Iraq Railways - A Mixture Of Gauges

At the time of its independence Iraq effectively had two railway systems - a standard gauge line running north from Baghdad through Mosul and on to the Syrian border and a meter gauge line which ran south from the capital to Basra. These two systems were of course incompatible and so this meant that everything had to be offloaded and reloaded at Baghdad when being shipped from north to southor vice versa.

With the help of the Soviet Union however the standard gauge line was gradually extended and by 1977 the majority of the country's railway was running on standard gauge. By 1985 the railway system, built at a cost of some US$855 million, was capable of carrying up to 1 million passengers and 3 million tons of freight each year. The Iraq rail system included maintenance and control centers as well as over thirty bridges spanning the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

Originally it was planned that this passenger capacity would be tripled by the end of the century and that at the same time the freight capacity would be doubled. This was not achieved and two Gulf Wars mean that it will be many years before Iraq Railways reach anything like this originally planned capacity.