|
Rail transport in Israel includes heavy rail (inter-city, commuter, and freight rail) as well as light rail. Excluding light rail, the network consists of of track, and is undergoing constant expansion. All of the lines are standard gauge and as of 2012 all of the heavy rail lines are not electrified. A government owned company, Israel Railways, manages the entire heavy rail network. Most of the network is located on the densely populated coastal plain. The only light rail line in Israel is the Jerusalem Light Rail, though another line in Tel Aviv is currently under construction. Many of the rail routes in Israel date back to before the establishment of the state – to the days of the British Mandate for Palestine and earlier. Rail infrastructure was considered less important than road infrastructure during the state's early years, and except for the construction of the coastal railway in the early 1950s, the network saw little investment until the late 1980s. In 1993, a rail connection was opened between the coastal railway from the north and southern lines (the railway to Jerusalem and railway to Beersheba) through Tel Aviv. Previously the only connection between northern railways and southern railways bypassed the Tel Aviv region – Israel's population and commercial center. The linking of the nationwide rail network through the heart of Tel Aviv was a major factor in facilitating further expansion in the overall network during in the 1990s and 2000s and as a result of the heavy infrastructure investments passenger traffic rose significantly, from about 2.5 million per year in 1990 to about 36 million in 2010. Israel is a member of the International Union of Railways and its UIC country code is 95.〔http://www.uic.org/IMG/xls/country_code_applicable.xls〕 Currently, the country does not have railway links to adjacent countries, but one such link is planned with Jordan. Unlike road vehicles (including trams), Israeli railway trains run on the left hand tracks. ==History== Rail infrastructure in what is now Israel was first envisioned and realized during the Ottoman period. The Jaffa–Jerusalem railway, initiated by the Jewish entrepreneur Joseph Navon and built by the French, was opened in full in 1892 at 1 m gauge. The Ottomans soon built the Hejaz railway, which had an extension to Haifa called the Jezreel Valley railway. It was inaugurated in 1905. Major railway development was undertaken by the Ottomans, with German assistance, in the Sinai and Palestine Campaign of World War I, which saw the construction of the eastern and southern railways. When the British Empire was advancing on the Ottomans, it too built and repaired numerous railways to help in the war effort. Starting in 1917–18, the British converted the Ottoman 1.05 m gauge southern, eastern and Jerusalem railways to standard gauge, though not the Jezreel Valley railway and some of its branches which remained narrow gauge and thus incompatible with the rest of the railways in Palestine. The British also extended some of the existing railways and connected them with adjacent countries and built gauge lines in Jaffa and Jerusalem. After the First World War ended, the British nationalized all railways in the Palestine mandate and created the Palestine Railways company to manage operations. When Israel gained independence in 1948, the state created Israel Railways as a successor to the British company. During the 1948 War of Independence, much damage was done to the railways in the country, especially the Jezreel Valley railway, which was not rebuilt due to financial constraints and its incompatibility with the rest of the rail network. In the first years of Israeli independence, rail passenger traffic grew rapidly, reaching about 4.5 million passengers per annum during the early to mid-1960s, at which point traffic began to slacken due to improvements in the road infrastructure, increases in the automobile ownership rate, lack of investment in the rail network, and a continued favoring of public transportation using buses over trains. This trend reached a low point of about 2.5 million passengers in 1990, which on a per-capita basis represented about a 75% decrease from the heyday of the 1960s. Then in the 1990s, a wave of railway infrastructure development began, leading to a resurgence of the railways' importance within the country's transportation system. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Rail transport in Israel」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|