The Hijaz Railway Station and Museum, Madinah

The Hijaz Railway Station and Museum, Madinah: History of Mahattat al-Hijaz and a Ziyarah Guide to Dar al-Madinah

West of the Prophet’s Mosque, no more than fifteen minutes on foot, a long stone building with seventeen arches along its front sits behind an iron fence in the Anbariyah district. Tour buses pass it on the way to somewhere else. Pilgrims glimpse it from taxi windows and rarely stop. Yet this quiet complex of basalt and limestone — a passenger hall, a locomotive shed, a water tower, a scatter of narrow-gauge track disappearing into a car park — is the terminus of one of the most improbable engineering and religious undertakings of the late Ottoman Empire: a railway built by public subscription across the Muslim world, without a single foreign loan, to carry pilgrims from Damascus to the city of the Prophet ﷺ in days rather than weeks. It ran for barely twelve years before war reduced it to a broken line of sabotaged track disappearing into the Arabian desert. What remains in Madinah today is administered as a museum — currently closed for renovation as this guide was written — and it is one of the few places in the holy city where a visitor can stand inside a chapter of history that has nothing to do with the seerah, and everything to do with what the Ottoman world tried, and largely failed, to build in its final decades.

This guide sets out the full history of the Hijaz Railway — known in Arabic as Sikkat Hadid al-Hijaz and, at its Madinah terminus, as Mahattat al-Hijaz — from Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s decree in 1900 to the siege that ended Ottoman rule in the city in January 1919, and on to the restoration project of the past three decades and the uncertain, contested state of the site as of July 2026. It gives the architecture of the station complex in detail, reports honestly on the well-known but imperfectly attested story of muffled rails near the Haram, surveys the surviving stations along the line from Tabuk to Hegra, and sets the railway beside its modern successor, the Haramain High Speed Railway. Throughout, this is presented as what it is: a work of Ottoman, Islamic and colonial-era history, not a site of devotional visitation, and the distinction matters — it is addressed directly in the section on common misconceptions below.

History of the Hijaz Railway: Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s Decree of 1900

The order to build the railway was issued by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II in March 1900, with construction formally beginning that September. The Ottoman inscription still preserved at the Madinah terminus dates the sultan’s decree to 5 Jumada al-Awwal 1318 AH, corresponding to 1 September 1900, and construction is generally dated from that same day, a date the builders would return to eight years later for the line’s opening ceremony (IRCICA Islamic Architectural Heritage Database; Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”). The Ottoman Empire in 1900 had already lost most of its European territories in the Balkans and had watched France and Britain absorb its North African provinces; Abdul Hamid, increasingly reliant on pan-Islamic legitimacy rather than a multi-ethnic imperial identity, needed a project that bound the empire’s Arab periphery back to Istanbul and reasserted his role as Caliph of all Muslims (AramcoWorld, “Ottoman-Era Hijaz Railway’s Legacy Endures,” July–August 2026).

Historian Zekeriya Kurşun, a specialist on the railway interviewed by AramcoWorld, summarises the three overlapping purposes behind the decree: political centralisation, binding the empire’s distant Arabian provinces back to Istanbul; military reinforcement, allowing troops to be moved quickly to defend the Hejaz and the Red Sea coast against European encroachment; and religious symbolism, replacing the gruelling camel caravan to Makkah and Madinah with a railway that would cut the pilgrimage from forty days to a matter of days. Of the three, Kurşun told AramcoWorld, “the religious reason was elevated above the others” (AramcoWorld, July–August 2026). Historian Murat Özyüksel, whose academic work on the railway is summarised in Wikipedia’s account, adds a harder political edge: the railway was also intended to weaken the growing autonomy of the Sharifs of Makkah and the independence of local amirs, and to counter Bedouin raiding on the pilgrimage routes by giving the Ottoman state faster, less interceptable lines of supply and reinforcement (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”). Both readings — the railway as sincere pan-Islamic project and the railway as an instrument of Ottoman state control — are supported by the same set of facts, and this guide presents both rather than adjudicating between them; a fuller discussion follows in the section on wider significance below.

The Human Cost the Railway Was Meant to Address

The scale of the problem the railway addressed should not be understated. The overland Hajj caravan route from Damascus to the Hejaz was, by multiple accounts, one of the most dangerous journeys in the Islamic world: heat, thirst, banditry and disease combined to produce, according to figures cited in academic and popular accounts of the railway’s origins, mortality among some pilgrims that could run as high as twenty percent on the hardest stretches (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”). The journey itself, without the railway, took roughly forty days from Damascus to Madinah; every source consulted for this guide — Ottoman, Saudi, Western academic and popular — agrees on this figure, and on the railway’s reduction of that same journey to somewhere between four and five days by 1908 (Saudipedia, “The Railway Museum”; The Hejaz Railway, “Medina Station”; AramcoWorld, July–August 2026). Some accounts round this to “three days in a carriage” for the fastest scheduled services once the line was fully operational (AramcoWorld, July–August 2026), while most sources settle on four to five days as the more commonly cited figure for the full Damascus–Madinah run in ordinary service.

Funding by Public Subscription: An Islamic Waqf, Not a European Loan

The railway’s most distinctive feature, and the one its promoters emphasised most heavily at the time, was how it was paid for. Estimates of the total project cost vary by source between roughly 3 and 4 million Ottoman lira — figures cited elsewhere as “around 570 kilograms of gold” against 20 percent of the entire annual Ottoman state budget (Daily Sabah, “Hejaz railway: A historic line to Islam’s holiest cities,” 2016; Gulf International Forum, “Traveling Through History on the Forgotten Hejaz Railway”). An initial loan of 100,000 lira from the state-run Ziraat Bankasi, an agricultural bank, allowed construction to begin in 1900, and academic sources put the eventual total borrowed from that bank at around 480,000 lira by 1908 (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”; Valeev, Abidulin and Ayupova, “The Project of Hejaz Railway Construction,” University of Malta).

But the bulk of the funding, and the whole of its symbolic weight, came from a deliberate decision to reject foreign capital altogether. Abdul Hamid II called on Muslims across the world to donate, and established a Donation Commission to collect and record contributions, issuing commemorative medallions to donors as a mark of participation in a sacred undertaking (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”). The sultan contributed a reported 50,000 lira of his own funds — by one academic account equivalent to a full month of his personal income — and government ministers followed his example (Valeev, Abidulin and Ayupova, University of Malta). Donations then arrived from across the Muslim world outside Ottoman territory entirely: from British India, from Egypt under its Khedive, from Iran’s Shah, from the Nizam of Hyderabad, and from Muslim communities as far afield as Morocco, South Africa, Singapore and Russian Kazan (Daily Sabah, 2016; AramcoWorld, July–August 2026). A wealthy Punjabi newspaper editor, Muhammad Inshaullah, was instrumental enough in organising Indian Muslim donations that he helped establish a Hejaz Railway Central Committee to coordinate the effort from British India (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”).

The British authorities in India took this seriously enough to try to suppress it: London backed newspaper campaigns discouraging Indian Muslims from donating, and banned the wearing of the commemorative Hejaz Railway medals among Indian subjects, on the stated grounds that the funds were serving the sultan’s personal ambitions rather than the railway itself (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”). Despite this, and despite the fact that only around one donation in ten reportedly came from outside Ottoman territory, the railway succeeded in becoming what the BBC and other outlets have described as a project funded entirely by donation rather than foreign debt — the only railway in Ottoman history built and operated wholly by the Ottoman state itself, without European concessionary capital (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”). This mattered enormously to contemporaries: virtually every other Ottoman railway of the period, including the Anatolian and Baghdad lines on which German capital and engineering played a leading role, was built with substantial foreign financing and correspondingly foreign strategic influence. The Hijaz line’s promoters presented it, by contrast, as a purely Islamic undertaking, and its status today as a religious endowment — a waqf — reflects that founding claim. Azmi Nalshik, head of Jordan’s Hejaz Railway operations, has stated that the railway is considered waqf, meaning it belongs to the Muslim community collectively and cannot legally be sold (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”).

Meissner Pasha and the Engineering of the Line

The railway’s construction did not go smoothly at first. Under the Italian contractor Signor Labella, the first year of work produced only fifteen kilometres of track, a rate of progress that reportedly enraged Sultan Abdul Hamid II. The Ottoman chief of construction, Mehmed Ali Pasha, was court-martialled and replaced by Field Marshal Kazim Pasha, and Labella was replaced as chief engineer by a German railway engineer who would become the project’s defining figure: Heinrich August Meissner, known in Ottoman service as Meissner Pasha (The Hejaz Railway, “Heinrich Meissner”).

Meissner was born in Leipzig in 1862 and trained in civil engineering at the Technical College of Dresden, with a particular focus on railway construction, hydraulic engineering, tunnelling and telegraphy. He had already built a substantial career in Ottoman railway service before 1900, including work on the Salonica–Monastir and Salonica–Dedeagach lines in the Balkans, and he combined technical competence with genuine fluency in Turkish and, by contemporary British accounts, considerable political tact in managing Ottoman superiors. The British military attaché in Constantinople, Lieutenant Colonel F. Maunsell, wrote that Meissner “has studied with the greatest care the Turkish character and always displays excellent tact in managing his superiors,” while the British consul in Damascus, W. Richards, described him as an “energetic and keen workman” who nonetheless would not tolerate malingering among those under his command (The Hejaz Railway, “Heinrich Meissner”).

