Baghdad’s main railway station evokes a lost world. Two clock towers stand like sentinels on each side of a turquoise dome built half a century ago. Musty ticket counters advertise lines that no longer run: to Mosul, to Huseiba, and across the border to Syria and Turkey. Flickering chandeliers illuminate distinctions – couchette class; tourist class – that no longer matter.

All aboard: the train waits at Baghdad station before setting out, packed with passengers, for a journey across the former Triangle of Death

Since the start of the year, the station has also offered the chance to see another Iraq – far removed from the land devastated by six years of war. It is an Iraq imbued with the recollection, sometimes imagined, of a past not yet bloodied; a nation where names still evoke a place, not an occupier’s crimes and excesses – Abu Ghraib, Haditha, even Baghdad.