 A trip along the line took 3 hours and 30 minutes.The line was initiated by the Jewish entrepreneur Joseph Navon and built by the French at 1 m gauge.The second line in what is now Israel was the Jezreel Valley railway from Haifa to Beit She’an, which had been built in 1904 as part of the Haifa-Daraa branch, a 1905-built feeder line of the Hejaz Railway which ran from Medina to Damascus.