Last Train from Damascus

The Hejaz Railway, built at the dawn of the twentieth century, was a miracle of its age: eight hundred miles of track laid across some of the harshest terrain on earth, beginning in Damascus and ending at the holy city of Medina. It cut the Hajj pilgrimage from forty days to just three and offered a lifeline to the ailing Ottoman Empire. But its promise was never truly fulfilled. By 1917, large sections lay in ruins, blown up by Arab tribes and British soldiers. A century later, Leon McCarron travelled its length to find what remains, and what might be revived. Setting out from Istanbul, once the seat of the Sultans, he reaches Damascus in the days after the fall of the Assad regime, then follows the line through southern Syria and Jordan into the deserts of Saudi Arabia. Travelling in overpacked cars on dirt roads, on foot along remote embankments, and occasionally in ageing train carriages, McCarron spends time with those who still live along the tracks: stationmasters and soldiers, archaeologists and treasure hunters, pilgrims, revolutionaries, refugees, and more. Through these conversations he pieces together how the region was once connected, how it broke apart, and why - as new wars threaten to redraw the map and governments race to lay fresh track - the railway may yet run again. Last Train from Damascus is at once an elegy for a lost era, a dispatch from a region in flux, and above all, a contemplation on unanswered questions of borders and belonging.