Tabuk Station in Hejaz Railway

Tabuk Station is a historic railway site in the city of Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, and it now works as a museum about the Hejaz Railway. People come to learn how a line built in the early twentieth century changed travel for pilgrims and for the communities along its route. There is no minimum age, so families can visit with children of any age. The station was one of the railway's main stops and is the third largest by area, after Madinah and AlUla. Its grounds hold about 13 buildings, originally put up to look after travelling pilgrims, among them a hospital, a rest house and a quarantine station. Inside the museum you can see key tools once used to run the station day to day. The railway was begun in 1900 and took eight years to finish. It linked Damascus with Madina, cutting a trip that previously needed 45 days to no more than five. Trains reached Tabuk on 1 September 1906, when merchants, tribal leaders and dignitaries gathered for a ceremony and a dawn prayer at the mosque now called Al Tawba. The first train arrived in Madina on 22 August 1908, and by 1914 the line carried 300,000 pilgrims, before the First World War damaged it and halted service.