Railways of Iraq

Federal News Radio has an AP photo by Hameed Rasheed showing a wrecked station building. The caption says Two people look through the ruins of a damaged train station building after U.S. warplanes and helicopters shelled al-Abbasiya railway, near Samarra 95 kilometers (60 miles) north of Baghdad, Iraq, on this Monday, June 4, 2007.

Marine Corps Times has a little more information: Two Iraqi men stand in the ruins of a building after a U.S. air strike on the al-Abbasiya railway, about 60 miles north of Baghdad on June 4. The American warplanes and helicopters shelled al-Abbasiya railway, and later the land forces attacked the station, killing four people including two women and detaining 20 people, police said.

The November 2006 issue of American magazine Railway Age has a report from former KCS dispatcher, locomotive leasing/maintenance specialist, and Trains magazine editor Mark Hemphill, who has been in Iraq as senior railway consultant for the U.S. Department of State’s Iraq Reconstruction Management Office.

It is a very interesting read, describing the scale of the problems faced by IRR, in particular with security.

On the record . . . with railroader Mark W. Hemphill

There have been 1 500-plus attacks on IRR fixed plant, concentrated in areas where there is no local control. Some 90% of attacks use IEDs (improvised explosive devices) placed on the track. Crews go out daily to repair the two to five meters of damage the devices generally cause.

…

Another 7% of attacks are from small-arms fires (firing at trains or repairmen), and 3%, complex attacks using IEDs, small-arms fires, grenades, and machine guns.

Passenger trains are not attacked, according to Hemphill, because “everything in Iraq is local, family, tribal. You don’t attack because your mother-in-law is onboard.”