From Steam Locomotives to High-Speed Rail in Ankara

Begin at the old part of the station, the Direction Building of 1892, now visited as the Atatürk Residence and Railway Museum. Built by the Anatolian Railway Company for station management, this two-storey house became Mustafa Kemal's headquarters and residence after his arrival in Ankara on 27 December 1919; the rooms where decisions such as the Treaty of Ankara were prepared are upstairs. It opened as a museum on 24 December 1964 and counts as the first institutional museum with private status under the Ministry of Culture. The ground floor holds a railway museum in five sections: documents going back to 1856, rail samples, locomotive plates, telegraph machines, silver dining sets from sleeping and dining cars, a gilded miniature wagon presented to Sultan Abdülaziz, and İbrahim Çallı's large 1920 painting of women with ox carts in the War of Independence. Upstairs, the reception room, study and bedrooms, along with Fikriye Hanım's room, are furnished with period pieces. Outside stands the white-painted special carriage used on the country tours of 1935-1938.

Then move to the 1937 building. Designed by Şekip Akalın, with its foundation laid on 4 March 1935, the Art Deco station opened on 30 October 1937 and was conceived as one complex with its clock tower, the Station Casino, staff housing and administrative blocks. Look at the height and symmetry of the main hall and the stonework of the square-facing facade. Long-distance trains such as the Eastern Express, the Lake Van Express and the İzmir Blue Train still use the platforms, and the Başkentray station is here too. Check the TCDD museums page for the museum's open days and hours; early morning is the quietest time.

Source: Wikipedia (Ankara Garı; Atatürk Konutu ve Demiryolları Müzesi); Kültür Portalı.

Turn from the station square onto Hipodrom Street and the long stone-faced building in front of you is the headquarters of the State Railways. Construction started in 1939 to a design by Bedri Uçar of the Ministry of Public Works planning office, and the central block was finished in 1941. With its reinforced concrete body clad in stone and simplified classical details, it is considered one of the first examples of the Second National Architecture movement; seen beside the Art Deco language of the station built in the same years, it shows how sharply the two periods diverge. The plan called for a rectangular courtyard in the middle with two wings on each side; because of limited space and a request for a conference hall, all sections were built four storeys high. The first two wings were added in 1958, the third in 1974, the fourth in 1979 and the conference hall in 1986.

This is a working public building and cannot be entered; its place on the route is for viewing from outside. Walk the length of the facade along the pavement and notice the rhythm of the windows and the emphasis on the entrance axis. Across the street rises the THK Parachute Tower opened in 1937; together with the station, three buildings gather three architectural attitudes of the same decade in a single square. For photographs, the sun falls on the facade before noon. From here it is a few minutes' walk to the high-speed station along Celal Bayar Boulevard.

Source: Wikipedia (TCDD Genel Müdürlük Binası; Ankara Paraşüt Kulesi).

The glass and steel mass right beside the historic station is the building of Ankara's high-speed era. Built between 2014 and 2016 under a build-operate-transfer model, the Ankara High-Speed Train Station opened on 29 October 2016; it has 194,460 square metres of enclosed space, eight floors, six tracks and three island platforms, and was designed for 50,000 passengers a day. The open-air locomotive museum next to the old station was removed to make room for it, so beneath these platforms once stood the museum of the previous railway age.

High-speed history was written from Ankara. The first line, Ankara-Eskişehir, opened on 13 March 2009 with Spanish-built HT65000 sets running at 250 kilometres per hour. Ankara-Konya services began in August 2011, the line reached Pendik on 25 July 2014 and Halkalı on 12 March 2019, and Ankara-Sivas opened on 26 April 2023. Ankara to Istanbul now takes about five hours, and HT80000 sets capable of 300 kilometres per hour have joined the fleet.

Go up to the passenger level and walk through the ticket counters, waiting lounges and shopping area; the departure board shows trains to Istanbul, Konya, Karaman and Sivas side by side. The platforms lie behind ticket control, so if you want a close look at the trains, watch from the upper-floor glass front overlooking the station. A pedestrian link connects the old and new stations, and a passenger stepping off Başkentray reaches the high-speed trains within minutes. Check the TCDD Taşımacılık website for timetables and tickets. From here CerModern is a ten-minute walk along Celal Bayar Boulevard and onto Altınsoy Street.

Source: Wikipedia (Ankara Yüksek Hızlı Tren Garı; Ankara-İstanbul yüksek hızlı demiryolu); Wikipedia (High-speed rail in Turkey).

