Hello, and welcome to Levantrain. You may have just come across an interesting website.

Bring high-speed rail to the Middle East to connect people and places in peace.

Yep, bit of a crazy idea and may not happen in our lifetime.

The situation in the Middle East is absolutely heartbreaking. It’s highly complex, it’s been going on forever, and there is so little one seems to be able to do as an individual to change things for the better. It seems impossible to imagine how this region may ever arrive at peace. However, it’s worth remembering that peace is possible! For example, following World War II the people of Europe – somehow, miraculously – managed to overcome centuries of near-constant wars. And it only took about one generation for them to leave (a lot of) the past behind, basically just get along, and start visiting each other in peace, often by train. Nowadays, it’s easy to zoom across the continent in the comfort of modern and fast trains: from Warsaw to Munich, from Vienna to Amsterdam, from Paris to Barcelona, or wherever else you might need to go. Sweet!

We don’t know whether it will take five years or fifty for the people in the Middle East to finally overcome their conflicts, but if and when they do, they will need a world class high-speed rail system to connect them.

Levantrain is a grassroots community effort to lay the groundwork for this idea to take hold. We’ll start by doing some basic research, including:

• build a map of current and historic railway routes in the greater Levant region,
• prepare high-level cost estimates,
• collect media articles,
• collect research articles,
• identify potential partners,
• list upcoming events,
• make some art,
• etc.

Let’s see where this will take us. All aboard!

According to Wikipedia, the Levant is “an approximate historical geographical term referring to a large area in the Eastern Mediterranean region of West Asia and core territory of the political term Middle East.” For the purposes of this project we are including the following seven countries/territories:

• Egypt
• Israel
• Jordan
• Lebanon
• Palestine
• Syria
• Turkey