IRR Transversal Line

[1] The line crosses the north of Iraq, roughly where the country has the greatest east-west extension, from the southwest to the northeast.

It connects the Haidtha Railway Station in the west of the country along the IRR Western with Kirkuk in the east.

The railway line further possessed a network of telegraph cables running parallel to the rails which provided connections between the stations and locomotives.

[1] Ever since the latter half of the 19th century, a railway line to Kirkuk was discussed but construction was postponed due to the Great War.

[2][3] The Ba'athist Regime took on a similar rail development strategy to the one prior to the 1968 coup by Saleh Zaki Tawfiq.

The new railway made the old connection economically obsolete, thus forcing it to close, but other, political reasons were to make Arabisation easier, by not only connecting Kirkuk better to other Sunni Arab areas in the west of Iraq but also cutting off railway access to Kurdish areas following the autonomy of Iraqi Kurdistan in 1970.

Another reason for the relocation of the route was the now double connection of the Haditha oil refinery, in the west of Iraq, to the Iraqi railway network.

This also provided a quicker connection from the mining operations in the Syrian Desert to the population centres in the north of Iraq.