page_title: Rail transport in Lebanon
section_title: French Mandate
hierarchical_section_title: Rail transport in Lebanon / History / French Mandate
caption_attribution_description: English: At Maalmeltein work on the railway cutting took six months. Some 35,000 cubic yards of limestone rock had to be removed. See Barton Maughan (1966) "Tobruk and El Alamein. Australia in the War of 1939-45." P.823-9. Australian War Memorial, Canberra.
context_page_description: Rail transport in Lebanon began in the 1890s as French projects under the Ottoman Empire but largely ceased in the 1970s owing to the country's civil war. The last remaining routes ended for economic reasons in the 1990s. At its peak Lebanon had about 408 kilometres of railway.
context_section_description: Following the First World War, France held the mandate for Syria and Lebanon under the auspices of the League of Nations. The DHP's ownership of its track was reinstated and it was also given control of the Hejaz Railway. Competition between the French port at Beirut and the British one at Haifa led to tariff wars and, in 1921, land swaps in Palestine for Syrian railway rights.
  From around 1930, the Aleppo Railway formed a stage on the Taurus Express's southern route to Cairo. An alternate route ran along the Tripoli line to Beirut. The service was operated by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits and was discontinued in 1972. In 1933, the Syrian Lines to Baghdad (Lignes Syriennes de Baghdad) arranged the Baghdad Railway as a subsidiary of the DHP.
   The railways saw significant use in the Second World War. The British originally planned to connect their standard-gauge network from Haifa to Riyaq but gave up the project in 1941 as too difficult. Instead, engineers from South Africa and Australia completed a standard-gauge line along the coast between Haifa and Beirut by 24 August 1942 and expanded this to Tripoli Railway Station by 18 December 1942. This Haifa–Beirut–Tripoli Railway (HBT) was the last link connecting the European and North African standard-gauge rail networks, apart from the ferry across the Bosphorus at Istanbul, but it never operated for civilian use. Instead, the British maintained it under the control of their military as late as February 1948, when the Jewish insurgency in Palestine destroyed the bridges near the tunnels at Ras al-Nakura. An earlier attempt by Haganah forces to attack the HBT in two places near Nahal Kziv during the Night of the Bridges in 1946 was unsuccessful. Nowadays the only portion of the HBT still in operation is the Coastal Railway between Nahariya and Haifa in northern Israel.
caption: Australian Army Engineers, African Auxiliary Pioneer Corps NCO and Lebanese workers in the cutting at Maameltein in 1942
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