Middle East: Cleaning Up after Lawrence

MIDDLE EAST

“A terrific roar, and the line vanished from sight behind a spouting column of black dust and smoke.” So wrote T. E. Lawrence, in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, of his World War I dynamiting raids on the Hejaz Railway, the 782-mile “pilgrim express” whose single track linked Damascus with the Islamic holy city of Medina. Lawrence of Arabia reduced most of the line to a snarl of sprung steel and splintered ties. Nearly half a century of desert winds and systematic depredation have done the rest. Bedouins ransacked the abandoned stations, pried loose wooden ties for cooking fires. In Medina the station house is a shell, its doors torn off.

At last some modern contractors are going to clean up after Lawrence & Co. In Riyadh next week, government representatives from Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia will sign a $28 million contract with a British consortium-Alderton Construction Co., Ltd. and Martin Cowley, Ltd.—to renovate the German-designed railroad. A team of 200 engineers, working from air-conditioned railway cars, will direct an army of Arab laborers as they rebuild 55 stations and 1,900 bridges and culverts, lay 750,000 ties and 23,000 tons of rails at a planned rate of one mile a day.