photo: Archives/Photo report: "Military paradev" in the Israeli high-speed train set
The Promised Land on the King David's Track. Almost four years ago, one of the wonders of modern infrastructure covered the distance between liberal Tel Aviv and Orthodox Jerusalem.

In 2018, partial operation of the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem high-speed rail line came to life. While rush hour travel would take an hour and a half, double-decker trainsets with the capacity of up to 1,000 passengers provide transport from Ben Gurion Airport to Navon Station in Jerusalem in just 26 minutes.

Perhaps for the diversity of both cities, passengers bring a dazzling display of cultural customs, from traditional clothes of Orthodox individuals, young ladies with a gun thrown over their shoulders to tourists embarrassingly pulling their dogs and yarmulkes.

In the absence of disappointing hopes, it is not advisable to expect aesthetic enjoyment from the breathtaking views of the surroundings. The construction is characterized by exceptional technical complexity. In a relatively short stretch, it overcomes a considerable height difference over a relatively short stretch, and it passes through a densely populated region of high environmental value. Most of the line, therefore, consists of five several-kilometer tunnels arrangement, one of which, led by Latrun and Mevaseret Cijon, with its length of 11.5 kilometers, ranks first in the longest tunnels in Israel.

Some bridges bring a bit of pleasure from the surrounding landscape, such as the engineering-complex bridge over the Nachal Jitla wadi in the Judean Mountains, the construction of which was accompanied by political and environmental difficulties. The short section leads through the Latrun promontory, which most of the international community considers to be occupied territory. For this reason, the German state-owned company Deutsche Bahn even refrained from cooperation in the section construction.
