IRR Southern Line

The line is roughly 550 kilometres (340 mi) long, with intermediate stops including Karbala, Musayyib, Diwaniya, Samawah, Nasiriya and Um Qasr.

A proposal was put forward to convert the railway route to high-speed rail and connect the city of Najaf, but the plan was never realised.

[6] The line had a semiautomatic block relay signalling system installed in 1975, as well as sound cables running along the tracks providing communication between the stations and locomotives.

[7][8] During the Gulf War, the railway line was so severely damaged that train services were suspended - presumably shortly after American intervention.

[9] The unstable political and economic situation in Iraq resulted in the reliability of the service being so poor that timetables did not indicate an arrival time beforehand over the last few decades.

The trainsets consist of two diesel-powered locomotives and eight steel-bodied trailers and are specifically built to resist the high temperatures and wind-blown dust of Iraq's desert environment.

[12][13] Also, there are currently renovation efforts, such as to fully double track the railway, construct new bridges, embankments and culverts and all of the engineering was done in-house by the IRR.

[6] In an incident in 1917, local tribesmen stole a temporary halt for firewood use, which was later humourously picked up by magazines, as the material of the station "was too valuable to be left unattended in the cold Mesopotamian winter evenings".