Rail-less countries gaining their first length of railway

[edwin_m]

If Iceland were ever to build a rail network, focused on Reykjavik it could be based on the Merseyrail network with one line going from north to south, another performing an airport to city centre loop and another going from the docks to a town somewhere east with all of the terminating stations being a park and ride with one depot and signalling centre built next to a central station (in similar stance to Exeter St. Davids albeit smaller taking in the population of Iceland as a whole). Its likely that they may opt for trams instead.

We ended up proposing a T-shaped network with an east-west tram-like line and a north-south one that ran through the built-up area and then became an airport express. Rolling stock would have been some sort of tram-train. The obvious depot site was near the aluminium smelter south of Hafnarfjordur.

 

[Baxenden Bank]

There is a proposal for a link to Bhutan.

Another good site is Railways of the World. Some seriously obscure stuff in there. Details country by country (or sub-geography).

 

[reb0118]

AFAIK he had the same status in Denmark as Prince Philip had in England the United Kingdom.

Scotland & Northern Ireland haven't left yet.

 

[stuu]

There is a proposal for a link to Bhutan.

Another good site is Railways of the World. Some seriously obscure stuff in there. Details country by country (or sub-geography).

There's another couple of hours of my life gone!

 

[Baxenden Bank]

There's another couple of hours of my life gone!

I'd measure it in days, weeks or months if I were you. A couple of hours will be nowhere near enough.

I note the publisher has found current lines in Oman and Barbados.

 

[Angusbswheeler]

Thanks for the correction. I seem to recall the IC4 wasn't much better than the Fyra so perhaps the Danes were better off without it.

Now I think about it, I got an email one morning about 15 years ago asking me to apply for a Libyan visa to work on a Metro project for Tripoli. A quick phone call established this was a faint prospect someone in the marketing department had identified and we agreed it wasn't worth spending multiple hours and hundreds of £ on the application until it became a bit more likely to happen. I never heard from them again - if I had I might have been among the many non-railway collegues who had to be evacuated at very short notice when the regime fell. Consulting an old atlas, there was a coastal railway westwards from Egypt into eastern Libya (which passed through El Alamein) and several branches inland.

A consultant we employed wanted me to go to Ethiopia at one stage too, and had the Arab Spring not intervened I might have got a trip to Jordan as part of an idea to reinstate some of the Hedjaz Railway (as destroyed by Lawrence of Arabia) as an urban metro in Amman. I seem to get all the wacko jobs.

Back in the early 90's I worked on the Great Man Made River Project in Libya. After one leave period I was asked to take some tender documents from my then employer for a planned railway along the full coastline with a branch to Sabha in the south. We didn't win the tender but somebody started construction. If you look on Google Earth near the town of Al Khums you can see a new railway leading from a new port to some sort of production facility. Although some waggons can be seen it looks pretty abandoned, probably as a result of the civil war.

 

[Gag Halfrunt]

Russian and Chinese companies started to build lines in Libya in 2008. Work stopped in 2011.

Rail transport in Libya - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Backroom_boy]

Malta is mulling over a metro with I'm sure all the usual arguments back and forth on both sides.

Malta publishes metro vision - The International Light Rail Magazine

Three-line network would put 40% of the population within 15 minutes of a station.

www.tautonline.com

A feasibility study for a 35.5km (22-mile) light metro has been published by Transport Malta. Compiled by Arup, the report analyses underground and elevated light metro options, plus BRT and surface tram alternatives, to deliver a new rapid transit system for the EU’s smallest nation (2021 population, 443 000).

 

[Baxenden Bank]

Back in the early 90's I worked on the Great Man Made River Project in Libya. After one leave period I was asked to take some tender documents from my then employer for a planned railway along the full coastline with a branch to Sabha in the south. We didn't win the tender but somebody started construction. If you look on Google Earth near the town of Al Khums you can see a new railway leading from a new port to some sort of production facility. Although some waggons can be seen it looks pretty abandoned, probably as a result of the civil war.

The railway curves back from Alkhoms port (co-ordinates 32.675819, 14.250684) to what looks like a railway construction depot (32.621133, 14.262448). There appear to be carriages / multiple units / tram vehicles in the port sidings on Google Aerial. Anyone like to take a guess what they are? There is another unit/pair just outside the port here (32.670037, 14.245584).

