Aleppo Railway Station (Gare de Bagdad)

The main station of Aleppo stands on Baghdad Street, on the boundary between the Syriac quarter and Ashrafieh. It opened in 1912 as the Aleppo stop of the Berlin–Baghdad railway and is the second-oldest station in Syria. The first train ever to leave it ran east, towards Jarabulus. In the city nobody calls it anything but Baghdad Station.

Getting there

The station sits north of the city centre. Ten minutes on foot from the northern end of Aleppo Public Park, five by taxi from Aziziyah. The building presents a single face to the street, and from the pavement it does not read as a station at all: cut stone, a tiled roof with a deep eave, rows of pointed-arch windows on the upper floor.

What to see

The facade outside, the ticket hall inside. The hall is high and cool, with a stone basin at its centre and a large brass chandelier above it. You cannot reach the platforms without a ticket. German engineers built the station, and its front puts late Ottoman stonework and railway architecture on the same wall.

Do the trains run

Until 2011 there were daily services from here to Damascus, Latakia, Hama, Homs, Qamishli and Deir ez-Zor. Services stopped in 2012. They resumed on 25 January 2017 after four years, work on the Damascus-Aleppo line began in 2020, and services to Hama and Damascus started running again in August 2025. This picture changes fast, so ask at the station before you plan around it.

A short history of the line

By the First World War the railway had reached Aleppo. A branch ran down to Tripoli, and by October 1918 the line had got as far east as Nusaybin. After the war the border was redrawn and the railway ended up north of it. From 1922 two French companies worked the Baghdad Railway in turn, and both were wound up in 1933. The Aleppo line then went to the Damascus-Hama Railway Company for 15 years, which is how Aleppo came to be linked to Damascus. Everything was nationalised in 1956, and on 1 January 1965 Syrian Railways was reorganised with its head office in Aleppo.

What most people miss

The stone basin in the ticket hall. You cannot see it from the door; it stands in the middle of the floor, directly under the chandelier.