The following text is from the Eritrean Profile:
Vol. 6 No. 44 January 8, 2000

Monument put in place marking the reactivation of Eritrean Railways

Photo courtesy of Rick Baxter.  Representative of marker.*
           On the occasion of the new millennium, a monument marking the rehabilitation of Eritrean railways was inaugurated on January 1, 2000 in Embatkala. Work on reactivating the railway begun in 1995 with great efforts and on the basis of domestic skills after it was destroyed and remained out of order for the last 20 years. It has now reached Embatkala from Massawa. Mr. Amanuel Gebreselassie, Coordinator of Eritrean Railways Rehabilitation Project, indicated that at present daily railway transportation service is in effect from Ghinda to Demas, and service from Ghinda to Massawa is available if necessary. He also explained that the project has so far incurred an expense of Nfa. 28 million. Eritrean railways was started to be built in 1887 and reached Asmara and Agordat in 1911 and 1928 respectively. However, it stopped its operation in 1975. The monument in Embatkala was put in place jointly by Eritrean Railways Rehabilitation Project and the National Holidays Coordinating Committee

A number of companies conduct railfan tours of the railroad. I did a quick search on February 4, 2009 and found these:

http://www.railsnw.com/Tours/tut/eritrea-steam-spectacular.htm
http://www.trainsunlimitedtours.com/eritrea-steam-spectacular.html
http://www.lcgb.org.uk/html/tours/eritrea2009.htm

Just go to your favorite search engine such as the one at the top of the page and put in train tour eritrea or railfan tour eritrea and you''ll get a lot of links.

There are just a whole bunch of videos on youtube.

Photo courtesy of Mebrat Tzehaie and Hans van der Splinter
The above picture was provided by Hans and Mebrat from an Eritrean Tourist Bureau brochure.  It struck me as just the thing for this page.

A picture provided by Michela Wrong provided the answer.  This is near Dermas:

Michela Wrong©2001
The vegetation is very similar, albeit a different time of the year.  I didn't remember the acacia loosing their leaves but this certainly must happen.

I have provided some sorting of topics by what journalism students call the 5 Ws….Who, What, Where, When, and Why.

 a sixth (sorta)

Waznew

and a seventh (sorta)

Wanted

Jennie Street Jennie(at)hadish.f9.co.uk  is preparing to co-author a History of the Eritrean Railways with Amanuel Gebreselassie (Head of the Eritrean Railway Authority), which will be published in the near furue. She would be delighted to hear from anyone who can help in the project.

For many years, Americans and probably many others, collected their flat memorabilia in a scrapbook. This page is like that.  Of course, I welcome any stories or pictures about the line. ERRYnRY(at)gmail.com.  As an attempt to bluff the 'bots' I put (at) in place of @.

*  I took the liberty to show a marker from a 1999 dedication.  As I can neither read Ge'ez nor Arabic, I can't be sure this is the marker.  The scenery and the greenery are appropriate for Embatkala.
 
 

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