Under Meissner and Kazim Pasha, construction accelerated dramatically. Meissner persuaded the Ottoman Central Commission to bring in larger numbers of foreign contractors and engineers for the most technically demanding stretches, building an engineering team that was, by some accounts, close to half European — mostly German, with French and Belgian engineers also involved (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”). For his role in the project he was awarded the Ottoman rank of Mirmiran — literally “Chief of Chiefs,” a grade of Pasha — by Abdul Hamid II in 1904, and on one occasion, on being shown a photograph of a particularly impressive bridge on the Haifa branch, the sultan was reportedly moved enough to award Meissner a gold medal (The Hejaz Railway, “Heinrich Meissner”).

Yet Abdul Hamid II remained equally committed, for reasons both symbolic and political, to building Ottoman and specifically Muslim engineering capacity rather than relying indefinitely on foreigners. This was, notably, the first Ottoman railway on which graduates of the empire’s own engineering schools worked in significant numbers, and in 1904 seventeen Muslim engineers were hired specifically, with additional engineers sent to Germany for further training (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”). This distinction became more than symbolic south of the town of al-Ula: as a European Christian, Meissner Pasha was barred by religious protocol from travelling or working in the sacred territory approaching Madinah, and the final and most difficult stretch of the line, from al-Ula to Madinah itself, was completed entirely by Muslim engineers and workers under the Ottoman engineer Haji Muhtar Bey, also referred to in some sources as Mokhtar Bey (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”; The Hejaz Railway, “Medina Station”).

This division had practical consequences that contemporaries noted at the time. Without Meissner’s direct technical supervision on the final stretch, basic construction discipline suffered under the pressure to finish by a fixed ceremonial deadline. The British traveller A. J. Wavell, who journeyed to Madinah as a pilgrim shortly after the line opened, recorded passing “several wrecked engines that had run off the track owing to it not having been properly laid” (The Hejaz Railway, “Medina Station”). Temporary embankments were sometimes used across dry watercourses, or wadis, in place of proper bridges and culverts, in order to meet the deadline (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”).

The Workforce: Ottoman Soldiers and Conscript Labour

Labour was, by the consistent account of every source examined for this guide, the single hardest constraint the project faced. In settled areas closer to Damascus, much of the excavation work was carried out by local residents and Muslims obligated under Ottoman law to contribute labour to the project. In the vast unpopulated stretches of the Hejaz further south, the Ottoman state turned to a more systematic solution: soldiers of the Ottoman army were deployed as railway troops, working on construction in exchange for a reduction of one third of their standard military service obligation (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”). Author James Nicholson, whose 2005 history The Hejaz Railway is cited by AramcoWorld as a leading account of the construction period, describes the work as “a tale of endurance and resolve made epic by the heat [and] the harsh conditions” (AramcoWorld, July–August 2026). Meissner introduced a system of financial incentives to sustain morale among these conscript labourers: a bonus of one piastre for each cubic metre of earth excavated, and three piastres for the same volume of rock (The Hejaz Railway, “Heinrich Meissner”).

The physical conditions these men worked under were extreme even by the standards of desert railway construction. Water, fuel and building materials had to be hauled by camel into some of the most remote and arid terrain in the Middle East; coal was imported from abroad and stockpiled at Haifa and Damascus for distribution along the line (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”). AramcoWorld’s 2026 report, drawing on two years of the author’s own travel along the surviving route, describes temperatures along the final stretch south of Amman climbing above 120 degrees Fahrenheit (49°C) in summer, with workers surviving on limited rations while excavating tunnels and laying bridge foundations by hand (AramcoWorld, July–August 2026). With access to concrete limited in these remote stretches, many of the line’s bridges and viaducts were built from carved stone, a number of which survive intact in the desert more than a century later (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”).

The Line Itself: 1,320 Kilometres from Damascus to Madinah

The completed main line ran approximately 1,320 kilometres from Damascus to Madinah, a figure given consistently across Ottoman-era, Saudi and Western sources, though some render the total distance closer to 1,300 or 1,303 kilometres depending on whether certain branch or extension sections are included (Saudipedia, “The Railway Museum”; Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”). The gauge was narrow — 1,050 millimetres, roughly three feet five inches — chosen for economy of construction across difficult terrain rather than for speed or capacity (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”).

The route began at Damascus, initially running from an area near al-Muzayrib in the Hauran region of southern Syria before the line was extended north into central Damascus itself, where the grand Hejaz Railway Station opened in 1913 as the formal starting point of the line (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”). From Damascus the line ran south through the fertile volcanic Hauran plateau — described by Roman-era writers, AramcoWorld notes, as “the granary of Rome” for its agricultural richness — through Deraa, into what is now Jordan via Mafraq, Zarqa and Amman, and on south through Ma’an, Aqaba al-Hejaz and the border crossing into what is now Saudi Arabia at Mudawwara and Halat Ammar. From there the line continued through Tabuk, al-Akhdar, al-Mu’azzam, Mada’in Salih (Hegra), al-Ula, Hadiyah, Abu al-Na’am, Buwayr and a long chain of smaller halts before reaching its final terminus at Madinah (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”).

A significant branch line ran from Deraa, in southern Syria, west to the Mediterranean port of Haifa — engineered largely by Meissner himself, including the technically demanding crossing of the Yarmouk Valley gorge, which required some fifteen major bridges, several using metal construction for strength and economy over traditional masonry (The Hejaz Railway, “Heinrich Meissner”). Although this branch represented only around a fifth of the total track built for the Hijaz Railway network, it is reported to have carried roughly three quarters of the network’s total freight and passenger traffic, since it opened a Mediterranean trading outlet that the main pilgrimage line, running through largely unpopulated desert, could never generate on its own (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”). Haifa itself grew substantially as a result of this new rail connection, even as, according to historian Murat Özyüksel’s assessment cited on Wikipedia, the wider Hejaz region did not see comparable economic benefit from the railway passing through it (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”).

The Opening: 1 September 1908

Under the overall supervision of chief engineer Mokhtar Bey (also transliterated Muhtar Bey), the railway reached Madinah, arriving on or around 28 August 1908 by most Islamic-calendar reckonings and formally celebrated on 1 September 1908 — the anniversary of Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s accession to the throne, a date chosen deliberately for its symbolic resonance (The Hejaz Railway, “Medina Station”; IRCICA Islamic Architectural Heritage Database). The IRCICA heritage inventory dates the first train’s actual arrival to 3 Sha’ban 1326 AH (28 August 1908) with the formal celebration following on 7 Sha’ban (1 September); other sources place the ceremonial arrival slightly differently, but the 1 September 1908 date for the official opening is consistent across virtually every account consulted (IRCICA Islamic Architectural Heritage Database).

The ceremony itself was relatively modest by the standards of the project’s ambition, because everyone present still believed, in September 1908, that the line would soon be extended a further four hundred kilometres to Makkah itself. An official delegation travelled from Damascus and Constantinople, accompanied by newspaper correspondents; contemporary fares are recorded as 7 Turkish lira for a third-class ticket and 14 lira for first class on the inaugural service (The Hejaz Railway, “Medina Station”). More strikingly, a crowd reported at over 30,000 people gathered for the separate ceremony to lay the cornerstone of the mosque built alongside the new station — the Hamidia Mosque, later renamed al-Anbariyah, discussed in the architecture section below (The Hejaz Railway, “Medina Station”).

The Decision Not to Extend to Makkah

The railway’s promoters and engineers had always intended Madinah to be a way station rather than the final destination; the ultimate goal, repeatedly stated in Ottoman planning, was Makkah itself. This never happened, and the reasons were as much political as technical. Extending the line into the territory nearer Makkah would have removed the last major economic role played by the Bedouin tribes of the Hejaz, above all the powerful Harb confederation, who derived income from hiring out camels and guides to pilgrims for the final overland stage of the journey (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”). In September 1907, as celebrations marked the rail line’s arrival at al-Ula station, a rebellion organised by the Harb tribe broke out in protest against the railway’s continued southward progress, on the explicit grounds that reaching Makkah would destroy their livelihood (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”). This opposition was reportedly encouraged, at least tacitly, by Sharif Hussein bin Ali, the Ottoman-appointed Amir of Makkah, who viewed the railway more broadly as a threat to his own regional autonomy: it would give Ottoman troops far faster access to garrisons across the Hejaz, Asir and Yemen than his own irregular forces could match (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”; The Hejaz Railway, “Medina Station”).

British diplomatic pressure compounded this local resistance. Historian Özyüksel’s account, summarised on Wikipedia, notes that a British ultimatum specifically prevented Ottoman construction of a branch line to Aqaba on the Red Sea, part of a wider pattern of British obstruction aimed at limiting Ottoman strategic reach in Arabia (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”). Faced with combined tribal rebellion and the practical costs of running a rail line through the last, most sacred and most politically sensitive stretch of the pilgrimage route, Sultan Abdul Hamid II decided that the railway would terminate at Madinah. The 400-kilometre gap to Makkah was never closed by rail until the entirely different and vastly more expensive Haramain High Speed Railway opened more than a century later, discussed further below (AramcoWorld, July–August 2026).

The Muffled Rails: A Story Reported, Not Confirmed

Among the stories attached to the railway’s approach to Madinah, one recurs often enough in Turkish popular history and Islamic heritage writing to deserve careful treatment here — and careful treatment means reporting exactly how well, or poorly, it is attested, rather than repeating it as settled fact.

