Businessmen clutching briefcases, women with handbags and families with children scramble for seats in the two gleaming carriages. A smartly dressed guard blows the whistle and the train chugs out of the capital’s main station.

This is the image that the Iraqi Transport Ministry sought to convey when it arranged for The Times to board a commuter train one morning last week.

The reality is rather different. Most of the commuters on the train — laid on especially for the media — turned out to be railway employees. The real train runs much earlier and carries only the conductor, driver and a couple of police guards from the main station in Baghdad to Dora, about 30 minutes away, down a rickety track.

There it reverses and traces the route back in the forlorn hope of picking up passengers along the way. Unfortunately, the service has failed to catch on since it started at the end of last year because of a lack of well-marked stations, an unreliable timetable, pricey tickets and a dearth of advertising. It is a passenger service with no passengers.

That any commuter service — however rudimentary — is running at all is a sign of progress and Amer Abdul Jabbar Ismail, the Transport Minister, has big plans for the rest of the 1,240 miles of creaking network.

Much of the track is in need of repair after years of neglect under Saddam Hussein, war damage and sabotage after the US-led invasion. Engines stand idle outside the Baghdad station in contrast to the 1970s and 1980s, when there was a bustling service.

Mr Ismail is determined to revive the railway and hopes to win billions of dollars of investment from his Government and foreign companies to revamp and expand the network to between 2,480 and 3,100 miles.

“I am working with exceptional efforts to try to achieve something out of nothing,” he told The Times, adding that budget restraints and the time-consuming process of approving contracts were the main obstacles.

Against the odds, the minister has reopened a nightly passenger route between Baghdad and Basra. A train also runs every Friday to Samarra, a holy city to the north of the capital, carrying pilgrims to its golden-domed shrine. Last month a weekly service resumed between Baghdad and Fallujah.

“The track between Mosul [to the north] and Baghdad is almost ready,” Mr Ismail said. These services, which ran regularly before the war, are more popular than the Baghdad commuter line, which was dreamt up only in October. Commuters in the capital prefer to travel in cars or minibuses despite frequent roadblocks and checkpoints.

Getting any train running, regardless of popularity, offered a form of psychological comfort to the public after years of violence, the minister said. “Our security forces may improve security in some areas but the citizens will not feel confident unless they see transport,” he said.

The Transport Ministry wants to award contracts to renovate carriages. Freight trains are also in increasing use, providing a profitable service transporting fuel and goods.

Mr Ismail hopes that Iraq will enjoy the same quality of high-speed service that passengers have on trains in Japan and France. But, to judge by the evidence, he faces a long wait.

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