A couple of days ago, after the evening news, we watched a repeat of Michael Palin’s travel documentary where he visits Iraq.
In the opening few minutes of the programme, he rides the train through a wintry Turkey to Diyarbakir in the east of the country.
And that reminded me of the other thing I knew about Agatha Christie.
Her second husband, Max Mallowan, was an archaeologist working in Iraq in 1930.
Mallowan was probably the last of the heroic age of archaeology, when men in shorts went out, dug holes, and discovered things. Apprenticed to Leonard Woolley, Mallowan worked at Ur with Woolley, before going on to direct his own excavations in the north of Iraq and Syrian Kurdistan, the area through which the men of Xenophon’s Persian expedition marched.
Anyway, cutting to the chase, Agatha Christie met Max Mallowan at the excavations in Ur, not as you might think, at some genteel garden party back in England.
And that of course begs the question of how did Agatha Christie get to Iraq?
And the answer is breathtakingly simple – she got the train.
(Actually she didn’t – quite. She took the train to Damascus, and after touring the city for a few days , took a long distance express bus to Baghdad.)
Lets go back to the years before the First World War.
The Ottoman empire, while it had lost its territories in Europe and in Libya still sprawled over what is today Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Palestine/Israel, and even uncertainly into a little bit of what is now Saudi Arabia.
And while it was relatively underdeveloped, the Ottoman empire had begun to build a railway network to connect its empire together.
Perhaps the best known is the Hejaz line, spectacularly destroyed by Lawrence of Arabia (himself a former archaeologist) during world war one, built to take pilgrims to the holy places of Islam.
The other great railway project was the Berlin to Baghdad railway.
Originally conceived in the years before the First World War, it was a plan to build a railway line to Baghdad from Istanbul and the connect it to the European railway network.
Imperial Germany saw it as a way of potentially moving troops to the Persian Gulf to threaten British interests in the region, Imperial Russia saw it as a threat to its interests in Iran and The Caucasus, and the British just didn’t like the idea.
Finance was a continual problem as the Ottoman Empire was broke and could not guarantee the vast loans to build it, meaning that it was incomplete by the beginning of World War One.
In fact the line was only completed through in 1940.
Post world war one, part of the line formed the border between Ataturk’s new Turkish Republic and the French protectorate in Syria, and there was a gap between the line in eastern Turkey and railway line from Baghdad to Mosul and Kirkuk in what is now Iraqi Kurdistan.
However, in 1930, the same company as ran the Orient Express in Europe began running the Taurus Express via Aleppo in Syria to both Beirut and Baghdad.
Passengers to Baghdad had to transfer to large buses at the Turkish border to transfer to the then end of the Iraqi railway line in Kirkuk before travelling on to Baghdad and Basra.
Equally, there was an express bus, run by a British company, from Damascus to Baghdad, and this is how Agatha Christie reached Baghdad in what must have been quite an adventurous journey, albeit with the aid Cook’s representatives and the Orient Express company’s staff.
By 1940, the line was complete, and it was possible to travel all the way by rail from Istanbul to Baghdad, and with a change of trains, on to Basra at the head of the Persian Gulf.
Over the years, there were changes to the route, for example Turkey built a new section of the line via Gaziantep to avoid the detour via Aleppo in Syria.
The Lebanese civil war in the nineteen seventies put an end to the service to Beirut, and political problems meant that by the late nineteen eighties the service to Baghdad was cut back to the border with Turkey at Nusabiyah, but amazingly, a through service to Damascus via Aleppo continued to run until the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011.
Now there are no trains to Baghdad, or Damascus, and of course the conflict with Islamic State in the east of Syria was fought over the route of the railway, and not surprisingly, the service has been suspended since 2014.
So what of the future of the line?
I suspect that it will be a long time before we see passenger services from Istanbul to Baghdad again. Even if the security situation improves it will almost certainly remain cheaper and safer to fly, and the heady days of luxury trains rattling across the Mesopotamian plain are long behind us.
However, railways have never really been about passenger travel over long distances.
In the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century there were various long haul trains such as the Orient Express, the St Petersburg express and the Trans Siberian, but the reality today is that air travel has eaten the transcontinental expresses’ lunch.
Let’s take an Australian example.
The train from Brisbane to Cairns, over largely unimproved tracks, takes just over a day to cover the 1600 or so kilometres north along the Queensland coast, despite using modent tilt train technology to ensure a faster journey.
The previous classic passenger service, The Sunlander, which we took in 2014, took closer to thirty hours.
You can fly in less than three hours, meaning that to travel the route of the Brisbane Cairns train is something that you only do for fun.
In truth, long distance railways have always really been about freight.
Ever since I once spent a very long time waiting at a railway crossing in Cherbourg waiting for a train full of Zanussi washing machines, fridges and Renault cars to pass I’ve been convinced of the economics of long distance rail freight.
A train, averaging say 60km/h, can cover a huge distance cheaply and economically, more economically than the equivalent in trucks.
When we were recently in Fremantle, our rental apartment looked over the rail line from Fremantle docks. Dual gauge, it eventually connected to the east west transcontinental railway line, and our sleep was regularly punctuated by clanking and hooting as immensely long train loads of containers set off towards the east coast, meaning they would probably be in Sydney in three or four days time.
And so it would be for the Istanbul Baghdad railway. Reconstructed it would provide a link to Basra at the head of the Persian Gulf to allow the transport of freight overland from Iraq and the Gulf states to Europe.
Saudi Arabia is already building a substantial railway network, and initiatives such as the Gulf Railway have the potential to allow the development of freight network bypassing the strait of Hormuz and connecting ports in Oman on the Arabian sea to Europe.
Yes, there will inevitably be problems, for example there are as yet no plans to connect the Iraqi railway network to the Gulf Railway, although the logic is inescapable.
All it takes is political will.
And this is not a fantasy. Once, the borders were more or less open. In the seventies, travelling around Europe one would occasionally see cars with Iraqi plates that had driven from Iraq to Europe on holiday driving trips – in fact at one time I had an Iraqi refugee GP, and she too remembered holiday trips from Baghdad to Istanbul and Greece all overland.
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