While capital blocks the way to the railway stations once again

Haydarpaşa Station is crowded, but this is not the usual crowd. Some personnel of TCDD and TC Taşımacılık AŞ are of course there. On the one hand, the staff of the restoration company affiliated to the Ministry of Culture are walking around. If we include the area around the station, there is an archaeological excavation team under the supervision of the Ministry of Culture. The Cengiz-Kolin-Kalyon partnership, which received the tender for the infrastructure investments, employs its own personnel. There are also surprise visitors such as Guler Sabanci, whose photos of her inspecting the station building have been circulating on social media in recent weeks. The station is crowded, but if you ask what is missing, the train is missing, the passenger is missing.

In fact, it is not quite right to call Güler Sabancı's visit a “surprise”. The lease agreement signed between the Ministry of Culture and TCDD on 15.08.2024 is rather fresh; it envisages the transfer of Haydarpaşa Station, with the surrounding 700 decares of land, and Sirkeci Station to the Ministry of Culture for 29 years. The important factor is that the ministry will operate here with partners to be determined by itself. We can read this as capital approaching the platform. In the case of Haydarpaşa Terminal, this has already been tried since 2004.

‘It is very normal for people like Sabancı to hang around here,’ says Tugay Kartal. He has been a ‘railwayman’ since 1977, and has been working at Haydarpaşa Station since 1988, although there were some ‘exile’ attempts in between. He is currently an office chief in the Traffic and Station Management Office, and also the Workplace Representative of the Istanbul Branch No. 1 of the United Transport Workers' Union (BTS). As someone who has closely experienced the story of marketisation in railway transport, Kartal says that the future partners of the Ministry of Culture will offset their investment from the 29-year lease. This means the following: It is highly probable that those companies will actually be credited by the state at the end of 29 years. Let's say it didn't happen, Tugay Kartal calculated the transfer price over the area in question, the rent is equivalent to 300 Lira per m2! It is truly unbelievable that these buildings, which constitute the memory of the city and whose operation is not only a nostalgic element but also a public benefit, are destined for this fate. BTS and the Chamber of Architects have filed a lawsuit regarding this process, and the file is currently being examined within the scope of the demand for a stay of execution. Everything happened so fast that an evacuation period of 15 days was given for tenants in the existing lodgings within the station and 7 days for commercial enterprises. They are also going to the judiciary one by one.

The railway history of “liberalization”
Tugay Kartal may belong to a generation that can work in the same place for his entire working life, but what has really guided his professional life of nearly half a century is his ‘love for trains’. Since his father also worked at TCDD, he grew up with trains, and the sound of trains has stayed with him like music. At some point in the conversation, he spontaneously starts saying ‘if I were born again’, he would like to work at TCDD again, but only if it remains a public enterprise.
As is known, it is called ‘liberalisation’ rather than privatisation, and since the early 2000s, TCDD has also started to operate under market conditions. The Haydarpaşa Project with seven skyscrapers covering Haydarpaşa Station, harbour and its surroundings was brought to the agenda in 2004 as the first link in the attempts to gain rent over public spaces, and even the following year, Kadir Topbaş, the then Mayor of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, announced that the project "was made debut" at the Cannes Real Estate Fair.

Haydarpaşa Solidarity, jointly formed by BTS and the Chamber of Architects and supported by more than seventy NGOs, was established during this period. The rising reaction halted the project and the entire site was declared an urban and historical protected area. However, the gaps in between would be searched and scanned, this time the stations would be removed from their reason for existence with a horizontal project, not a vertical one.

Tugay Kartal says that the fire at Haydarpaşa Station in 2010 and Marmaray are being used to labelling these stations as dysfunctional. On the other hand, there is also a preparation for this. For example, the double line between Sirkeci-Kazlıçeşme was reduced to a single line, thus delibrately blunting the railway connection to Europe and paving the way for rent projects by labelling them dysfunctional. At the moment, so few trains are running that the magnificent Haydarpaşa Station has been reduced to the level of a suburban station. Apart from the station building, the site of the Meat and Fish Institution and the legendary building of the Soil Products Office on the shore will be converted into predictable market areas such as cafes, restaurants and shopping centres similar to Galataport; one or two perfunctory cultural spaces such as libraries and museums will also be added. While the station has been deliberately dysfunctionalised over the years, ‘train nostalgia’ will be sold here, one can smell it immediately.

No room for workers in overalls”
“They don't want to see people in overalls and greasy hands in the centre of the city,” says Kartal, adding that there will no longer be a maintenance and repair facility in Haydarpaşa, because the trains will be repaired in Ankara when needed. He mentions that the capital does not prefer wagon trains and wagon lits because high speed trains require less personnel, switching is done automatically and there is no need to turn direction. 

Words get mixed up with words. Railway porterage which ended when wheels were invented for suitcases... Trains and porters carrying the gold coming from Europe while the Central Bank was opening... The killing of public spaces and the concept of public interest... Tugay Bey always reads the industrial heritage and the plans of capital through labour. If the skyscrapers rent project, which was put forward at the time, could not be realised, those who resisted by looking at the railway stations from this perspective, those who forced both the judicial path and the streets, are of great importance in this. What 668 weeks means! Haydarpaşa Solidarity will come together for the 668th time this Sunday and raise their voices against this new project for Haydarpaşa Station. Not counting the election bans and pandemic quarantines, Tugay Kartal was there for the majority of the Sunday meetings that have been held persistently since then.