The claim, in its most commonly circulated form, is that as the railway neared Madinah, Sultan Abdul Hamid II ordered that felt matting, or some comparable muffling material, be laid beneath the rails in the final stretch approaching the Haram, so that the noise and vibration of passing trains would not disturb the resting place of the Prophet ﷺ. The clearest documented version of this story that this research was able to locate comes not from a contemporary Ottoman engineering record but from a much later Turkish civic project: in a 2016–2017 renovation of tram tracks near the Sultan’s own tomb in Istanbul’s Çemberlitaş district, project officials explicitly framed their choice of noise-dampening materials as a deliberate act of reciprocity, citing the earlier precedent of Abdul Hamid II’s supposed order regarding the Madinah line. The Istanbul metro authority’s own account states: “During the construction of Madinah Part of The Hejaz Railway, Sultan Abdul Hamid the second ordered that works should be carried out to prevent the noise and vibration as a mark of respect and reverence to the personality of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). As a result of this sensitivity, mats were installed into the rails with the technology of that period” (Istanbul Metro, “Renovation of Rails for Abdulhamid Han”). The same account quotes a descendant of the sultan repeating the story on Turkish television at the end of 2016, as the direct inspiration for the modern tram project (Istanbul Metro).

This is worth being precise about. It is a genuine, traceable claim, repeated by a Turkish state transport authority and tied to a specific, verifiable modern engineering project undertaken in the story’s honour. It is not, however, corroborated in this research by a contemporary 1900s Ottoman construction record, by Meissner Pasha’s own detailed technical writings on the line as reproduced in secondary sources, or by any of the specialist railway-history sites and academic papers consulted for this guide, several of which describe the Madinah approach and the final stretch of construction in considerable technical detail without mentioning muffling material of any kind (The Hejaz Railway, “Medina Station”). It should therefore be presented to readers exactly as it is: a widely repeated and evidently sincerely held item of popular memory, attributed to Abdul Hamid II, preserved and acted upon in modern Turkey, but resting — on the evidence available for this guide — on a later oral and popular tradition rather than a document from the railway’s own construction period. Readers who encounter the story presented as settled historical fact elsewhere should treat it with the same caution applied here.

The End of the Line: Arab Revolt, T. E. Lawrence and the Siege of Madinah

Outbreak of the Arab Revolt, 1916

The railway had barely eight years of full operation before the First World War brought its ordinary working life to an end. In June 1916, Sharif Hussein bin Ali of Makkah, encouraged and materially supported by British and French agents through the wartime diplomacy now known as the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence, launched a region-wide revolt against Ottoman rule, with the explicit initial objective of capturing both Makkah and Madinah and thereby denying the Ottoman sultan-caliph his claim to guardianship of the two holy cities (Wikipedia, “Siege of Medina”). Makkah fell relatively quickly to Hussein’s forces. Madinah did not.

Madinah was defended by a substantial and well-equipped Ottoman garrison — sources place its size at roughly 3,000 troops at the outset of the siege in 1916, rising over the following years to reports of as many as 12,000 to 14,000 men as reinforcements arrived (Wikipedia, “Siege of Medina”; The Hejaz Railway, “Medina Station”). Command fell to Ömer Fahreddin Pasha, generally rendered in English-language sources as Fakhri Pasha, an experienced Ottoman officer who would go on to become the central figure of the city’s wartime defence. When Prince Faisal, Hussein’s son, attempted a full frontal assault on Madinah’s defences in June 1916, his Bedouin forces on camelback, unused to sustained artillery bombardment, broke and fell back to their watering holes under heavy Ottoman machine-gun and artillery fire (The Hejaz Railway, “Medina Station”). It was, from the very first engagement, clear that Madinah could not be taken by direct assault.

T. E. Lawrence and the Railway War

Arab and British planners quickly recognised that Madinah could instead be neutralised by siege, pinning down a substantial Ottoman force that would otherwise have been available to reinforce other fronts in Palestine, Sinai, Mesopotamia and Aqaba (Wikipedia, “Siege of Medina”). The railway itself became the central military problem: it was the Ottoman garrison’s only reliable line of supply, and its destruction, or at least its persistent disruption, became a central Arab and British strategic objective for the remainder of the war.

This is the context in which T. E. Lawrence, the British liaison officer later known popularly as “Lawrence of Arabia,” became closely associated with the railway’s story. Lawrence was one of a number of British and French officers attached to the Arab forces as technical and military advisers (Wikipedia, “Siege of Medina”). On 26 March 1917 he led an attack on Aba el Naam station, taking around thirty Ottoman prisoners and inflicting an estimated seventy casualties on the garrison; Lawrence himself later wrote of the raid, “Traffic was held up for three days of repair and investigation. So we did not wholly fail” (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”). Arab News, in an account of the surviving stations, describes the same engagement in more detail: Ottoman artillery fire was directed at the station, the locomotive hauling a train standing there was uncoupled and sent south, where it struck a mine, and roughly seventy of the three hundred Turkish troops present were killed, against a single injury on Lawrence’s own side (Arab News, “The Hejaz Railway: A Piece of History”).

Attacks against the railway continued and intensified through 1917 and 1918. In May 1917 British aircraft bombed al-Ula station; in July 1917 the British engineer Stewart Newcombe, working with Egyptian and Indian army units, sabotaged the line and captured the al-Akhdar station along with twenty Ottoman soldiers; in October 1917 the Ottoman stronghold at Tabuk fell to Arab rebels, along with the Abu Na’am station; and in November 1917 forces under Sharif Abdullah and the Harb tribe attacked Buwayr station and destroyed two locomotives (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”). Wikipedia’s account of the Siege of Medina records roughly 130 major attacks on the line in 1917 alone, rising to hundreds of smaller strikes in 1918, including a single coordinated effort that detonated more than 300 explosive charges along the track on 30 April 1918 (Wikipedia, “Siege of Medina”). Ottoman garrisons at these isolated small stations, remarkably, withstood the great majority of these night attacks and kept the line functioning, however precariously, for most of the siege’s duration.

It is worth stating plainly that these accounts come overwhelmingly from British and Arab Revolt sources, above all Lawrence’s own writing and the military histories built substantially upon it. Ottoman and Turkish accounts of the same campaign, drawn on more heavily elsewhere in this guide for the siege itself, understandably frame these same raids as harassment of a defending garrison holding sacred ground rather than as a liberation campaign — a difference of perspective this guide notes without adjudicating.

The Siege of Madinah, 1916–1919

The siege of Madinah is conventionally dated from 10 June 1916 to 10 January 1919 — two years and seven months, making it, by a wide margin, the longest continuous siege of the First World War and one of the longest in modern military history (Wikipedia, “Siege of Medina”). Fakhri Pasha’s garrison held the city under increasingly severe conditions: most of the civilian population was evacuated, at times forcibly driven out into the desert, to preserve dwindling food supplies for the defenders, and a chronic shortage of fuel for the railway’s locomotives eventually led to private houses in the city being stripped of furniture and structural timber to keep trains running (The Hejaz Railway, “Medina Station”).

By the spring of 1918, worsening Ottoman positions in Palestine and Jordan produced a plan to abandon Madinah entirely and redeploy its large garrison north to reinforce the main theatre of war. This plan collapsed when a series of intense Allied raids against the railway in southern Jordan cut the line so thoroughly that Fakhri Pasha’s forces could no longer withdraw even had they wished to (The Hejaz Railway, “Medina Station”). From that point, the garrison’s fate was tied irrevocably to the city it defended.

Fakhri Pasha’s Refusal to Surrender

The Ottoman Empire formally left the war under the Armistice of Mudros, signed with the Entente powers on 30 October 1918. Every other Ottoman garrison in the region was expected to lay down its arms. Fakhri Pasha refused.

His refusal was framed, consistently across Turkish, British and academic sources, in explicitly religious terms tied directly to his role as defender of the Prophet’s city. According to a Turkish-authored account often cited in this context, Fakhri Pasha addressed his troops from the pulpit of Masjid an-Nabawi in the spring of 1918, turning to face the Prophet’s tomb and declaring his intention to defend the city “to the last cartridge” (Living Warbirds, “Fakhri Pasha”). When the British General Reginald Wingate demanded his surrender on 15 December 1918, Fakhri is recorded as having replied: “I am an Ottoman. I am a Muslim. I am the son of Bayer Bey. I am a soldier” (Fahmy, “Fakhri Paşa and the End of Ottoman Rule in Medina,” Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt; Daily Sabah, “Fahreddin Pasha: Ottoman officer who defended the holy lands with all he had,” 2017). Even Enver Pasha, from Istanbul, reportedly reaffirmed his orders to defend Madinah “up to the last bullet and the last man,” to which Fakhri is said to have replied with grim humour: “Yes, Sir, but not up to the last date” (Uni-Halle open access repository).

He refused a direct order from the Ottoman Minister of War to hand over his sword and evacuate, and the Sultan, Mehmed VI, eventually dismissed him from his post in frustration — a dismissal Fakhri simply ignored, continuing to fly the Ottoman flag over Madinah for a further period that multiple sources place at seventy to seventy-two days beyond the armistice (Wikipedia, “Siege of Medina”; TRT World, “Remembering Ottoman legend Fahreddin Pasha”). Before the eventual capitulation he is reported to have removed sacred relics from the Prophet’s Mosque and sent them to Istanbul for safekeeping, a detail recorded by the peer-reviewed 1914–1918-Online WWI Encyclopedia coordinated by the Freie Universität Berlin (1914-1918-Online, “Medina, Siege of”).

The end, when it came, was not a formal capitulation to an external enemy but an internal collapse. With his garrison starving and exhausted, and having reportedly forced himself to stay awake for extended periods out of fear that his own officers would move against him if he slept, Fakhri Pasha was arrested by a group of his own men on 9 or 10 January 1919 — sources differ on the exact date by a day — and handed over to Sharif Hussein’s son, Prince Abdullah, at Bir Darwish (Wikipedia, “Siege of Medina”; Living Warbirds). One detailed academic account records that he was permitted to lay down his sword at the tomb of Fatimah before his surrender (Uni-Halle repository). Prince Abdullah — later King Abdullah I of Jordan — entered Madinah on 13 January 1919; his brother Ali entered separately, with some sources dating his arrival to early February 1919 (Wikipedia, “Siege of Medina”; Living Warbirds).

