirely new track is laid over a different route. That is planned to be completed sometime in the future.
Attending Wednesday’s event, President Chaim Herzog recalled how he, like so many other boys, had once dreamed of driving a train. He observed that “I had to wait until I became president” to even partially fulfill his dream, and by this time it was “a diesel, and not the old romantic steam engine.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
