El Mina Railway Station
At the beginning of the twentieth century, during the final Ottoman decades, Tripoli witnessed the arrival of trains at El Mina station. Local families helped finance its construction, connecting the city to a wider railway network leading toward Istanbul and onward through Europe to Paris.
The station became associated in local memory with the great international rail routes of the period, including the Orient Express network. Its buildings and surviving equipment preserve evidence of the ambitions that accompanied the railway’s arrival.
By 2019, the abandoned structures and machinery gave the site the character of an open-air railway museum awaiting restoration. Surviving railway stock included two German-built locomotives dated 1895 and four French-built examples dated 1901.
