Tag Archives: Israel

Rail Photo of the Month: February 2024

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IC3 DMU 7203

Location: Jerusalem-Malha Station, Jerusalem, Israel
Operator of Vehicle: Israel Railways
Date of Photo: May 18, 2012

Israel Railways, the only operator of the IC3 DMU trainsets outside of Scandinavia, retired the rolling stock type in the past month.  The IC3 was introduced to Israel in 1992.  At the time, it was the first new rolling stock purchased by Israel Railways in over 20 years and the trains quickly became popular with staff and passengers alike due to their spacious interior layout and other modern (for the time) features.  

The most notable feature on the exterior of these trains is the rubber diaphragm at the end of each three car set.  When two sets were coupled together, the entire cab would be folded back allowing for seamless movement between the individual trainsets.  This setup also meant that a train could be easily split or recoupled almost “on the fly” so to speak, for example, to separate to provide service to a branch line.  Each trainset consisted of three cars and up to five trainsets could be coupled together to create a 15 car train.  

In 1997, two Israel Railways trainsets were demoed by Amtrak in the United States and VIA Rail in Canada.  Called the “Flexliner” for North American marketing purposes, Amtrak trialed the train on the Hiawatha, Kansas City Mule, St. Louis Mule, San Diegan, and Cascades services, while VIA used it in the Windsor-Quebec corridor.  The trains were certainly a novelty and garnered some attention during their time in North America, but neither operator purchased them.

In Israel, the IC3 was the only rolling stock to operate on the old Jerusalem-Tel Aviv route, as this was the only equipment that had the power to go up the steep grades on this line (any other train would have had to be “doubleheaded” due to the gradients).  They were also mainstays on the Be’er Sheva-Dimona line and, since its 2019 opening, the Jezreel Valley line to Beit She’an.  However, their age combined with the closure of the old Jerusalem-Tel Aviv route during the Covid-19 pandemic means that Israel Railways can replace them with newer equipment, especially as the project to electrify the entire network proceeds.  

I rode them a number of times on the old Jerusalem-Tel Aviv line.  They certainly are unique trains and while the new high speed line between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv is a game changer for getting between the two cities, the retirement of the IC3 will make the Israel Railways fleet more homogenous and less diverse.  

Did you ever ride the IC3 in Israel?  What about Denmark, Sweden, or on its North American tour in 1997?  Post a comment either way!  You can still find the IC3 in revenue service in Scandinavia, and one Israel Railways set has already been preserved at the Israel Railways Museum in Haifa.  

For more photos of Israel Railways’ IC3 “Flexliner” DMUs, please click here.  And to learn more about these trains, you can read this article from Walla News (Hebrew only).  

Looking Back at ’23, Looking Forward to ’24

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Siemens Desiro HC EMU at Jerusalem-Navon Station, Jerusalem, Israel, June 7, 2022

Devout fans of this website might have noticed no new content has been added for nearly 11 months.  I had expected to make headway on a photo backlog that includes most of the photos I took in 2022 and if you had asked me 12 months ago, I would have predicted that most if not all of those photos would be online by now.  Needless to say, that hasn’t happened yet.

After a 2022 that had enough travel for me to earn status with United Airlines for the first time, I’m not surprised that I traveled much less in 2023.  However, life was busy in other ways.  I had the opportunity to do the Five Boro Bike Tour in New York City in May, which was a wonderful way to experience the city very differently than how I experience it when traveling by subway or bus.  Mrs. Oren’s Transit Page and I bought a house about 4 miles from where we were previously living, so the home buying process followed by moving took up much of the late summer and fall.  

MPM-10 train at Lionel-Groulx Station, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, June 30, 2023

In terms of transit related highlights, I had the opportunity to tour the DC Streetcar Barn in April.  In May, I visited the new Potomac Yard Metrorail station on its opening day.  The biggest trip of the year brought me to Montreal for the first time in over 20 years.  I look forward to sharing the photos from that trip at some point, hopefully before the calendar turns to 2025.  In the fall, work travel brought me to Orlando for the first time in nearly 20 years.  A second work trip allowed me to ride Amtrak’s Empire Service from New York City to Albany during the peak fall foliage period, which was a pretty trip to say the least.  It was this level of “busy-ness” that led me to pausing the photos of the month for the past three months, there wasn’t even time for those posts!  Photos from some of these trips as well as many of my travels around the Washington, DC area aren’t even in the Uncaptioned & Unsorted Photos gallery yet, but I hope to get them there soon.