The part constructed lines head east and west from the depot roughly following the coast road. Westwards it heads to just short of the Tunisian border (33.131620, 11.594136). Eastwards to just past Buerat (31.277418, 15.991910). Open Railway Map shows the proposed route, Google Aerial fades in and out according to the amount of construction work carried out and, lets face it, your enthusiasm for interpreting lines in the sand!

Another line heads west then south from the depot to a 'manufacturing facility' (32.630669, 13.626607). This line runs north of the East-West coastal line then turns south to cross it.

The gifted train set and completed length of track is here (32.828764, 13.111515). Click on the google map pointer for a picture of the vandalised unit.

From the Jim Fergusson data sheets and a bit of extra measuring I get a former 950mm gauge network of 421km plus the Western Desert Railway (WWII) approx 188km of standard gauge from the triangular junction just inside the Egyptian border (31.522365, 25.059536). Wkipedia gives a distance of 125km which is about right to reach Tobruk. Open Railway Map has the line heading farther west to Ayn al Ulaymah (32.142669, 23.356480).

Just stick those strings of numbers into your mapping service search bar to go straight to the locations.

 

[Angusbswheeler]

That's a good bit of detective work - the earthworks are certainly extensive. You have to treat them with care though as the earthwork strip for the Great Man Made River Project (a large buried water pipeline hundreds of km long) looks very similar to the earthwork preparations for the new railway and is parallel in places.

At 32.643006, 14.238097 you can see the pipeline earthworks just north of the railway. The "manufacturing facility" at 32.630669, 13.626607 is actually a regulating tank for the pipeline (my last job in Libya was doing the ground investigation for this in 1994) and its the pipeline that leads to it rather than a railway branch.

I hope one day the railway can be completed.

 

[Baxenden Bank]

That's a good bit of detective work - the earthworks are certainly extensive. You have to treat them with care though as the earthwork strip for the Great Man Made River Project (a large buried water pipeline hundreds of km long) looks very similar to the earthwork preparations for the new railway and is parallel in places.

At 32.643006, 14.238097 you can see the pipeline earthworks just north of the railway. The "manufacturing facility" at 32.630669, 13.626607 is actually a regulating tank for the pipeline (my last job in Libya was doing the ground investigation for this in 1994) and its the pipeline that leads to it rather than a railway branch.

I hope one day the railway can be completed.

Thanks for the information.

That was my point about interpreting 'lines in the sand'. Even a set of vehicle tracks running straight across the sand can look like a railway if you want them to! Always a problem when researching old routes via the internet.

 

[DanBlanchflowe]

A fascinating thread with considerable accuracy on the list of countries that had no railway.
I can add that a new book ‘Lost Railways of the World’ by Nigel Welbourn is an excellent armchair read.
In it under Rwanda “Three separate 2ft narrow-gauge industrial networks once existed but were damaged by the civil war in the 1990s and our out of use”.

 

[Baxenden Bank]

A fascinating thread with considerable accuracy on the list of countries that had no railway.
I can add that a new book ‘Lost Railways of the World’ by Nigel Welbourn is an excellent armchair read.
In it under Rwanda “Three separate 2ft narrow-gauge industrial networks once existed but were damaged by the civil war in the 1990s and our out of use”.

I shall have to give the book a miss! It sounds like one of those 'read a paragraph, spend a weekend on the internet trying to follow things up' type of book.

An update for Libya. The Russian line construction depot is at Ras Lanuf, co-ordinates: 30.495136, 18.514864.

The vehicles visible on Google at Alkhoms port that I queried are probably the order for 16 GE locomotives, stored since arrival, plus a couple of other 'american style' locomotives I assume used for construction work.

 

[61653 HTAFC]

Malta is mulling over a metro with I'm sure all the usual arguments back and forth on both sides.

Malta publishes metro vision - The International Light Rail Magazine

Three-line network would put 40% of the population within 15 minutes of a station.

www.tautonline.com

Would be interesting to see if anything comes of the proposal. One the one hand Malta may be the smallest full member of the European Union, but it's also among the most (if not THE most) densely-populated. I remember seeing all the ancient buses they had back in the 1990s, many of them ex-GB (Malta being one of the handful of European countries that drive on the left).

Wasn't there some sort of scandal in the 2000s related to Malta's buses which involved Arriva?

 

[Gag Halfrunt]

There was a thread on the Malta metro plan when the proposal was published.

Malta Metro

Hi, The Maltese government have funded a study in to a potential mass transit system. More info here: https://www.metro.mt/ Of course, being Malta this may never happen, and there is also an election soon. But I found it interesting, the website seems serious.

www.railforums.co.uk