We hear endlessly about restaurants and artists, but when most media people live in the center, the train does not take people to the streets.

At the beginning of the current millennium, I arrived at the Beersheba train station to pick up a friend from the center. As I waited, I spotted a ragged man sitting at the entrance to the station with a host of makeshift luggage. He looked as if he had destroyed his world, sobbing softly again. I wanted to go but the guard stopped me - leave, you can't help him. 

Photo by David Peretz

What happened, I asked. "He just wants to go home," the guard replied, "a few hours ago he came here and wanted to buy a ticket to Bucharest. We explained to him that there is no train from here to Romania, but he barely understands English, hours he waits and cries. Every few minutes he comes, marks the clock and asks when the train to Bucharest And I tell him - Nu Train !!! Go Home !!! And he doesn't understand and cry, and asks when the train will come, and I tell him - Yo got up Beck when he is Piss in Middle East, all the shift I wait for someone who knows Romanian and explain to him, until not There will be peace with Lebanon and Syria, there will be no direct train from here to Romania. " 

It is easy to laugh at that Romanian worker who did not know how to read the Mediterranean situation about his ignorance, but in the distance the joke is upon us. The State of Israel is a railroad anomaly. All over the world the train is already a traditional symbol of the modern day which has set the borders of the country. But in Israel we seem to have moved from a wall and tower to the Ben Gurion Supervisory Tower. Only too late did we remember that we also have a train carrying passengers and not just phosphates. Fewer passengers on the busy lines and cramped carriages. 

If you have forgotten, by then, in the PC (Corona) era, the train has become the preferred vehicle for peripheral residents. Whole careers were built according to the rail traffic, for the best ratio of work, living and quality of life. The train was the way to bypass the many years of transportation failure in Israel, the one that invested more and more on increasingly crowded roads, neglecting public transport.

Through the train I could live in Be'er Sheva and work in Tel Aviv. Like me, there are tens and maybe hundreds of thousands, all of us, the platform people, on a never-ending journey on the tracks. The Corona was good at forgetting and rattling the noise of the carriages, but the day after, in the new routine, when all aspects of life returned to activity, it was precisely the train that last managed the change forced upon us by the virus. Return dates for activity have been set and canceled - it's currently Monday, but experience shows that one should not be greeted until he sits in the trailer - and like the anger, no one seems to care. 

The easiest to give up on the periphery is tens of thousands of good people who have hit them deadly without thinking twice. I can't get to work, work from home, but for many people, not having trains is a serious injury to humanity and quality of life and livelihood. The easiest way to relieve the head of the periphery and say they will get along without it is an outcry that the media does not deal with. 

You hear about the restaurants non-stop, artists live in the center, they leave the house and they are in the stage square, but people from Beer Sheva who want to protest in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv cannot, because there is no train. How will they protest? Buy another vehicle? Suddenly you understand the tremendous significance of the train to the inhabitants of the periphery, north and south, and its absence has completely disrupted the lives of many.

When you think of periphery , you don't imagine Shay Fulbranis. He is a managing partner of an economic consulting firm, Fulbrnis Barkat Ben Yehuda, which is located on the Ramat Gan Stock Exchange complex and lives in Be'er Sheva, on the line. "My wife and I were 70 years old. We lived in Tel Aviv for years, but when the twins were born we decided that we would go back and get comfortable with my parents, and I would continue to work in the center and do these trips. And exhausted and it was really dangerous to drive like that late at night on Route 6. A decade ago the train was nothing but constantly improving, quality of travel, 55 minutes from Beer Sheva to Tel Aviv - it was lined up, so I decided to take the train. "

Photo by David Peretz

Isn't it strange that a big company manager comes to work on a train? "Outside the country this question was not asked. I traveled with a Swedish friend in Ayalon, and he saw thousands of vehicles around, in each vehicle only one person, and everyone stuck in a traffic jam. He did not understand how we manage to function that way. , Where CEOs also travel by train.

"When you look at the world, even in places that were much louder than us, the trains did not close - in New York, the Netherlands - people have to come to work and continue to live. And somehow here, they shut down without thinking or referring. Train passengers? Who writes about that? " 

The feeling of carelessness of the train passengers is also shared by M. Netivot, who uses the train twice a week. "I work full time and attend evening studies at the center twice a week. I am very limited in terms of time, these are very difficult times to get in the car in time for traffic, not to mention parking and fatigue. I have the experience of public transport and it was a nightmare, no good access, do not tighten the lines, reduce the people who can be on the bus, and in fact a situation is created that even if I arrive on time Not to mention everyone, not to mention who waits in the middle stations, and no bus stops for them. 

"People leave the platform fifteen minutes before the bus arrives, the ability to stay two meters away does not exist, and a lot of people get together and are close to each other. A situation is exactly the opposite of what they are trying to do, and the poor drivers absorb the shouts." 

M. from the south has greatly reduced her travel, uses a lot of zoom but feels she is losing every moment. "What is annoying is that there are simple solutions that exist in the routine but it is unclear to me why the Ministry of Transport and the Israeli Railways choose not to run them.

Photo: Oren Ben Hakon

They will do the whole train with reserved places, there is a platform to book places in advance and people get into a specific trailer, and if people need to be isolated because of a patient who was in one of the carriages, there is an accurate record of who was in what trailer and when. You can check and monitor that there are no crowds, it's not that complex. It's clear to me that high-techers can continue to work from home, but for the rest this situation is paralyzing. "

Vishi Seal, "Talking about the opening of the train again on Monday, but another two or three postponement would be devastating. I know people whose inability to get to work in the central area was the trigger for losing their job. I saw things that would change after the corona, and told my employees that they would not have to come to the office every day, except for seasonal periods where we were obliged to work in the office. I look at the corona as a special, strange, interesting period Bad time, but it certainly opens the way to new life forms. "