Alstom Citadis 305 in Athens, Greece, September 3, 2022

I tend to approach the photo queue in chronological order, so many photos from Israel as well as photos from a work trip to Greece that I took in 2022 are likely to appear online before the 2023 photos are captioned and sorted into their proper pages.  I hope the wait is ultimately worth it.

As of now, I’m not expecting 2024 to be a heavy travel year, but since when do prognostications in late December and early January turn out to be entirely accurate?  Perhaps it will give me the opportunity to catch up on the seemingly never empty photo queue.  I’m also giving thought to sharing some of the material that I would potentially share in Oren’s Reading List posts directly to Facebook instead of waiting to draft a post here.  Would that be considered to be an improvement?  Let me know by leaving a comment below.  And as always, thanks for dropping in and checking out my work.  I really appreciate it.

 

Bus Photo of the Month: June 2023

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MAN NL-313

Location: Jaffa Road, Jerusalem, Israel
Operator of Vehicle: Egged
Date of Photo: July 7, 2022

Today, green Egged buses such as this one will operate on Jerusalem’s Route 3 between the Central Bus Station and Western Wall.  As of tomorrow, that will no longer be the case, as a relatively new company called Extra takes over the route.  If you are reading this from somewhere such as Europe or Israel, the idea of a route shifting from one operator to another is probably one with which you are familiar.  In this type of model, a government agency (in this case, the Israeli Ministry of Transportation) determines routes and service levels and operating companies, such as Egged, Superbus, and Extra bid on tenders to provide the service.  Conversely, in North America, transit agencies determine the routes and service levels and often operate the services themselves with their own buses and personnel.  Even if an agency contracts with an operator to provide service (such as Loudoun County Transit in Northern Virginia, which is operated by Keolis North America), the vehicles are owned by the transit agency and their appearance remains identical, even if the contracted operator changes.  Not so in Israel.  With the change to Extra as the route’s operator, passengers will be on brand new buses with a different livery and different drivers.  While there are instances where buses get transferred from the prior operator to the new one or staff leaves one company and joins another, neither is a given.  It is just one of many differences in how transit operates in different places around the world.  

For more photos of Egged MAN NL-313 buses, please click here.  

Bus Photo of the Month: November 2021

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MAN NG-363F 44420

Location: David Remez at the Old Train Station, Jerusalem, Israel
Operator of Vehicle: Egged
Date of Photo: May 25, 2018

In many places, bus systems are operated on a tender basis by various companies.  In these systems, a transportation ministry or some other oversight entity puts out a call for bids from interested parties to operate the service.  The idea is that the cost of operating the service will be lower if it is operated by a transportation company rather than directly by the oversight agency.  Sometimes, a company is able to maintain its tender for many years, and it is notable when a change in operator occurs.  

Egged had a near monopoly on bus services within Israel for many years, though in the past twenty years or so, many other companies have won tenders that Egged historically operated.  However, Jerusalem intracity service remained with Egged, as it had dating back to some of Egged’s predecessor companies that merged when Egged was formed.  This Friday, the second phase of transitioning some of Jerusalem’s intracity service to other companies will take effect.  In July, Superbus took over four routes serving the Old City and started operating a new route to the Old City as well.  This Friday, three new routes will be established, and two routes, 74 and 75, will transfer from Egged to Superbus.  The 74 and 75 are not nearly as “historical” as some other transport routes in the city, but the 74 is notable for being the first “rapid” route to be launched in the city back in 2008.  Seeing Superbus vehicles on this route, rather than Egged vehicles, is certainly going to take some getting used to.

For more photos of Jerusalem MAN NG-363F Buses, please click here.

