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At least in Israel, many of the old lines, even if they still operated today, would have been long obsolete. A daily train leaving Haifa at 8:30 and reaching Jaffa by lunch? Three, four hours? The same line today makes the journey in an hour, and there are plans on the table to build additional tracks to cut that down to a half hour. People commute from Haifa to Tel Aviv, with three (soon four) tracks passing through the Ayalon bottleneck. Or, take the line to Jerusalem. The old line took a twisty, no-tunnels approach up the hills to Jerusalem that took hours. It was mostly only used to get out of the city in case snow blocked the main entrance, because it was so slow. The new line, with tunnels and bridges, cuts right through and makes the journey to Tel Aviv in an hour. It doesn't really matter what the Ottomans or the British built, because it was built for a level of traffic of a largely rural, empty empire. It would never have met modern needs. As populations grew across the Middle East, even a Middle East at peace, all of these lines would have long been dismembered anyway, and replaced with lines designed to actually meet the transportation needs of the people who lived there. |