Home of the Station Manager - About the Valley Train

Welcome to the Kfar Yehoshua Valley Train site. The site is operated by the Council for Conservation of Heritage Sites in Israel. This was once the location of the Tel El-Shamam Station, until the train line stopped operating. The buildings were abandoned and exposed to the ravages of time, until the visitor center was built here…

The story of the Valley Train began at the end of the Ottoman period, when the sultan Abdul Hamid the Second decided to establish the Hejaz railway, a railway beginning in Damascus that was to end in the holy Islamic cities of Medina and Mecca, in Saudi Arabia. This was the plan, but the railway never actually reached Mecca. A branch line, which was inaugurated in 1905 and connected Haifa with Daraa in Syria, was dubbed the Valley Train by the Jews. The railway between Haifa and Daraa was 161 kilometers long, and its construction, under the supervision of German engineer Heinrich August Meissner, was an engineering feat that took just two years.

Initially, seven stations were built along the length of the railway, from Haifa to Daraa. When the tracks were laid, not many people lived in the Valley and the nearby moshav of Kfar Yehoshua had not yet been founded. So why was the train station built here? Because of the need for water. The train operated on steam, and every 20 to 25 kilometers it was necessary to refill the steam engine’s water tank. At Tel El-Shamam, there was an available source of water, so a station was built here.

At the end of World War I, when Eretz Israel came under the rule of the British mandate, Yehoshua Hankin bought land in the Jezreel Valley. Many towns were established near the train tracks, since the train was the residents’ primary means of transportation as well as a means of transporting agricultural produce to Haifa.

After the establishment of the State of Israel, the train stopped running on this line, and truck and automobile traffic increased on the roads that had been paved throughout the Valley.

Israel Railways renewed the operations of the Valley Train route in 2016. The new tracks connect Haifa to Beit Shean via Afula, Kfar Yehoshua, and Kfar Baruch, on a route that is close to the original. If you are lucky and the time is right, you might see the train passing through the Valley fields.