The aftermath was harsh. Arab troops are recorded as having looted the city for twelve days following the surrender, forcibly breaking into some 4,850 houses that Fakhri Pasha had ordered locked and sealed during the siege (Wikipedia, “Siege of Medina”). Roughly 8,000 men of the Ottoman garrison — variously recorded as 456 to 519 officers and between 7,545 and 9,364 soldiers, depending on the source — were evacuated to Egypt as prisoners of war (Wikipedia, “Siege of Medina”; Wikipedia, “Arab Revolt”). Fakhri Pasha himself was interned first in Cairo, then in Malta, where he reportedly refused throughout his captivity to remove his Ottoman military uniform. A wartime tribunal condemned him to death in absentia, but Turkish diplomatic pressure secured his release in April 1921, after which he joined Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s forces in the Turkish War of Independence (TRT World). He died on 22 November 1948; his gravestone in Istanbul carries the epithet Medinenin Kahraman Müdafii — “the heroic defender of Medina” (The Open University, “The First World War continues: Medina, Arabia, January 1919”).

The competing framings of this episode are worth stating explicitly, without this guide choosing between them. In the Ottoman and Turkish telling, Fakhri Pasha is a figure of extraordinary religious devotion and military honour, the last defender of a sacred trust who held out for the Prophet’s city long after his own government had abandoned the fight. In the Hashemite Arab telling, his resistance prolonged the suffering of Madinah’s civilian population — evacuated, starved and stripped of their homes’ timber to fuel a war their own city had no say in — well beyond any point of military necessity. In the British telling, embedded in Lawrence’s own writing and the wider Arab Revolt historiography built upon it, the railway campaign was a successful application of irregular warfare that tied down a substantial Ottoman force and hastened the empire’s collapse in the region. All three readings rest on the same underlying facts; a reader forming a judgment on Fakhri Pasha’s conduct is choosing among genuinely contested value systems, not settling a dispute about what actually happened.

After the surrender, the railway itself never returned to full operation in the Hejaz. Track was patched sufficiently for a handful of supply trains to reach Madinah in 1925, under the Hashemite administration and then amid the rise of Abdulaziz ibn Saud, but that same winter torrential rains caused extensive damage that rendered the Saudi section permanently impassable (The Hejaz Railway, “Medina Station”). AramcoWorld dates the last train ever to run on the Hejaz line in what is now Saudi Arabia to 1925 (AramcoWorld, July–August 2026). By the middle of the twentieth century even the rails themselves had, in many stretches, been removed or looted for scrap. Ibn Saud’s consolidation of the peninsula from 1924 onward left no political appetite for reviving the line (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”).

The Station Complex: Architecture of Mahattat al-Hijaz

The Madinah terminus was, by design, one of the largest and most architecturally significant stops on the entire line — appropriate to its status as the railway’s final and most sacred destination. It stood, by design, outside the old walled city, adjacent to the Anbariyah Gate on Madinah’s western side, connected to the historic centre and the Prophet’s Mosque by a residential street running through that gate (The Hejaz Railway, “Medina Station”). A 1914 plan of the city, preserved and cited by railway historians, shows the station — labelled in German as Bahnhof — sitting just outside the Anbariyah Gate on Madinah’s western perimeter (The Hejaz Railway, “Medina Station”).

The complex as a whole, including its surrounding grounds, covers an area recorded variously as approximately 90,000 or 140,000 square metres depending on the source and the period of measurement (Saudipedia, “The Railway Museum”; IRCICA Islamic Architectural Heritage Database). The IRCICA heritage database, working from Saudi antiquities records, classifies the complex’s architectural style as “Ottoman Baroque,” a description that captures the late Ottoman period’s characteristic fusion of European neoclassical massing with Islamic decorative vocabulary (IRCICA Islamic Architectural Heritage Database). A separate assessment by a British railway historian who visited the site in 2018 makes a useful comparative point: unlike the railway’s grand Damascus terminus, which fuses Islamic and European colonial styles, the Madinah station “is totally Islamic in style” in its ornamentation, and — tellingly — was never designed to function as a genuine through-station, since it faces west, away from the old city centre, with nothing beyond it but the direction the line was never permitted to continue: toward Makkah (International Steam, “A Visit to the Railway Station and Museum at Madinah, Saudi Arabia 2018”).

The Main Station Building

The main passenger building is constructed principally of dark, dressed basalt with limestone and sandstone dressings, a combination that recurs across the line’s surviving stations and reflects both the volcanic geology of much of the route and the practical need for stone that could be quarried locally rather than transported at great expense. Its most distinctive external feature is a long façade carrying seventeen decorative arches, a design detail specifically noted in the operator’s own historical account of the site (The Hejaz Railway, “Medina Station”). At the time of the 1908 opening ceremony, the main building had only a single storey; a second storey was added in 1914, with its own separate inauguration ceremony, as the station’s role and importance grew during the railway’s brief working life (The Hejaz Railway, “Medina Station”).

Historical photographs of the wider network describe a broader pattern that likely applied at Madinah’s scale as well: stations along the Hijaz line, built from dressed basalt or sandstone with crisp mortar pointing, have proven remarkably durable, their stonework kept in close to original condition by the region’s dry climate, constant sandblasting from wind-borne desert sand, and the complete absence of industrial pollution (Arab News, “The Hejaz Railway: A Piece of History”).

The Platform, Workshops and Locomotive Shed

Alongside the main building, the surviving complex includes a stone platform running beside a preserved stretch of the narrow-gauge track, and a locomotive shed originally built with four parallel tracks for engine storage and maintenance (Wikipedia, “Hejaz Railway Museum”). The full working complex, as restored, comprised an engine repair workshop, an operations centre, a station master’s residence, a maintenance supervisor’s residence, staff and passenger rest-houses, washrooms, a storehouse, a goods office, sidings and a turntable for reversing locomotives (The Hejaz Railway, “Medina Station”). The repair workshop building today houses the core Hejaz Railway Museum display, established as the first phase of the modern museum project (Saudipedia, “The Railway Museum”).

The Water Tower

A water tower with four tanks formed part of the original complex, essential to servicing steam locomotives that needed regular replenishment across a route running through some of the driest terrain the Ottoman railway network touched anywhere (The Hejaz Railway, “Medina Station”). Water towers of this kind recur at stations across the line — a 2018 visitor account of Hadiyah station further north describes a comparable arrangement of a two-storey blockhouse and single-storey building standing to either side of a central water tower, underlining how central the challenge of water supply was to the entire railway’s operation (Arab News).

Surviving Rolling Stock

A number of locomotives and items of rolling stock survive on site, several transported to Madinah from other points along the historic line specifically for preservation and display (Wikipedia, “Hejaz Railway Museum”). Restoration work completed in 2004 covered six locomotives along with a number of carriages, wagons and flatbed trucks (The Hejaz Railway, “Medina Station”). Among the specific engines documented at the site are German-built Hartmann 2-8-0 and Hartmann 2-6-0 steam locomotives, the latter restored well enough by 2004 to be capable of limited operation on the museum’s own preserved track (The Hejaz Railway, “Medina Station”; Wikipedia, “Hejaz Railway Museum”). A specialist enthusiast reference — the German-language study Die Hedschas-Bahn – Eine Deutsche Eisenbahn in der Wüste by Dieter Noll, Benno Bickel and Ahmad v. Denffer — documents eleven surviving locomotives from the historic Hejaz Railway network as a whole, of which six are recorded at Madinah (Wikipedia, “Hejaz Railway Museum”). Twelve carriages from the original rolling stock have separately been converted into a “Train Restaurant” seating area within the museum grounds, discussed further in the practical section below (Saudipedia, “The Railway Museum”).

The Anbariyah Mosque

Built alongside the station and completed at the same period, the mosque known today as the al-Anbariyah Mosque — originally named the Hamidia Mosque, after Sultan Abdul Hamid II, before its later renaming — sits close to the station entrance, by one account only about forty metres from the station door (NU Online, “Stasiun dan Masjid Anbariyah Peninggalan Turki Utsmani”). Its foundation stone was laid amid the crowd of more than 30,000 present for the station’s 1908 opening ceremonies, underlining how closely the railway and its mosque were conceived as a single Ottoman civic project rather than separate undertakings (The Hejaz Railway, “Medina Station”). Some sources refer to this same structure, or a closely associated one, as the Suqia Mosque, included among the buildings covered by the 2004 restoration project (The Hejaz Railway, “Medina Station”) — a naming inconsistency this guide notes rather than resolves, since available sources are not fully consistent on whether “Suqia” and “Anbariyah” denote the same mosque, a renamed mosque, or two distinct nearby structures from the same building campaign. An independent architectural description characterises the mosque’s design as a blend of Mamluk, Ottoman and European influences within a rectangular plan, consistent with the wider Ottoman Baroque idiom applied to the station itself (Tribun Jabar, “Al Anbariya, Tempat Paling Eropa di Madinah”). The mosque remains an active place of worship today, standing across the road from the museum complex, and several visitor accounts note it specifically as worth a look when visiting the station grounds (Wanderboat AI visitor review).

From Ottoman Terminus to Museum: The Long Restoration

The transformation of the Madinah terminus from a derelict, war-damaged rail yard into a museum has taken place in overlapping phases spanning several decades, and the historical record on exact dates is not fully consistent across sources — a point worth flagging honestly before giving the timeline as best it can be reconstructed.

