Not long ago, at the other end of the country, I camped out with my kids in a tamarisk grove by a Turkish military line from 1915 — a high earthen berm that still swoops through miles of the Negev desert, running over a bridge across a desolate ravine before hitting the razor wire of the Israel-Egypt frontier. The barrier was built a few years ago because of smuggling and terrorism, but when the tracks were laid there was nothing there. Following the old route toward the fence, we were warned off by the army and turned back. The line just kept going, pushing obliviously into the desert on the other side, as if there were no border at all.

The country’s most storied ghost line is the Valley Railroad, built in 1905 by order of the Ottoman sultan as part of the grand Hijaz Railway project, meant as a leap into modernity for the Turkish Empire. The Valley Railroad made a connection, entirely logical and yet now inconceivable, between the port of Haifa in modern-day Israel and the city of Damascus, now in Syria. (The train got its name from the Jezreel Valley, which contained much of the route.) The Haifa train met the main imperial line at Dara’a, a sleepy Syrian junction. Dara’a became known to the world only much later, in 2011, as the site of the crackdown that helped ignite Syria’s civil war, signaling the breakdown of more of the region into hostile enclaves, and also severing the vestiges of the Turkey-Syria rail link.

Israel and Syria became enemies 72 years ago, but when the railroad was built, neither existed. According to a rail schedule I found from 1934, you could steam out of the Haifa station at 10 a.m. and reach Damascus that evening at 8:02.

Remnants of this line are visible at Kibbutz Gesher on the Jordan River, where a third-generation kibbutz member, Nirit Bagron, showed me around. The basalt rail bridge from 1905 lies behind a formidable army gate topped with barbed wire; this is now the frontier with Jordan, and the bridge is in a buffer zone. Nirit just kicked the gate open with her sandaled foot and assured me the area had been demined.