Recapturing railway history a slow effort in Saudi Arabia
Photo: Hejaz Railway station in Medina / Osama Saeed Bhutta / CC BY-NC 2.0
Saudi Arabia is slowly transforming its historic Hejaz Railway stations, some of the country's most important and underappreciated early-20th century cultural and heritage landmarks, from a hopeless cause into multimedia museums.
The projects, launched in 2005 by the Commission for Tourism and National Heritage, fall short of fully restoring locomotives and carriages that operated from 1900 to 1924 during the reign of the Ottoman Empire, but features them in exhibits in the Medina and Tabuk regions.
The Medina and Mada’in Saleh railway station museums are complete and open to the public while the Tabuk station remains under construction. Tabuk’s facility is scheduled for completion in September 2016.
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Rob L. Wagner