Afghan railroads, past, present and future
Photo taken by William Henry Jackson and published in Harper’s Weekly, 1895, now available on the Library of Congress website.
Railway station at Chaman, near Kojak Tunnel.
Gulistan Station on the Great Military Railway.
Although labelled as “Gulistan Station on the Great Military Railway, at entrance to Kojak Tunnel”, this is actually Shela Bagh station.
Photos of Khyber Pass border signs through the years. Although a railway alignment seems to have been cleared from the short-lived Landi Khana station to the Indo-Afghan frontier, it appears (unless anyone knows better) that tracks were probably never laid on it.
John Saunders has uploaded to Flickr the contents of an album of 1930s and 1940s photos which belonged to his uncle Bill Saunders (1916-69), who was an aircraftsman in the Royal Air Force and spent some years in India.
From 0:54 there is a brief glimpse of some trains in this ‘Linking Afghanistan to the World’ video from CAREC.
There is a photo of a “Henschel engine of the first railway at Kabul, stored at Darulaman, 1974” by Dr Wolfram Koehler at the Trains-Worldexpresses website (which also has lots of other interesting pictures of trains in Asia).
In the Tehkal Christian Cemetery in Peshawar is the grave of: “Edwin Thomas Large, who died at Shahidmaina, August 2nd 1907, while employed on the Loi Shilman Railway, aged 36 years.”
Muhammad Imran Saeed has taken a photograph of it, along with other memorials in the cemetery.
A Russian-language photograph archive with images of the official opening ceremony for the Friendship bridge between the USSR and Afghanistan on 12 May 1982, and associated events including a tree-planting ceremony on the previous day.
The photos include a view of the bridge decorated with large photos of Soviet and Afghan bigwigs – I think they are Brezhnev on the left and Afghanistan’s President Karmal on the right(?).
On Flickr is a wonderful collection of photographs of Landi Kotal and the Khyber Pass in 1937, taken (or collected?) by Albert Chalcroft of The King’s Regiment.
These are some of the railway ones (click to enlarge and visit on Flickr):
I think this is my favourite:
A photo of the Khyber Pass railway from the Railway Gazette International archives.
On the back of the picture is a handwritten caption: “On the Khyber Railway – a push trolly on a down grade entering a tunnel, after it has already passed through the top tunnel. P.W.R.”.
PWR is presumably Pakistan Western Railway. The back of the picture has a 30 March 1962 date stamp; this might be when the picture was developed or when the magazine received it, rather than when the picture was taken.
Click the image for more details.
