By: Ammar Khammash
4-8-2002 |
Hijaz Railway
Amman Station
Or
Where time stood still |
A quick destination, easy to visit and good for a 2-hour break from
familiar Amman mood. Entertaining and educational for children.
Photogenic, provides good subject for photography enthusiasts. Special
care and attention should be given to occasionally moving trains. It
can be particularly dangerous when inspecting trains on Main tracks.
For children the best fun would be viewing the out-of- function
engines and carts on the maintenance side rails.
The Amman station remains an almost intact specimen from Jordan at the
end of the Ottoman Empire. Like a historical photograph where time is
captured and brought to complete stop, this station is a physical
three-dimensional freeze, a snapshot fixed in iron and stone, as steam
engines have been dormant for decades on rails with shrubs growing
around the wheels.
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The impact of time is immediate and stunning, the minute you step past
the main gate. Although Amman’s surrounding mountains are visible from
inside the station, you still feel that you are in a time fame cut
from another era. You are in a preserved atmosphere from days gone,
different colors of rust, iron that is no longer used by in
contemporary objects, and the air smells Ottoman or East European with
a faint element of Hijazi flavor.
This station was built as with the Zarqa -Qatarana track (1902- 1905).
It is a part of the much bigger project of the rail that connected
Damascus with Madina in Saudi Arabia. The Jordanian section of the
project was one of the most difficult to construct, it demanded mush
more bridges to span the numerous valleys our rugged terrain. From the
950 bridges, 1540 kilometers of steep hill, the majority were in
Jordan. Two battalions of the Ottoman soldiers, some 5700, and al
least 600 “foreign” workmen including Italians, Greeks, and
Montenegrins were employed for their skills in building bridges and
culverts. Railway materials came from Europe (Germany and Belgium) and
the United States. Had you been at the construction site you would
have heard French, Italian and Turkish, besides Arabic, used for
communication. At the same time many of the foremen were German
speakers.
The making of this lasting monument wasn’t easy. In Jordan, the summer
temperature has reached 55 degrees centigrade, and between Amman and
Der’a al least 400 workers died from cholera and many more fled the
area. There were strikes by workers who were not paid in time and
floods delayed construction in many parts of the railway project. |
Architecturally, the Amman station was, during the first decade of
20th century, the first physical influence of such a magnitude. It
arrived to a village that was sleeping out of the stage of history for
about a thousand year. The structures of this station introduced many
architectural and structural elements new to the traditional
architecture of Amman. It gave an example of “modern engineering”
where stones have a modular to follow, arches have a prototype, and
all details followed a set of standards clearly formulated on the
drafting table of a western construction engineer.
This station can also be seen as the full-fledge arrival of the
industrial revolution that Europe hade gone through and now expanding
it, using these new inventions, eastwards.
It can be said that the architecture of the station had a major
influence on most of the Jordanian villages and towns, including Sult.
The time of the construction of the station came im midst of the
biggest construction boom that Jordan was going through since the
Mamluk times some 700 years before.
The Amman station remains to be a charming monument, an open-air
museum of architecture, engineering and steam engines. It’s history is
so relevant, so close to us, that some of our grandparents might have
actually witnessed its making.
This destination remains one of the many hidden treasures of Amman
waiting for your attention. |