Right after the railways were nationalised, workshops for locomotive and carriage maintenance were built behind the station in 1926-1927. The State Railways used these hangars, with periodic repairs, until 1995, after which they stood empty. The project by Semra and Özcan Uygur rehabilitated the surviving workshop building instead of demolishing it and wrapped a transparent, curving wall around it; the new wall binds to the old hangars like a bandage and defines a multi-purpose courtyard in the middle. Restoration began in 2008 and finished in April 2010, when the 9,380-square-metre complex opened as an arts centre under the name CerModern.

Here the railway heritage is the backdrop to the exhibitions. In the galleries, notice the brick walls of the hangars, the tall steel truss roof and the wide door openings; the artworks settle into that scale. The courtyard is arranged for open-air events and for sitting; you can take your lunch break here and use the centre's cafeteria. Since the programme changes constantly, check the current exhibition and entry conditions on cermodern.org; some shows are ticketed, while the courtyard and entrance hall are free.

The address is Altınsoy Street No:3, Sıhhiye; coming from the station, the street turning off the boulevard brings you straight to the entrance. From the wide forecourt, look back towards the railway and take in the buildings lined along the tracks one last time: the direction house of 1892, the station of 1937, the headquarters of 1941, the high-speed terminal of 2016 and the workshop of 1926 stand on a single kilometre-long line. From here, reach the M2 metro at Kızılay by Ankaray or on foot through Sıhhiye.

Source: Wikipedia (CerModern); Arkiv (Cer Modern projesi).

To see Ankara's steam locomotives today you have to go to METU. The Open-Air Steam Locomotive Museum that TCDD opened in 1991 beside the station, along Celal Bayar Boulevard, was removed at the end of 2013 for the construction of the high-speed terminal and Başkentray; about ten steam engines (built between 1912 and 1948 by German, American, Swedish and British makers such as Henschel, Baldwin, NOHAB and Vulcan Foundry) and a wooden passenger carriage of 1909 were moved to TCDD facilities at Behiçbey. Some of them came to the open-air exhibition of the METU Science and Technology Museum. Since the Behiçbey site requires permission to visit, this publicly accessible garden is the route's locomotive stop.

The museum was founded in 2003, with construction completed between 2001 and 2005. It has four parts: the history of science and technology exhibition in the Big Silo, the Hangar devoted to the history of transport, the applied science centre called UFO with more than fifty hands-on experiments, and the open-air display. Outdoors, a C-47 and an F-104 aircraft stand beside the locomotives; the classic car collection and the planetarium are separate sections. Get close to the engines and study the wheel diameters, the scale of the boilers and the makers' plates; for families with children, the experiments in UFO make a good break.

Get off at the ODTÜ metro station and enter the campus through the Metro A2 gate; visitor entry is through the A1, A4, A7 and Metro A2 gates with a visitor record, so bring your ID. The museum opens on weekday daytimes; check tbm.metu.edu.tr for weekend arrangements and any fee.

Source: Wikipedia (ODTÜ Bilim ve Teknoloji Müzesi; TCDD Açık Hava Buharlı Lokomotif Müzesi); ODTÜ TBM; ODTÜ İç Hizmetler.

The final stop is the first trace in Ankara of the Republic's railway policy. The state created the Anatolian-Baghdad Railways administration on 24 May 1924 and began laying its own line eastwards: Ankara-Yahşihan opened on 17 April 1925, Yerköy on 20 November 1925 and Kayseri on 29 May 1927 at a ceremony attended by Prime Minister İsmet İnönü; the line reached Sivas on 30 August 1930 and Kars on 20 October 1939. Kayaş Station at the eastern exit of the city is one of the line's first stations from the 1920s, and its building carries the Turkish neoclassical lines of the First National Architecture period; look at the window arrangement and the eaves and you will see its kinship with Ankara buildings of the same years.

Today the station is the eastern terminus of Başkentray. The Sincan-Kayaş commuter line, running since 1972, closed on 11 July 2016 to be raised to metro standards and reopened on 12 April 2018 as a 37.5-kilometre line with 24 stations; Kayaş has three platforms and seven tracks, two of them used for laying over commuter trains. The Eastern Express, the Lake Van Express and the Ankara-Sivas high-speed train also stop here, and in the evening you may watch a long-distance train pass from the edge of the platform.

From METU, take the metro to Kızılay, Ankaray to Kurtuluş and change to Başkentray there, or board directly at the main station; the full line from Sincan to Kayaş takes 49 minutes. Returning on the same train to the main station closes the route where it began. The platforms and forecourt are free to walk, and EGO buses from outside run towards Mamak and Kızılay.

Source: Wikipedia (Kayaş railway station; Ankara–Kars railway); Wikipedia (Başkentray; Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Devlet Demiryolları).