About Levantrain

Levantrain starts from an unusual place. Rather than wait for the region’s hardest problems to be solved, we assume — just for a while — that they are, and get to work on something hopeful and concrete that a connected Middle East would then need: a modern railway linking the Levant and its neighbors. It’s a small mental trick, but it lets us begin. Because you can’t build toward a future you refuse to imagine.

What we’re building

We start with the truth. We’re assembling an open, fully-sourced map of the region’s real railway history — where the lines once ran, what still remains, every fact traced back to a source, and honest about what we don’t yet know. On that foundation we’re working toward a concrete, buildable blueprint for a future high-speed network: the routes, the engineering, ballpark costs, and the hard trade-offs — rigorous enough to hold up under scrutiny and to inform real decisions, if the moment ever comes. Serious, hands-on work, done in the open.

How a railway becomes something bigger

Here’s the part that matters most. Reconstructing this shared history can’t be done alone. The sources are in Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, German, and French; the ground truth sits on both sides of borders; confirming a single old station can take one person who reads the Ottoman record and another who reads the Mandate survey. The work itself requires cooperation across the very lines that divide the region — not contact for its own sake, but joint truth-seeking about a contested past, under rules that make disagreement productive rather than destructive.

Our aim is to grow Levantrain into a genuinely collaborative effort: people from across the region — many of them young — working the same material together and building trust through a real shared task. And in doing that, quietly helping shift the story from division toward a shared future worth building.

Where we are — honestly

We hold ourselves to being honest about what’s real — on the map, and about the project itself. Today, Levantrain is a grassroots, volunteer effort: an open dataset, an honest map, and a public build log — a solid skeleton, but only a small fraction of the detail we ultimately want. The collaborative, cross-border layer described above is the plan we’re growing into; it doesn’t exist yet. Right now we’re finding the first people who get it, and laying a foundation that a wider community — and one day teams of researchers across the nine countries — can build on.

The long game

If it works, Levantrain becomes more than a map. It becomes a demonstrated way for people across a divided region to do serious work together — and a robust, opinionated proposal that future decision-makers could actually pick up: here’s what a modern network could look like, here’s roughly what it would cost, here’s where to start. And maybe, within a lifetime, an actual train from Cairo to Beirut — breakfast in Egypt, dinner in Lebanon.