Rail Photo of the Month: February 2021

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Alstom Citadis 302 008Alstom Citadis 302 008

Location: HaDavidka Station, Jerusalem, Israel
Operator of Vehicle: Citipass
Date of Photo: December 16, 2013

Despite the trend of milder winters in the Washington, DC area, scenes such as the one I featured in the Bus Photo of the Month for February 2021 aren’t all that uncommon.  You’ll find plenty of photos of DC transit operations in the snow on this website (as well as others).  On the other hand, significant snow in Jerusalem is a much more uncommon occurrence.  Like Washington, Jerusalem has had more mild winters recently.  Usually, the city would get one dusting of snow each winter, which would grind the Israeli capital to a halt as the city’s snow removal infrastructure borders on non-existent.  After several winters with no snow accumulation at all, there were significant snowstorms in both January and December of 2013.  In this photo, the light rail right-of-way through the center of the city has been cleared to allow train service to resume, mostly by pushing it to the sides of the tracks.  As a result, the accumulation appears to be much larger than the actual 16 to 28 inches (40 to 70 centimeters) that actually fell, but regardless, this photo captured a sight one rarely sees most winters in Jerusalem.  

For more photos of Jerusalem Light Rail Rolling Stock, please click here.

Rail Photo of the Month: July 2019

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Alstom Citadis 302 020

Alstom Citadis 302 020

Location: Derech Yafo (Jaffa Road) at Shlomtzion HaMalka, Jerusalem, Israel
Operator of Vehicle: Citipass
Date of Photo: June 2, 2016

Summer in Jerusalem means there’s a pretty good chance there’s a festival or two taking place in the evenings, and my favorite of them all is currently ongoing.  The Jerusalem Light Festival, which has taken place each summer since 2009, will be illuminating the Old City of Jerusalem through Thursday evening, July 4.  As a photographer, it is lots of fun to wander through the Old City and around its walls, capturing the dazzling displays which are so different than what one typically sees when traversing these areas any other week of the year.  In 2016, the festival extended down Jaffa Road towards the present day city center, and some of the the light rail trains themselves got in on the fun by having strings of lights placed along their rooflines.  Here is a photo of one of those trains passing by a model Eiffel Tower.  If you’re able to catch one of the remaining nights of the festival, I highly recommend it!

For more photos of the Jerusalem Light Rail, please click here.

Bus Photo of the Month: January 2019

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MAN NG-313 37192

MAN NG-313 37192

Location: Arlozorov Terminal (2000 Terminal), Tel Aviv, Israel
Operator of Vehicle: Egged
Date of Photo: December 8, 2009

The “New” Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv gets a lot of attention from the transitfan, urban planning, and architecture communities, generally for all the wrong reasons.  As a result, those who can avoid traveling through the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station do so when they can, opting instead to use Arlozorov Terminal, adjacent to the Tel Aviv Central Railway Station.  Unlike most major bus terminals in Israel, the Arlozorov Terminal is not located in a large building that also contains retail and other space in the transit terminal.  Instead, it is open air, has no building, and passengers just walk straight in from the street to their platform.  (This also means there is no security check prior to boarding the bus, unlike at just about every other major bus terminal in the country.)  Although perhaps it is a bit utilitarian, it is certainly the easier of the two major intercity terminals to use in Tel Aviv.  Recently, a reconstruction project has taken place here, and the new and improved terminal layout with boarding location changes and the like is officially being implemented today.  It will still be superior to the Central Bus Station (how could it not?) but perhaps a little less trecherous for pedestrians trying to reach the bus platforms in the middle of the terminal to get to where they want to go.

For more photos of the buses in Tel Aviv, please click here.

Bus Photo of the Month: November 2018

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Mercedes-Benz OC500 42044

Mercedes-Benz OC500 42044

Location: Route 40 between Har HaAyit and Neot Smadar, Israel
Operator of Vehicle: Egged
Date of Photo: November 13, 2011

What is the most surprising place you’ve found public transit services?  There have been quite a few times in my travels over the years I’ve seen a bus stop in a seemingly random place and wondered how much service really comes out here and how many people actually board or alight here.  Although it makes up over 55 percent of Israel’s land area, the Negev desert is home to only about 8 percent of its population.  Yet there are bus stops throughout the desert and considering the low population densities and distances between places, many routes operate a minimum of four to five trips per day.  Why so much service?  Much of the land is used by the Israeli Army, and soldiers ride free on public transit, so they take buses to and from their bases.  In addition, the resort town of Eilat, Israel’s southernmost city, has regular service to cities in the central and northern parts of the country in order to cater to vacationers.  Besides the bus, the most common ways to travel to Eilat are by plane (expensive and inconvenient for anyone not coming from Tel Aviv) or driving (on two lane roads through miles upon miles of desert).  Needless to say, the bus is a popular option, and reservations are recommended for the buses to and from Eilat.  

