All aboard the Baghdad Metro

Reporting from Baghdad — Don't be put off by the sign, which reads "Cent al B ghd d Stat on."

And don't worry about the gun-toting men who emerge from the dark and board the train as it sits in predawn silence at the huge, domed station that has seen grander days.

They're there to protect passengers riding Baghdad's first commuter train, an experiment in urban renewal in a city as broken as the rusted station sign but struggling to pull itself together.

Since the commuter train service began about a month ago, ridership has been spotty. Few people seem to know it exists. After all, who would imagine such a thing in Baghdad, where going from one end of town to another was, not that long ago, an invitation to be killed?

But the Ministry of Transportation wanted to relieve Iraqis of the chaos of Baghdad's streets, where checkpoints, speeding convoys and almost daily bombings cause massive traffic tie-ups. Thus was born the Baghdad Metro, as the men who gather for each day's 5:30 a.m. departure have dubbed the service.

"If this succeeds, I think they'll open more lines inside Baghdad," says Thafir Salim, the engineer on the route, which leaves the main station and weaves about 15 miles through west and south Baghdad on just two round-trip journeys a day: one in the morning and one in the afternoon.

Like most employees of the state-run Iraqi Republic Railways Co., Salim found himself with little to do after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Train travel, like much of life here, ground to a halt as violence took over the country. Bombs were planted on tracks. Conductors were yanked out of their engines and beheaded. Riders were scared off.

Last year, passenger service between Baghdad and Basra, a 13-hour trip south, resumed. Other than that, the Baghdad Metro is the only regular train service, and the trip offers a close-up view of the upended lives of Iraqis since the war.

Squatter communities filled with people displaced by sectarian violence bump up against the tracks. Women tend bean fields planted haphazardly in the shadow of a giant refinery belching black smoke. Crossing gates and guards are nonexistent, continually putting the train on a potential collision course with cars and military convoys. Cows and sheep meander dangerously close to the tracks, as do children, who sometimes throw rocks at the passing green cars.