THE MALATYA STATION OF THE RAILROAD POLICY IN THE REPUBLICAN PERIOD
In order to spread the economic development to the scale of the entire country with the Atatürk-era catchword "one handbreadth more of railroad", the raildroad construction was shifted from Western Anatolia to Eastern Anatolia. In accordance with this policy, a 50-km part of the Fevzipaşa-Diyarbakır railroad line was inaugurated on 1 October 1930. The part of the same line up to Malatya was inaugurated on 23 April 1931, and its extension from Malatya up to the area known as "the Old Malatya" on 1 February 1932. After its Fırat-Yolçatı part was put into operation on 1 April 1934, the track-laying work reached the Sivrice Station in January 1935. The construction of the Malatya-Çetinkaya line started on 29 October 1933, and on 15 June 1936 the line between Malatya and Yazıhan and on 1 November 1936 that between Yazıhan and Hekimhan and on 16 August 1937 the whole line were put into service. The raildroad construction that slowed down after the Second World War was replaced by highway transportation in the Democrat Party era. In the post-1960 planned development periods too, the targets projected for railroads were never reached. Even though it was aimed in these plans to ensure coordination among transportation subsystems, the conditions of pre-planning period were continued, thereby failing at this coordination, and the investments on highways maintained their priority in all the planning periods. In this paper, the condition of the railroad activities in the Malatya province in the republican era will be discussed in the light of the official sources, secondary sources and the periodicals of the period. Within this framework, the process from the initial railword work in Malatya to the present day will be presented from an analytical and objective point of view.

Keywords
Railway, The Republican Period, Malatya