The idea to build a railway linking the coast with Jerusalem was first raised in the middle of the 19th century by Dr. Conrad Schick, Sir Moses Montefiore and others.

The track was chosen to be of 1,000 mm (3 ft 3+3⁄8 in) metre gauge, similar to French minor railways, and was brought in from France and the Belgian manufacturer Angleur.

Even so, Yosef Navon was granted several high-profile awards for his efforts, and the opening event received extensive media coverage worldwide.

[11] Trestle bridges were installed instead of the destroyed iron ones[9] and a 600 mm (1 ft 11+5⁄8 in) gauge railway was built from Jaffa to Lydda, with an extension from Mikveh Israel Street, where Tel Aviv South railway station would be built shortly thereafter, along Petah Tikva Road (now Begin Road) towards the Yarkon River, the front line at the time.

[13] In 1918, the Palestine Military Railways of the victorious British forces rebuilt the line to the wider 1,435 mm (4 ft 8+1⁄2 in) standard gauge, an operation that lasted between January 27 and June 15.

[9] The final section, between Jaffa and Lydda, was completed in September 1920, and inaugurated in a ceremony attended by Sir Herbert Samuel, the British High Commissioner, on October 5.

(Services were then moved once again in 1970 2 km further out towards the city's outskirts, which itself became disused when a completely new railway alignment in Tel Aviv started operating in the mid-1990s.)

The Red line reuses part of the original 1891 railway alignment next to the Neve Zedek neighborhood, which also includes a rail track park [he].