Text and photos: Lydia Aisenberg
Close to the southern shore of the Sea of Galilee, where the River Jordan exits and begins its long journey wending through the Jordan Valley toward the Dead Sea, sits the Samakh Railway Station.
In recent years the main structures and outbuildings, tracks and surrounding area have been expertly restored and further enhanced, with emotionally moving, appropriate sculptures and memorials. These are coupled with ample texts, so that visitors can understand more deeply the importance of the site and provide a lasting memorial to those who lost their lives in battles in and around that station in the not so distant past.
The Samakh-Tsemach Railway Museum was brought to fruition through a partnership with the Kinneret College, Jordan Valley Regional Council and the Council for the Preservation of Buildings and Historic Sites, together with Israel Railways and other organizations and individual donors.
The extensive site sits at one of the most important railway junctions in the history of Israel. It made a huge contribution to the development of the railways and the country in the first half of the twentieth century, building a major chapter in the political, national and geopolitical struggles that shaped the State of Israel, particularly in the Jordan Valley, the Sea of Galilee region, and the Jezreel Valley in the Lower Galilee.
Key players in this incredible, fascinating story were far-away governments, locals – Jews and Arabs – as well as Turks, Germans, Australians and the British.
The Samakh to Haifa line was built by the Turkish Ottomans and inaugurated in October, 1905. It was 87 km in length and sported nine stations en route, thus enabling the refilling of the trains' coal and water supplies. The railway was captured by Australian forces in 1918, and extensively used and highly valued by the British Army during the Mandate period up until 1948.It eventually became part of the Kinneret College's Center for Land of Israel Studies and it shares a large portion of the incredibly rich history, basically offering a fast track back to the beginnings of the region's mind boggling rail history.
Also known as Tsemach, Samakh was one of the major stopping points of the famous Ottoman built Hijaz Railway line that ran between the Mediterranean port city of Haifa and the southwestern Syrian city of Daraa. This particular section of the Hijaz railway network became fondly dubbed the "Valley Train," as the railway between Samakh and Haifa passed through the northern section of the Jordan Valley before huffing and puffing all the way through the full length of the Jezreel Valley to the all-important Mediterranean port of Haifa.
In present times the historic and extensively reconstructed Samakh-Tsemach Railway Museum tells in fascinating film, photographs, illustrated texts and professional on-site guidance, the mind-boggling history not only of the Valley Train and in particular the Samakh station, but also that of the entire region.
The Samakh/Tsemach station is situated in a unique location, a very short distance indeed from the southern shores of the Sea of Galilee, and in close proximity to the meeting of three borders and a major thoroughfare, making it an important strategic landmark in the area.
In the last weeks of World War I, a rare and daring night cavalry charge over unknown terrain by the Australian Light Horsemen defeated the German and Turkish forces, capturing the Samakh station and nearby town of the same name, in what became the last cavalry charge in modern times.
In the 1920's, fierce battles with Bedouin tribes took place around the station and in 1948, Syrian armored forces overran the Samakh station and attacked Jewish communities nearby, before eventually being defeated in a battle at the gates of Kibbutz Degania.
The renovated site in present times includes the two-story basalt stone-built main station building, including the passenger hall, offices and the manager's family residence. Other renovated properties include a storage building, water tower, workshops, locomotive garage and coal filling area, and close to the station, a number of structures for the quarantine of livestock brought in from Syria.
The water tower's oval shape is unique, basically two gigantic water tanks with pumps filling them with water from the nearby Sea of Galilee. Nowadays this construction has become a closed visitors' center where those – with a ticket to ride of course – sit on benches around the inner walls and are taken on a journey through the railway's incredible history as it is screened on the surrounding thick, Turkish-built basalt stone walls.
During the Turkish period, a turntable was installed at the station, which allowed the more powerful locomotives to return on the difficult ascent to Damascus through the Yarmouk Valley. A concrete tower was used to fill the locomotives with fuel oil after the transition from coal, and an underground fuel tank was built at the station in World War II, as a defense against attacks from the German air force.