1886: The Start of Operations for a Turkish Railway Station that Would Play a Noteworthy Role During World War II

August 2, 1886

A railway station was inaugurated in the village of Yenice in what is now southern Turkey’s Mersin province. Yenice was designated as a town in 1953; since 2013, it has been a neighborhood of the municipality and district of Tarsus. At the time of Yenice station’s opening, this region was part of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey, which is officially called the Republic of Túrkiye, was formed not long after the abolition of that empire in 1922.

Yenice station was built by the Mersin-Tarsus-Adana Railway, which likewise made its debut on August 2, 1886. The present-day successor of this railway is the Adana-Mersin Main Line. This route, covering a total of 41 miles (67 kilometers) between the cities of Adana and Mersin, is one of the busiest rail lines in all of Turkey. Approximately 57 passenger trains and 20 freight trains operate on the Adana-Mersin Main Line on a daily basis. Yenice station remains in service today as a key junction of that line.

Another one of Yenice station’s biggest claims to fame is that it was the venue for a major high-level conference during World War II. On January 30, 1943, British prime minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965) met with Turkish president İsmet İnönü (1886-1973) in a railway carriage at the station to discuss the possible involvement of Turkey in the Allies’ global fight against the Axis powers. This meeting between Churchill and İnönú has become widely known as both the Yenice Conference and — because the airport closest to that then-village was in Adana — the Adana Conference. As shown in the accompanying photo taken in 2012, a billboard commemorating this wartime conference is now on display at the station.

Photo Credit: Nedim Ardoğa (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Nedim_Ardo%C4%9Fa) – licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

Additional information on the Mersin-Tarsus-Adana Railway is available at http://www.trainsofturkey.com/pmwiki.php/History/MTA