It was officially announced May 11 that the swing bridge over the Suez
Canal at Kantara was completed, and that on May 15, 1918, there was
direct railway service from Cairo to Jerusalem. When the war broke out
there were no railways between the Suez Canal and the Jaffa-Jerusalem
railway, a distance of some 200 miles, mainly desert.
[Illustration]
At that time a line ran along the western bank of the canal from Suez
to Port Said. It was linked up with the main lines of the Egyptian
State railways by a single track from Ismailia to Zagazig.
A few miles to the north of that track another line from Zagazig
stopped some eighteen miles short of the canal at El Salhia. At the
beginning of the war, to facilitate the transport of troops and
supplies to the canal and beyond, the track from Zagazig to Ismailia
was doubled, and a new line was pushed out from the dead end at El
Salhia to the canal opposite Kantara, a village on the eastern, or
Sinai, side of the canal. Later, when the British troops entered the
Sinai Peninsula, a railway was begun from Kantara eastward, and as the
British troops advanced so did the railway. It followed the northern
track across Sinai, and had been taken within a few miles of Gaza when
that town was captured last November. Meantime the Turks had built a
branch from the Jaffa-Jerusalem line to a point only five miles north
of Gaza, and by February General Allenby had joined the two systems, so
that there was direct railway connection between Kantara and Jerusalem.