Haradara Bridge on the Baghdad Railway

Haradara Bridge is a steel railway bridge that carries the Baghdad Railway over a canyon about 30 km north-west of Afrin. It was completed in 1913. It is about 310 metres long and about 80 metres high, with a longest span of 74 metres. Of everything on the line running north from Aleppo to Turkey, this is the structure you notice first.

Which line it carries

This is the branch of the Istanbul-Aleppo-Damascus main line that crosses into Turkey. The bridge stands between the border station of Meidan Ekbis and the Muslimiyah junction north of Aleppo, about 4 km north-west of Rajo. Rajo was connected to the line in 1912, and the bridge was finished a year later. The line was part of the railway meant to link Berlin with Baghdad; Baghdad Station in Aleppo came out of the same project.

How it is built

It is a deck bridge, meaning trains run on top of the truss rather than through it. The truss is a Warren type: steel members meet at an angle and form a row of triangles. The figures come from the Structurae database, which itself gives all of them as approximate.

Do trains still cross it

In February and March 2007, Syrian Railways diesel locomotives and a passenger train with a dining car were photographed on the bridge, so the line was running that year. OpenStreetMap now marks the line as disused. No current source says whether services will resume.

Getting there

The bridge stands in farmland between Rajo and Meidan Ekbis, reached by car via Afrin. The area around Rajo was a front line with shelling and fighting between 2016-2018. Because of the risk of unexploded ordnance, stay off the land away from the road, especially on the hills along the border. Looking from the hillside is enough; there is no need to walk onto the bridge or the tracks. No access information from the past year could be found, so ask in Afrin before you set out.

What most people miss

The view from the olive groves on the opposite slope. The 80-metre height only makes sense from a distance, where the truss reads as a thin line strung between the two sides of the valley. A small, abandoned bridge on the same line stands 800 metres north of Haradara.