Why do I say those are the most common ways of getting to Eilat?  When I took this photo, I was on an organized bike ride that ended in Eilat.  It might not be the way most people get there, but it does create opportunities to get photos of buses as they cross the desert.  

For more photos of Egged Intercity Buses in Southern Israel, please click here.

Mapping Each Israeli Transit Operator’s Service Area

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The organization of transit services in Israel can be a bit confounding to people who are not familiar with how everything comes together.  It used to be that Egged basically had a monopoly in every part of the country except Tel Aviv, where the Dan Bus Company had a monopoly of its own.  Both companies were overseen by the Ministry of Transportation, and they received significant subsidies from the Israeli government to support their operations.  During Benjamin Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister in the late 1990s, he proposed privatizing transit services and increasing competition by allowing other companies, including those that had not operated in Israel previously, to bid on tenders for specific services that would be put out by the Transportation Ministry.  Egged went on strike to protest this change and brought all of Israel to a halt, but the march towards privatization and increased competition had begun.  Today, the Transportation Ministry puts out tenders for companies to bid on.  The company with the best bid package for that tender wins the right to operate those routes for a set number of years, at which point a new tender is made available for bidding for the next contract duration.

As of this writing, there are 26 companies providing transportation services under the auspices of the Ministry of Transportation, including the Carmelit in Haifa, Citipass (which operates the Jerusalem Light Rail), Israel Railways, the Golan Regional Council (which operates the transit service in the Golan Heights) and seven bus operators in East Jerusalem.  In response to a query on a Facebook group that I am a part of, I used a recent GTFS data feed download, I mapped out the starting point for each transit route in the country, and color coded those points by operator.  You can see the results of that here: 

Operators in certain parts of the country have changed over time.  For example, Ashkelon intracity lines have been operated by Dan BaDarom since 2016, but before that they were operated by Egged Ta’avurah and before that by Egged itself.  The bus routes in Tiberias were operated by Connex (Veolia) until that company ceased operations within Israel, at which point those services were transferred to Afikim and are now operated by Superbus. 

As you play with the highlighter and filters on the map above, what patterns or trends do you see?  Feel free to post any observations and/or questions you have about the map above in the comments section on this post.

Oren’s Reading List: A Train Ride Back to the Old Israel

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IC3 DMU 7203
About one month ago, after many delays and some fanfare, Israel Railways inaugurated service on the new Tel Aviv-Jerusalem High Speed Rail line, the first time that Israel’s capital city is connected to the rest of the country by a train line that is actually competitive with driving.  However, for reasons that can only be explained as politicking, the line is open despite not being ready for full operations just yet.  Trains are operating every half hour on weekdays between Jerusalem and Ben Gurion Airport, at which point passengers must transfer to another train in order to continue the rest of the way to Tel Aviv.  The power substations along the line are temporary, and several trains have gotten stuck along the line with passengers on board when the temporary electrical system is extended beyond its capabilities.  The line does not operate evenings and weekends so crews can finish the line and bring it to full operational status, which will take longer than it would if the crews could work 24/6 instead of needing to clear the tracks for revenue service each weekday.  Eventually, the trip between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv will take 35 minutes and not require a change of trains.

One question I’ve often received over the past few years while this new line is being constructed is what does the future hold for the old Tel Aviv-Jerusalem train line?  This line was constructed by the Ottomans and opened in 1892, and despite the fact it takes well over 90 minutes to travel between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and carries few passengers, it has been in operation ever since the line was reopened following extensive repairs and the construction of a new terminal at Malha in Jerusalem in 2005.  While this train route may not be the fastest way to get between these cities, it is quite pretty, as the train winds its way through the hills.  However, the beautiful scenery along the route will not be enough to save the line; the segment between Beit Shemesh and Jerusalem is likely to be closed at some point in the future after the new high speed line is fully operational.

Last week in the New York Times, Matti Friedman wrote about why he prefers the old Ottoman era train route over the new high speed route.  You can read his piece here. And if you find yourself in Israel with enough time to take the scenic train route on your way to or from Jerusalem, do so.  You won’t have the chance for too much longer…