A Tower for Locomotives

In the Old City, on Rambam Street, stands an elliptical stone building of two floors. It looks like a tower, and it really is a water tower — but it was not built for the city.

It was built in 1915, in parallel with the building of the railway station, and about 250 meters from it. It was designed by Heinrich August Meissner, the same German engineer who built the station.

On the first floor stood the pumps. On the second floor stood the water tanks, and they projected above the roof. The water was carried to it from a well in the city.

And why here? Because at this point a side track branched off from the Turkish line, toward a depot and army stores. The location made it possible to fill the steam locomotives with water — those that traveled north toward the center of the country, and those that traveled south toward Sinai.

Because a steam locomotive works on water. It boils it, the steam pushes a piston, and the piston turns the wheels. And a locomotive is thirsty: it has to take on water every few dozen kilometers. So a water tower beside a track is not an ornament. Without it the train simply stops.

And where did the water that filled it come from? From a well in the city. That is, those same shallow groundwaters because of which the city was built here in the first place are what moved the trains. The well, the pump, the tower and the locomotive are one chain, and every link in it depends on the link before it.

According to the source the tower was bombed several times from the air in the First World War, and was not damaged. It went on working also after the British entered the city.

And when the station closed in 1927, it did not close with it. It went on to serve the nearby veterinary station and further consumers — and in the first years of Israeli Beersheba it supplied water to the whole city.

Until the water pool in Neighborhood Alef was built, in 1950. Then the old system was abandoned, and the tower went out of use.

The tanks that defined its form are no longer there. And today it stands in the heart of a residential neighborhood, and beside it a playground. Whoever passes there sees a stone building without the tanks that were on top of it — and so it is very hard to guess what it was built for.