Saudi antiquities authorities took formal control of the site relatively early: the Antiquities and Museums Agency, then under the Ministry of Knowledge, assumed responsibility for the Hejaz Railway station complex in 1984 with a view to eventual conversion into a museum narrating Madinah’s history (Saudipedia, “The Railway Museum”). A dedicated restoration project is separately dated by Saudi and independent sources to 1998 — recorded in the Hijri calendar as 1419 AH — under the then-General Authority for Tourism and Antiquities, later folded into the Ministry of Tourism and now understood to fall under the Ministry of Culture’s Heritage Commission and the Madinah Region Development Authority (Visit Saudi, official website, “Hijaz Railway Museum”; Saudipedia). Visit Saudi’s own official page states that the museum “was established in 1419 AH, corresponding to 1998 AD, and was inaugurated by Prince Abdulmajeed ibn Abdulaziz” (Visit Saudi, “Hijaz Railway Museum”).

A separate and more specific restoration effort covering the physical station buildings — the main building, engine workshop, water tower, station master’s residence, operations centre, rest-houses, washrooms, storehouse, and the adjoining mosque — is dated by the railway’s own specialist historical site to completion in 2004, with six locomotives and associated rolling stock restored as part of the same programme (The Hejaz Railway, “Medina Station”). The museum housed within the restored main building is then dated by multiple independent sources, including Wikipedia’s dedicated Hejaz Railway Museum entry, Arab News’s contemporary 2006 report, and the railway’s own historical site, to a public opening in 2006 (Wikipedia, “Hejaz Railway Museum”; Arab News, “Hejaz Railway Museum Opened,” 21 January 2006; The Hejaz Railway, “Medina Station”). Arab News’s contemporary report notes an initial admission fee of five Saudi riyals and a stated plan to keep the museum open for an initial trial period of four months before deciding on its longer-term future, alongside criticism at the time from the Supreme Commission of Tourism directed at Madinah city officials for having separately demolished part of the historic rail line even as restoration proceeded elsewhere on the site (Arab News, 21 January 2006).

A further, larger-scale museum development is documented by Saudipedia with more institutional precision: a first phase of an expanded fourteen-hall museum, covering the main station building and the locomotive repair workshop, is dated to a formal inauguration on Monday, 9 December 2013 (Saudipedia, “The Railway Museum”). This 2013 date should be read as the opening of an expanded and reorganised museum programme built on top of the site the 2006 museum had already established, rather than as a contradiction of the earlier opening — though readers should note that available sources do not fully reconcile the 1998, 2004, 2006 and 2013 dates into a single, uncontested timeline, and this guide reports each as documented rather than resolving the discrepancy.

A separate demolition should be noted here rather than left out of the record: the old railway bridge over the Aqeeq Valley at Madinah, part of the historic line’s approach to the city, was demolished in 2005 after suffering damage from heavy rainfall the previous year — a loss Wikipedia records plainly among the site’s history (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”).

The Museum’s Content: Fourteen Halls of Madinah’s History

According to Saudipedia’s official-source account, drawn from the Madinah Region Development Authority, the museum’s first phase comprises fourteen exhibition halls tracing Madinah’s history from prehistory to the present: a museum lobby; a hall on the environment and natural history of the region; pre-Islamic Madinah; Madinah during the era of the Prophet ﷺ; a hall dedicated to his wives and children; a hall on the Muhajirun, the Makkan emigrants; a hall on the Ansar, the Madinan helpers; a hall on the Prophet’s Mosque itself; Madinah under the Rightly Guided Caliphs; Madinah across the wider span of Islamic eras; Madinah during the First Saudi State; Madinah during the Second Saudi State; Madinah under King Abdulaziz ibn Abdulrahman Al Saud; and a final hall on the region’s civil heritage (Saudipedia, “The Railway Museum”). A separate building within the museum grounds is dedicated specifically to the restored trains, carriages and the tools once used by the station’s own railway workers (Saudipedia, “The Railway Museum”).

The same source describes a planned second phase covering a further 12,000 square metres and five additional halls: “Al-Madinah al-Munawwarah Through the Ages,” a hall for the King Abdulaziz Library’s Madinah collection, a Prophet’s Mosque collection hall, a children’s hall, and a “Live Saudi Hall,” featuring interactive digital and audio-visual displays (Saudipedia, “The Railway Museum”). This guide could not independently confirm, as of July 2026, whether this second phase has been completed, partially completed, or remains only at the planning stage; readers should treat it as a documented plan rather than a confirmed current facility.

Beyond the historical halls, the main station building has also been described as housing a visitors’ and temporary exhibitions hall, a lecture and audio-visual presentation hall, a handicrafts market, a museum shop, a traditional café, and the “Train Restaurant” — twelve original railway carriages converted into a family dining venue within the museum grounds (Saudipedia, “The Railway Museum”). Independent Trip Advisor-sourced visitor accounts corroborate the presence of the train-carriage restaurant and a children’s playground on the grounds, and describe the museum’s broader collection as including household implements, jewellery, official seals from various historical periods, and historical photography (Tripadvisor, “Al-Madina Museum (Al Hejaz Railway Museum)”; NU Online).

Visiting the Museum as of July 2026: A Site Currently Closed

This section requires unusual honesty about what could and could not be confirmed, because the available sources genuinely disagree, and some of the most authoritative-looking ones are demonstrably out of date.

The single clearest and most recent primary account available for this guide is the AramcoWorld feature published in the magazine’s July–August 2026 issue, which describes the Madinah terminus in the present tense as marking “the end point of the Hijaz Railway route” with its “grand façade” intact, but does not describe active museum operations inside it, focusing instead on stations further north, at Tabuk and Hegra, as functioning visitor destinations (AramcoWorld, July–August 2026). Türkiye Today, reporting in June 2025 on Hajj pilgrims visiting the site, states directly: “Although currently closed for restoration, the historic Medina Train Station… continues to attract large groups of pilgrims visiting the holy city,” describing visitors gathering at the station’s exterior and grounds even though the museum halls themselves were not accessible (Türkiye Today, “Hajj pilgrims visit historic Ottoman Hejaz Railway Station in Medina,” June 2025). Madinah’s own Hop-On Hop-Off tourist bus operator confirms the same closure in a visitor guide updated in May 2025, stating that “public access to the Hijaz Railway Station is temporarily suspended,” that the tour bus no longer stops at the site, and that the closure is tied to ongoing construction and upgrade work, with no confirmed reopening date given (City Sightseeing Madinah, “Step Back in Time at Al Hijaz Railway Station in Madinah”; City Sightseeing Madinah, “2025 Guide to Hijaz Railway Station in Madinah”).

This guide could not confirm a reopening date for the Madinah museum as of July 2026. Readers should treat the site as closed to interior visits until they have confirmed otherwise through a current, dated source immediately before travelling.

Against this, a considerable amount of tourism content still circulating online — including, at time of writing, Visit Saudi’s own official multilingual pages — presents the museum with confident, specific opening hours as though it were currently operating normally, while simultaneously and somewhat contradictorily labelling the listing “Temporarily closed” or “Closed Now” in the same breath (Visit Saudi, “Hijaz Railway Museum”). The hours these pages give — variously stated as 8:00am to 9:00pm daily, or a split schedule of roughly 9:00am to 4:00pm and 5:00pm to 9:00 or 10:00pm with a later evening opening on Fridays, and free general admission — plainly describe the museum’s pre-closure operating pattern rather than any current schedule, and are reproduced here only as historical reference, not as a current visitor guide (Visit Saudi; Audiala, “Hejaz Railway Museum Visiting Hours, Tickets, and Medina Historical Sites Guide,” July 2025; Bayut.sa, “Hejaz Railway Museum in Al Madinah,” August 2025). This is precisely the kind of contradiction the reader should expect from a museum caught mid-renovation: the operator’s own historic listing has not yet been updated, aggregator travel sites have copied that stale listing without verification, and only the more recent, dated, on-the-ground reporting — the AramcoWorld feature, the Türkiye Today report, and the local Madinah tour operator’s own bulletin — actually reflects the closure.

Historical admission has consistently been reported as free, or as low as a nominal 10 to 20 Saudi riyals in some listings, with no reservation required in normal operation (Audiala, July 2025; Rehlat, “Hejaz Railway Museum, Medina”). Whether these terms will carry over once the site reopens cannot be confirmed from available sources.

The site’s address is consistently given as Omar ibn al-Khattab Road, in the Anbariyah or al-Suqya area, Madinah, with Visit Saudi’s official listing placing it approximately 1,020 metres from the Prophet’s Mosque (Visit Saudi). Independent travel guides commonly describe it as a walk of roughly ten minutes, or under a kilometre, from the Haram, and it has historically featured as Stop 11 on Madinah’s Hop-On Hop-Off tourist bus route — though that stop is itself currently suspended during the closure (City Sightseeing Madinah). A separate operator, Zamzam, states the site is roughly twenty-five kilometres from Prince Mohammad bin Abdulaziz International Airport, useful context for taxi planning (Zamzam Blogs, “Hejaz Railway Museum”).

What a Visitor Can See Today

Given the closure, honesty requires stating plainly what the practical visit currently amounts to: the exterior of the main station building, its arcaded façade, the mosque across the road, and glimpses of preserved track and rolling stock through the perimeter fencing, viewed from the street or from a passing vehicle. Multiple 2025 sources confirm that entry to the grounds and interior is not currently possible (City Sightseeing Madinah). This is, in its own way, not without interest: the building’s exterior architecture, discussed above, can be appreciated fully from outside the fence, and several recent video accounts describe walking the perimeter and photographing the station from the surrounding streets as the realistic current visitor experience (YouTube, “Inside 100-Year-Old Ottoman Ghost Railway Station in Medina,” December 2025).

