Can our Trains and Railway System be Revived? - KarazwLaimoon

Sarah Lily Yassine
is a practicing urban planner. She has served as a consultant to projects in Lebanon and the UK that include strategic city planning, environmental urban management and sustainable urban greening. She is interested in exploring the role of urban wilderness in reconfiguring the nexus of city, and nature and in developing adaptive reuse of post-industrial sites and restoration of environmentally damaged ecosystems.
In 2009, Sarah developed a proposal for Mar Mikhael’s derelict railway station in which she envisioned the station to evolve into a public green space and a railway museum. Ever since, Sarah has been working on preserving the railway heritage, she is currently working on a proposal for a network of industrial parks and greenways on former stations and portions of the railway right-of way. She is an active member of the non-profit organization Train/Train that strives to promote the importance of reinstating railways as a means of sustainable public transportation in Lebanon and preserving it heritage.

Elias Boutros Maalouf is a Lebanese documentary filmmaker and a railway historian. He cofounded the non-for profit organization Train/Train in 2010 with a group of like-minded train enthusiasts.
Growing up in Ecuador, Elias completed his university film studies in Lebanon and set out to produce a documentary about the railway ‘Ya Tren’, as part of his final year project, which he completed more than 8 years later. It was then that he discovered the Rayak railway factory, which was at the time being used by the Syrian army as a military base. He elaborated a proposal for a railway museum in Rayak, in an attempt to salvage what remains of the railway station. and its railyards, which had become relics of a once bustling railway town.
Elias has become an expert on the country’s trains, researching and interviewing many aging former railway employees gathering photographs, archives and scouting the world for railway related stories.