Railway Museum

This guide to the Railway Museum in Medina opens with an Ottoman officer, Mehmet Ali Pasha, removed from command and court martialed over how he treated the men building the Hejaz Railway's final stretch into this city. It follows the roughly thirty-eight hundred soldiers, many drafted straight out of the Medina garrison, who laid the track in tents that kept getting struck and moved forward, going unpaid for months while dysentery and typhoid spread through the camps. A few hundred hired Italian, French, Austrian and Greek specialists handled the engineering work the conscripts could not.