On Chariots with Horses of Fire and Iron: The Excursionists and the Narrow Gauge Railroad from Jaffa to Jerusalem Anthony S. Travis On Chariots with Horses of Fire and Iron deals with the arrival of modernity in the Holy Land in the form of the meter-gauge Jaffa-Jerusalem Railway, inaugurated in September 1892. It was the largest civil engineering project ever undertaken in the modern Holy Land. Though several proposals had been put forward since the 1850's , it was only in the 1880s that two young Jewish entrepreneurs, Joseph Navon of Jerusalem and Joseph Amzalak of Jaffa, backed by the Protestant banker Johannes Frutiger, were enabled to take the first steps leading to the acquisition of a license from the Ottoman government for laying down the iron rails. Unable to raise sufficient capital in Europe, Navon sold out to a group of Catholic businessmen in Paris, who established the Societe du Chemin de Fer Ottoman de Jaffa a Jerusalem et Prolongements. Despite difficulties due to poor construction and inadequate traffic during the early years, the railroad opened up Jerusalem to modern tourism, brought greater numbers of pilgrims, and contributed to the growth of the city. Anthony S. Travis, PhD, is deputy director of the Sidney M. Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and of the Jaques Loeb Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. He has published extensively on the history of technology in the 19th and 20th centuries.