Photography of the exterior from public streets is not restricted in the way photography inside the Haram complex can be; ordinary tourist photography rules that apply across Madinah — modesty in framing, no photographing of worshippers without consent, and the general Saudi caution around photographing government or security personnel and installations — apply here as elsewhere in the city. As the site is not currently open to the public, no interior photography guidance can meaningfully be given at this time.

The Wider Line: Other Surviving Stations

The Madinah terminus is only the southern end of a chain of stations, several of which survive today in dramatically different states of preservation and reuse, and understanding them helps place the Madinah site in its full context.

Mada’in Salih / Hegra

The station at Mada’in Salih, adjacent to the UNESCO World Heritage archaeological site more widely known as Hegra or al-Hijr, has undergone the most dramatic transformation on the entire line. Its original small railway museum has closed, and the station buildings have been converted into the five-star Chedi Hegra hotel, operated within the broader AlUla heritage and tourism development (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”). The former engine shed now serves as the hotel’s main restaurant, and a restored 2-6-0 Jung Railway locomotive remains on display, alongside a section of original rail preserved under glass (Wikipedia; AramcoWorld, July–August 2026). AramcoWorld describes the result as a spectacular adaptive reuse, though it is worth noting for readers that this transformation has moved the site decisively away from public museum access and toward a luxury hospitality product, a trade-off travellers on a budget should be aware of before planning a special visit.

Tabuk

The station at Tabuk, further north, houses what AramcoWorld’s 2026 reporting describes as “another small but well-curated museum,” maintained inside an original station building and offering a more conventional, publicly accessible museum experience than either the Madinah or Hegra sites currently provide (AramcoWorld, July–August 2026). Tabuk itself fell to Arab rebel forces in October 1917 during the Arab Revolt, discussed above (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”).

Al-Ula

The station at al-Ula, close to the modern town developed extensively as part of Saudi Arabia’s wider AlUla tourism and heritage strategy, retains its station house, fortifications, a windmill and water tower, along with the remains of derelict rolling stock, and has been folded into AlUla’s broader cultural revitalisation programme rather than operating as a standalone museum in its own right (Archnet, “Hejaz Railway Train Station al-‘Ula, Saudi Arabia”; Global Connectivities, “The Hejaz Railway: Faith, Engineering, and Revival in the New Middle East,” December 2025).

Hadiyah and Buwayr

Further stations along the route survive in far more isolated and fragile condition. Hadiyah station, with its black basalt buildings and prominent water tower, is described by Arab News as an important historical stopping point that remains standing in the open desert (Arab News, “The Hejaz Railway: A Piece of History”). Buwayr station, the site of the November 1917 Arab Revolt attack that destroyed two locomotives, survives as one of many remote desert stations described by AramcoWorld’s 2026 reporting as standing “like islands left behind when a river stops flowing,” visited today mainly by the tribal custodians and researchers who maintain informal watch over them rather than by organised tourism (AramcoWorld, July–August 2026).

Ongoing Damage and Treasure-Hunting

It would be dishonest to describe these desert stations without acknowledging the damage many have suffered. Wikipedia’s account, corroborated by AramcoWorld’s own 2026 fieldwork, describes persistent digging by treasure hunters searching for gold rumoured to have been buried by retreating Ottoman forces during the Arab Revolt, leaving station floors, walls and roofs pockmarked with holes, alongside continued theft of surviving rails for scrap metal (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”; AramcoWorld, July–August 2026). In Syria, the civil war that ran from 2011 until the fall of the Assad government in December 2024 caused further, separate damage to the railway’s surviving infrastructure there (Wikipedia; Caliber.az, “Türkiye spearheads restoration of historic railway across Levant,” September 2025).

Reviving the Line: Regional Politics and the 2026 Agreements

Interest in reviving some form of through service along the historic Hejaz route has recurred periodically since the 1920s without ever fully materialising, and 2025 and 2026 have seen the most concrete movement in decades — though it is important to be precise about what has actually been agreed rather than what has merely been proposed.

An attempt in the mid-1960s to rebuild embankments and replace deteriorated bridges and culverts in the Saudi section was abandoned amid the political disruption of the 1967 Six-Day War (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”). Sporadic revival proposals followed over subsequent decades: in February 2009, Turkey’s then Transport Minister Binali Yıldırım announced plans to rebuild Turkey’s section and called on Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria to jointly complete a fuller restoration; the same year, Jordan’s transport ministry floated a $5 billion, 1,590-kilometre regional rail network proposal that was never built (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”). A reported 2018 proposal for joint Saudi-Israeli plans to revive a Haifa-to-Riyadh route, cited by Middle East Monitor, appears not to have progressed into any confirmed construction agreement (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”).

More concrete movement began in September 2025, when Turkey, Syria and Jordan signed a draft memorandum of understanding at a meeting in Amman, explicitly described by Turkish officials as reviving the historic Hejaz Railway corridor. Under this agreement Turkey committed to developing a master plan and reconstructing a roughly 30-kilometre missing section of track inside Syria, while Jordan agreed to study the technical requirements for reintroducing locomotive operations and improving Turkish access to the Red Sea via Jordan’s Port of Aqaba (Caliber.az, September 2025; Global Connectivities, December 2025). Turkish officials at the time set a provisional target of reconnecting the Damascus–Amman line by 2026, though this should be read as a stated aim rather than a confirmed completion (Global Connectivities, December 2025).

Saudi Arabia formally joined this wider effort in mid-2026: on 9 June 2026, Turkish Transport and Infrastructure Minister Abdulkadir Uraloğlu and his Saudi counterpart signed rail and logistics cooperation agreements in Riyadh explicitly intended to support a Gulf–Europe transport corridor running through Syria and Jordan, with officials describing the project as capable of contributing to the revival of the historic Hejaz Railway route (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”; Hürriyet Daily News, “Project marks revival of Hejaz railway legacy over a century later,” June 2026). Speaking to Al Arabiya on 10 June 2026, Uraloğlu suggested the corridor could eventually extend into Europe, though he acknowledged that the financial framework and investment details for the wider Riyadh–Ankara rail link remained to be clarified (Hürriyet Daily News, June 2026). A Turkish outlet separately reported in April 2026 that a feasibility study for the modern Hejaz Railway revival was due by the end of 2026 (Türkiye Today, “Modern Hejaz Railway feasibility study due by end-2026, Saudi Arabia says,” April 2026).

Wikipedia’s account adds important geopolitical framing worth reporting alongside the infrastructure detail: analyses by the Times of Israel and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies have characterised the 2026 Saudi-Turkish agreement as partly intended to counterbalance Israel’s regional influence and its role in the rival India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor, at a time when Arab–Israeli normalisation efforts had stalled, with the 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis reportedly reinforcing Gulf state interest in alternative overland trade routes (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”). Readers should treat this geopolitical interpretation as reported analysis rather than an official statement of purpose, since the agreement’s signatories have publicly framed it around freight connectivity and regional integration rather than any explicit rivalry.

What should not be confused with any of this is the already-operating Aqaba Railway Corporation, which uses part of the historic line’s southern Jordanian trackbed to move phosphate freight from mines near Ma’an to the port of Aqaba, and the Hedjaz Jordan Railway’s freight service between Amman and Damascus — both real, functioning successor operations, but neither offering passenger service and neither constituting the revived pilgrim line these newer 2025–2026 agreements describe (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”). As of July 2026, no new passenger trains are running anywhere on the historic route, and this guide could not confirm a firm construction timeline for any resumption of passenger service.

Wider Significance: Pan-Islamic Project, Instrument of Centralisation, and the Haramain Successor

The Hijaz Railway occupies an unusual position in the historiography of the late Ottoman Empire precisely because it can be described accurately, and without contradiction, in two quite different registers.

Read as a pan-Islamic project, the railway is genuinely without parallel: no other piece of infrastructure in modern Islamic history was funded by voluntary donation from Muslim communities spanning British India, Egypt, Iran, Hyderabad, Morocco, South Africa, Singapore and Russian Central Asia, deliberately structured to exclude foreign loans so that the project would remain, in a meaningful legal and symbolic sense, the property of the global Muslim community rather than a concession to European finance capital (AramcoWorld, July–August 2026; Gulf International Forum). Its status as waqf endowment persists today, and Jordan’s own railway administration continues to describe the line in exactly these terms (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”). The French explorer Charles-Eudes Bonin, writing admiringly in the academic journal Annales de Géographie in 1909, captured the contemporary sense of achievement directly: “By reducing costs and journey times, and by protecting travellers… the Hijaz Railway has restored the terrestrial pilgrimage to its former glory” (AramcoWorld, July–August 2026).

Read as an instrument of Ottoman centralisation, the same railway looks rather different. Historian Murat Özyüksel’s academic assessment, summarised on Wikipedia, argues explicitly that the project served to weaken Arab nationalist sentiment and the growing autonomy of local amirs in Makkah and Madinah, tying the empire’s Arabian periphery more tightly to Istanbul’s political and military control at precisely the moment the empire’s grip on its Arab provinces was becoming most fragile (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”). Sharif Hussein bin Ali’s own hostility to the railway, and his tacit support for tribal resistance to its extension toward Makkah, reflected exactly this reading of the project as a threat to Hejazi autonomy rather than a gift to it (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”). Both readings are supported by the documentary record, and both were, in a real sense, true simultaneously: the railway could be sincerely experienced by a Punjabi donor as a contribution to the Hajj and simultaneously function, in Istanbul’s strategic calculations, as a tool for holding a restive province.

