Beiruit Railway Station and sidings

[Galatian]

In summer 2003 I was working in Beirut and heard about the derelict railway station - formerly the terminal of the coast line to Tripoli. Couldn't persuade the armed guard to let me in and didn't fancy scaling the 8ft walls and risking a bullet. Following year I tried again and there was no one around to stop me wandering in. Apparently these days it's a regular venue for raves.

This is the station/admin building - seems to be serving as someone's home.

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Section of track - now a vegetable patch


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I'm not a rail buff so all I can say is it looks like a steam train..


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Always wondered what was inside...


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Where's the steering wheel?


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Apparently during the Lebanese Civil war, Christian militias used the station, sidings and carriages as a a prison and interrogation centre.


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Employees entrance with remains of time clock and clock card rack


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Oddly there was still a wide selection of machinery and tools in the maintainance shed.


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Yes I did fulfill a childhood dream, and it was brilliant!


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Next train's gone. Whoever owns this has replaced the ash wood frame with aluminium profile. Civil war damage or woodworm?


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[Galatian]

Looks suspiciously like the ruslt of machine gun fire.


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Water tower - empty.


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A turntable - somewhat overgrown.


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Great Anvil


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Rails for a train that stares at goats?


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[Galatian]

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I think this is for balancing the wheels or similar..


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[Galatian]

Choice location, great photos - out of interest, do you reckon these were wood or oil fired - I'm guessing they won't be coal burners?

My knowlege of steam trains doesn't go much further than watching Casey Jones in the school Holidays aged 9. So it hadn't actually occurred to me that they might use anything other than coal.
But that's an excellent question and one which I can possibly answer.
Lebanon's tree cover was pretty well stripped by the Romans to build ships - and protecting the few remaining cedars has been an issue since Hadrian issued an edict in 118AD. Which I guess rules out wood as a fuel.
Coal could have been possible - there are big reserves in Turkey, Ukrine and Romania which could have been imported commercially. But I didn't see anything area that was big enough to have been used as a coal dump or anything like a wagon that coal could have been shoveled from into a boiler.

Looking at the shot inside the cab - the wide lower apperture looks like it was once an opening to a fire box - and could have had coal shoveled in. But it appears to have been modified to convrt it to an air intake.

Coupled with the exterior shots which show what appear to be quite substantial tanks running along the side of the main "cylinders" I'd guess that they were burning fuel oil - which I know prior to the civil war was being produced in large amounts by Lebanon's two "low spec" oil refineries - the southern refinery at Sidon** fed by the TAP pipeline rom Saudi Arabia and the northern one from Syria.

So maybe they originally burned coal, and were later converted to fuel oil.
Or maybe I've just been watching too much "House" and should have quit after the Casey Jones admission :-)


** This website gives the history of the TAP line, which closed in 1976 due to ongoing regional hostilities. http://almashriq.hiof.no/lebanon/300/380/388/tapline/

Check out "The Beirut Office" - fantastic photos of the pipeline's HQ 24 years after closure.