Hejaz Railway is an interesting nomination and I would say my favourite in Saudi out of the four large serial ones (the three others are pilgrimage hajj routes). It's a coherent collection of sites with an interesting story and many places to see in still quite decent shape. The Hejaz railway was a narrow gauge railway, named after the Hijaz region of present-day Saudi Arabia through which it ran. It connected Damascus in present-day Syria with Medina in Saudi Arabia, with a branch line to Haifa (present-day Israel). It was part of the Ottoman railway network and its original purpose was to connect Damascus and Mecca with Istanbul. The builders' grandiose plans were thwarted by the First World War; only the Damascus-Medina line, which was 1,300 kilometres long, was built. As you might have guessed, the main purpose of its construction was to bring pilgrims from Europe, Asia and the Levant to Medina and Mecca. To give you an idea, the journey from Damascus to Medina by camel took forty days, which the railway shortened considerably.

It was built in eight years, between 1900 and 1908, using local labor, local resources, and the charity of Muslims (their obligatory alms called zakat). There were stations every 20 kilometres, mainly for defence reasons, and there were water tanks - as there is no water to spare in the desert, the train had to have, among other things, one carriage of water, which was used to power the steam locomotive.

The glory of the Hijaz railway did not last long. During World War I, sections of it were attacked by representatives of the Arab Revolt and British officer T.E. Lawrence (I recommend the film Lawrence of Arabia) and by 1918, less than two decades after the project began, the railway lay in ruins. Today, the railroad operates on sections from Amman to Damascus and from the phosphate mines at Ma'an to Aqaba. Between Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia's two main pilgrimage centres, a high-speed rail line was completed in 2018. The most important historical stops along the way can be found in Medina, Madain Saleh (today's AlUla) and Tabuk.

I'll repeat myself like a broken radio, but even in the case of the Tabuk train station (the historic one), the town is preparing for a more expressive influx of tourists. You can go to the station area and go look at it - it's fenced off with a set of historic buildings built of brick as well as parts of the railroad tracks. The large visitor center is, unfortunately, being renovated again, however photos from the Google Reviews show interesting exhibition including a railway engine, so I guess I am happy for the visitors in the future.

Our second visit was similiar, we visited the train station in AlUla - a drive about 5 minutes from the town centre, it's located close to the park. The site is once again fenced off, but can be seen well and you can walk around. There are also many other stations along the main road as we drove, we took pictures of them. Given more care and information as well as signposts, this would be an interesting inscription. After the reconstruction works are done, of course.