The railway’s closest modern successor is Saudi Arabia’s Haramain High Speed Railway, and the comparison is instructive precisely because of how differently the two projects were financed and built, even as they share a common underlying ambition: shrinking the distance, in time and difficulty, between Islam’s two holiest cities. Construction on the Haramain line began in March 2009; the railway was officially inaugurated by King Salman on 25 September 2018 and opened to public passenger service on 11 October 2018, running 450 kilometres between Makkah and Madinah via Jeddah, King Abdullah Economic City and King Abdulaziz International Airport, at speeds up to 300 kilometres per hour (Wikipedia, “Haramain High Speed Railway”; BBC News, “Saudi Arabia opens high-speed railway linking holy cities,” September 2018). Where the Ottoman line was funded by voluntary Muslim donation specifically to avoid foreign capital, the Haramain line was built at a total cost reported at approximately $16 billion (SAR 60 billion), financed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund in partnership with a consortium of Spanish, French, Chinese and Saudi companies, under a commercial contract with the Spanish operator Renfe to run the service for twelve years (Saudipedia, “Haramain High Speed Railway”; BBC News). Where the Ottoman journey from Damascus took four to five days at best, the Haramain train covers the 450 kilometres between Makkah and Madinah in roughly two hours to two hours and forty-five minutes, and is designed to carry up to 60 million passengers annually, including several million Hajj and Umrah pilgrims each year (Saudipedia; WAM, “Haramain High-Speed Rail provides fast, comfortable travel”).

Most strikingly, the Haramain line achieves something the Ottoman project never managed: a direct rail connection reaching Makkah itself, closing the very gap that tribal resistance and British diplomatic pressure kept the Hijaz Railway from ever closing in 1908 (AramcoWorld, July–August 2026). AramcoWorld’s own July 2026 reporting makes this cross-reference explicit, describing the Haramain line as having “achieved what the Ottoman-era Hijaz Railway never did,” while noting that “in a very different technological and political era, it nevertheless echoes one of the central ambitions behind the original project: shrinking distance across the Hijaz” (AramcoWorld, July–August 2026). For a fuller account of the modern high-speed line’s stations, ticketing and current operating pattern, readers should consult this guide’s separate coverage of practical Makkah–Madinah travel; this article’s focus remains the Ottoman terminus and its own specific history.

Practical Guide 2026: Location, Access and Honest Advice

The station stands roughly one kilometre — commonly rounded to “under ten minutes’ walk” in tourist literature, though closer to a fifteen-to-twenty-minute walk for most visitors accounting for street routing rather than straight-line distance — west of the Prophet’s Mosque, in the Anbariyah or al-Suqya district on Omar ibn al-Khattab Road (Visit Saudi; City Sightseeing Madinah). It is close enough to reach on foot from most hotels in the central Markaziyah district around the Haram, though visitors should account for Madinah’s summer heat, which can make even a short walk uncomfortable outside the early morning or evening hours.

Taxis and ride-hailing services are the more practical option for most pilgrims, particularly given the current closure, which removes any incentive to linger on site. One visitor account records a one-way taxi fare of around 15 Saudi riyals from the Haram area, though fares fluctuate and ride-hailing apps generally offer more transparent and consistent pricing than street taxis, several of which have a reputation among visitors for overcharging foreigners on short hops (Tripadvisor). Madinah’s Hop-On Hop-Off bus tour has historically included the station as Stop 11, though that stop is currently suspended during the closure and the bus does not currently halt there (City Sightseeing Madinah).

Given the closure documented above, the honest current advice for a visitor arriving in Madinah in the second half of 2026 is this: treat the Hijaz Railway Station as an exterior, street-level historical sight rather than a museum visit to plan significant time around. Confirm the site’s status through a current source — ideally the Saudi Heritage Commission or Madinah Region Development Authority directly, since third-party travel sites have repeatedly been shown in this research to carry stale information — in the days immediately before travelling, rather than relying on any guide, including this one, written more than a few weeks in advance. If the museum has reopened by the time of a reader’s visit, the historical opening pattern most consistently reported — a morning session and a separate afternoon-to-evening session, six or seven days a week, with free or nominal admission — gives a reasonable expectation of what to plan for, but should still be verified locally (Audiala; Bayut.sa).

The best time to view the exterior, as with most outdoor sights in Madinah, is early morning or after Asr, when the heat has eased and the light on the basalt stonework is at its most photogenic. Modest dress, appropriate throughout Madinah, applies here as everywhere else in the city. There is no indication in any source consulted that the site involves gender-segregated visiting arrangements of the kind found inside the Haram complex, though one visitor review does advise women against visiting alone given the site’s relatively quiet surroundings outside of tour groups (Wanderboat AI). Accessibility information specific to the museum’s interior — ramps, lifts, accommodations for wheelchair users — could not be confirmed from any source available for this guide, and given the current closure this is, in any case, not currently a practical concern; travellers with mobility needs should ask directly once the site reopens.

Common Misconceptions and a Note on Ziyarah Legitimacy

The most persistent misconception surrounding this site is the muffled-rails story addressed at length above: it is frequently repeated online as an established historical fact rather than the popular tradition, traceable mainly through a modern Turkish transport authority’s own account, that the evidence here actually supports. A second, related misconception is the assumption that because the museum’s own tourism listings still show specific opening hours online, the site is currently operating on that schedule; as demonstrated above, this reflects stale, uncorrected content rather than the site’s actual 2025–2026 status, and readers who arrive expecting to walk into a functioning museum are likely, based on the most recent reporting available, to be disappointed. A third misconception worth correcting is the idea that the Hejaz Railway ever reached Makkah; it did not, for the specific tribal and diplomatic reasons detailed above, and the modern Haramain High Speed Railway achieving that connection in 2018 is a genuinely distinct and much later accomplishment, not a completion of the Ottoman project.

Beyond these factual points, a broader and more important clarification is owed to any reader approaching this site with devotional expectations, because its proximity to the Prophet’s Mosque invites exactly that kind of conflation. The Hijaz Railway Station and Museum has no basis whatsoever in the sunnah as a place of intentional devotional visitation, and nothing in this guide should be read as suggesting otherwise. The scholarly position on this question, as articulated by Ibn Taymiyyah, endorsed in modern rulings by Ibn Uthaymeen and by Saudi Arabia’s Standing Committee for Islamic Research and Issuing Fatwas, holds that only a short, specifically enumerated list of sites in and around Madinah and Makkah carries any basis in the sunnah for visitation undertaken with the intention of religious reward: al-Masjid an-Nabawi itself, the grave of the Prophet ﷺ together with those of Abu Bakr and Umar beside him, the graves of Jannat al-Baqi, the martyrs of Uhud, and Masjid Quba (IslamQA, “Going to visit places and mosques in which the Prophet prayed”). Ibn Taymiyyah is recorded as stating explicitly that none of the Companions — the people with the greatest knowledge of the Prophet’s ﷺ practice and the strongest incentive to imitate it faithfully — are known to have sought out other historical sites associated with his life for devotional visitation, “for they had more knowledge of the Sunnah and followed it more closely than anyone else” (IslamQA). The same source records that Umar ibn al-Khattab, encountering Muslims rushing to pray at a spot merely because the Prophet ﷺ had once prayed there in passing, rebuked them and warned that earlier communities were destroyed by exactly this habit of turning incidental locations into shrines (IslamQA).

This position does not describe the Hijaz Railway Station as forbidden to visit, nor does it suggest the site lacks value. It draws a precise distinction this guide asks readers to hold onto: visiting the station to understand Ottoman history, the story of Fakhri Pasha’s defence of the city, or the engineering of Meissner Pasha’s line is a historically and educationally worthwhile activity, entirely different in kind from visiting a place with the intention or expectation of religious merit, which is the narrower category these scholars address. Other scholars, particularly within Sufi and broader traditionalist currents of Islamic thought, take a more expansive view of tabarruk — seeking blessing through proximity to places and objects connected with the Prophet ﷺ and Islamic history more broadly — and would not necessarily draw the line in the same place. This guide states the position and names who holds it without adjudicating between these views; the reader is left to decide where they stand. What can be said without any ambiguity is that the railway station itself has no claim, from any school of thought, to the specific category of sites the hadith literature singles out for intentional devotional visitation, and nothing about its undeniable historical importance changes that. Visitors should also note the Standing Committee’s specific caution, echoed across this guide’s coverage of other historical sites in Madinah, against touching, rubbing or treating physical remains — stonework, rail, or rolling stock — as though they carried blessing in themselves; here, that caution applies to the locomotives and stonework exactly as it would to a rock or a tree elsewhere in the city.

Lesser-Known Facts

A handful of details from the research behind this guide are worth drawing out because they rarely appear in shorter tourist accounts of the site. The railway’s Madinah terminus was, by design, never meant to function as a through-station: it faces west, with nothing beyond it in the original plan except the unbuilt continuation to Makkah, which is why the building’s orientation can look slightly puzzling to a visitor expecting a conventional station layout (International Steam, 2018). The main station building itself grew significantly after its 1908 opening: what visitors see as a two-storey structure only became two storeys in 1914, six years into the line’s operating life, with its own dedicated inauguration ceremony (The Hejaz Railway, “Medina Station”). Meissner Pasha, the German engineer most responsible for the line’s completion, was legally barred by religious protocol from ever setting foot in the final and most sacred stretch of his own project, from al-Ula to Madinah — meaning the man who built the railway never saw its ultimate destination completed under his own supervision (The Hejaz Railway, “Heinrich Meissner”). And Fakhri Pasha’s dry rejoinder to Enver Pasha’s order to defend Madinah “up to the last bullet and the last man” — “Yes, Sir, but not up to the last date” — is one of the more human details to survive from a siege otherwise remembered mainly through the scale of its suffering and the length of its resistance (Uni-Halle open access repository).

Timeline

• 1 September 1900 (5 Jumada al-Awwal 1318 AH): Sultan Abdul Hamid II issues the decree ordering construction of the Hijaz Railway (IRCICA Islamic Architectural Heritage Database).
• 1900: Ziraat Bankasi provides an initial loan of 100,000 lira; construction begins under contractor Signor Labella (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”).
• c.1901–1902: Heinrich Meissner is appointed chief engineer after slow initial progress under Labella (The Hejaz Railway, “Heinrich Meissner”).
• 1904: Meissner is awarded the Ottoman rank of Mirmiran (Pasha); seventeen Muslim engineers are hired for the project (The Hejaz Railway; Wikipedia).
• September 1905: Inauguration of the Haifa branch line, engineered largely by Meissner across the Yarmouk Valley (The Hejaz Railway).
• September 1907: Harb tribal rebellion at al-Ula protests the railway’s planned extension toward Makkah (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”).
• 28 August–1 September 1908: The first train reaches Madinah; the line’s official opening is celebrated on 1 September 1908, the anniversary of Abdul Hamid II’s accession (IRCICA; The Hejaz Railway).
• 1913: The grand Hejaz Railway Station opens in central Damascus as the line’s formal northern starting point (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”).
• 1914: A second storey is added to the main Madinah station building (The Hejaz Railway).
• 10 June 1916: Sharif Hussein bin Ali launches the Arab Revolt; the siege of Madinah begins (Wikipedia, “Siege of Medina”).
• 1916–1918: T. E. Lawrence and Arab Revolt forces conduct repeated raids against the railway, including the 26 March 1917 attack on Aba el Naam station (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”).
• 30 October 1918: The Ottoman Empire signs the Armistice of Mudros; Fakhri Pasha refuses to surrender Madinah (Wikipedia, “Siege of Medina”).
• 9–10 January 1919: Fakhri Pasha is arrested by his own officers and handed to Prince Abdullah; Madinah falls, 72 days after the armistice (Wikipedia; TRT World).
• 13 January 1919: Prince Abdullah formally enters Madinah (Wikipedia, “Siege of Medina”).
• 1925: The last trains reach Madinah from Ma’an before torrential rain permanently disables the Saudi section of the line (The Hejaz Railway; AramcoWorld, July–August 2026).
• Mid-1960s: A partial attempt to rebuild the Saudi section is abandoned amid the 1967 Six-Day War (Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”).
• 1984: Saudi Arabia’s Antiquities and Museums Agency assumes control of the Madinah station site (Saudipedia, “The Railway Museum”).
• 1998 (1419 AH): The Hejaz Railway Restoration Project is launched under Saudi tourism authorities (Saudipedia; Visit Saudi).
• 2004: Restoration of the main station building, engine workshop, water tower and associated structures is completed; the Aqeeq Valley railway bridge is demolished the following year after storm damage (The Hejaz Railway; Wikipedia).
• 2006: The Hejaz Railway Museum opens to the public in the restored main station building (Wikipedia, “Hejaz Railway Museum”; Arab News, January 2006).
• 9 December 2013: A first phase of an expanded, fourteen-hall museum programme is formally inaugurated (Saudipedia, “The Railway Museum”).
• 2018: Saudi Arabia’s Haramain High Speed Railway opens, finally connecting Makkah and Madinah by rail (Wikipedia, “Haramain High Speed Railway”).
• 2025: The Madinah museum and station grounds are confirmed closed for renovation by multiple sources, with no public reopening date (City Sightseeing Madinah; Türkiye Today, June 2025).
• September 2025: Turkey, Syria and Jordan sign a draft memorandum of understanding to revive sections of the historic railway route (Caliber.az, September 2025).
• 9 June 2026: Saudi Arabia and Turkey sign rail and logistics cooperation agreements in Riyadh, explicitly linked to Hejaz Railway revival discussions (Hürriyet Daily News, June 2026).
• July 2026: AramcoWorld’s feature confirms the Madinah terminus’s grand façade still stands, with restoration and revival efforts continuing across the wider route; no confirmed reopening date for the Madinah museum could be established for this guide (AramcoWorld, July–August 2026).

Practical Takeaways

The Hijaz Railway Station in Madinah is a site of genuine historical importance and, as of July 2026, limited practical accessibility. The building and its grounds are closed to interior visits, and this guide could not establish a confirmed reopening date; travellers should verify current status through the Saudi Heritage Commission, the Madinah Region Development Authority, or recent on-the-ground reporting immediately before planning a visit, rather than relying on the many outdated hours and prices still circulating on tourism websites. The exterior — the arcaded basalt façade, the water tower, glimpses of preserved track, and the adjoining Anbariyah Mosque — remains viewable from the surrounding streets and is worth the short trip from the Haram for anyone interested in Ottoman history, the Arab Revolt, or the story of Fakhri Pasha’s long defence of the city. This is a historical and cultural visit, not a devotional one, and should be understood and undertaken as such, alongside this guide’s coverage of the seerah sites that do carry a recognised basis for ziyarah. Anyone planning a broader Umrah historical itinerary should treat the railway station as a valuable but modest addition — a half-hour stop for the exterior and its story, not a half-day museum visit, until firm news of its reopening arrives.

Sources

Official and institutional sources: Saudipedia, “The Railway Museum”; Visit Saudi, official website, “Hijaz Railway Museum”; Saudipedia, “Haramain High Speed Railway”; IRCICA Islamic Architectural Heritage Database, “Hejaz Railway Medina Station”; IslamQA, “Going to visit places and mosques in which the Prophet prayed”; The Open University, “The First World War continues: Medina, Arabia, January 1919”; 1914-1918-Online International Encyclopedia of the First World War, “Medina, Siege of”; Istanbul Metro, “Renovation of Rails for Abdulhamid Han”.

Independent reporting, academic and specialist sources: AramcoWorld, “Ottoman-Era Hijaz Railway’s Legacy Endures, Chugging Toward Revival,” July–August 2026; Wikipedia, “Hejaz railway”; Wikipedia, “Hejaz Railway Museum”; Wikipedia, “Siege of Medina”; Wikipedia, “Haramain High Speed Railway”; Wikipedia, “Arab Revolt”; The Hejaz Railway, “Medina Station”; The Hejaz Railway, “Heinrich Meissner”; Valeev, Abidulin and Ayupova, “The Project of Hejaz Railway Construction,” University of Malta; “Fakhri Paşa and the End of Ottoman Rule in Medina,” Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt open access repository; Gulf International Forum, “Traveling Through History on the Forgotten Hejaz Railway”; Daily Sabah, “Hejaz railway: A historic line to Islam’s holiest cities”; Daily Sabah, “Fahreddin Pasha: Ottoman officer who defended the holy lands with all he had”; TRT World, “Remembering Ottoman legend Fahreddin Pasha”; Living Warbirds, “Fakhri Pasha”; Arab News, “The Hejaz Railway: A Piece of History”; Arab News, “Hejaz Railway Museum Opened,” 2006; International Steam, “A Visit to the Railway Station and Museum at Madinah, Saudi Arabia 2018”; Archnet, “Hejaz Railway Train Station al-‘Ula, Saudi Arabia”; Caliber.az, “Türkiye spearheads restoration of historic railway across Levant”; Global Connectivities, “The Hejaz Railway: Faith, Engineering, and Revival in the New Middle East”; Hürriyet Daily News, “Project marks revival of Hejaz railway legacy over a century later”; Türkiye Today, “Modern Hejaz Railway feasibility study due by end-2026”; Türkiye Today, “Hajj pilgrims visit historic Ottoman Hejaz Railway Station in Medina”; City Sightseeing Madinah, “2025 Guide to Hijaz Railway Station in Madinah”; City Sightseeing Madinah, “Step Back in Time at Al Hijaz Railway Station in Madinah”; Audiala, “Hejaz Railway Museum Visiting Hours, Tickets, and Medina Historical Sites Guide”; Bayut.sa, “Hejaz Railway Museum in Al Madinah: Culture Built on Rails”; Zamzam Blogs, “Hejaz Railway Museum”; Rehlat, “Hejaz Railway Museum, Medina”; Tripadvisor, “Al-Madina Museum (Al Hejaz Railway Museum)”; Wanderboat AI visitor guide; NU Online, “Stasiun dan Masjid Anbariyah Peninggalan Turki Utsmani”; Tribun Jabar, “Al Anbariya, Tempat Paling Eropa di Madinah”; BBC News, “Saudi Arabia opens high-speed railway linking holy cities”; WAM, “Haramain High-Speed Rail provides fast, comfortable travel”; YouTube, “Inside 100-Year-Old Ottoman Ghost Railway Station in Medina”.

A note on method: This guide draws on Ottoman-era engineering histories, Saudi state heritage sources, peer-reviewed First World War historiography, contemporary Turkish, British, Jordanian and Gulf press coverage, and on-the-ground travel reporting current to within days of writing, cross-checked wherever more than one account existed. Where sources disagreed — most importantly on the exact sequence of restoration and opening dates between 1998 and 2013, and on the site’s precise operating status in 2026 — this guide has reported the disagreement rather than silently choosing one figure, and has flagged the one claim addressed here, the muffled rails beneath the approach to Madinah, that rests on popular tradition rather than a contemporary construction record. Practical information — opening hours, admission costs, transport, and above all the closure itself — should be treated as accurate to the sources’ publication dates cited throughout, and reconfirmed by any reader before travelling, since Saudi museum operations and regional rail politics are both changing quickly at the time of writing.