The Balya mines had been shipping lead ore to the Aegean coast long before rail arrived. The Société Anonyme Ottomane des Mines de Balia-Karaïdin, the French-connected company that controlled the mines in the late 19th century, initially relied on mules and camels to haul ore down the steep gradients of Mount Ida. By around 1884, the company had built the 62-kilometer Palamutluk–Balya–Mancılık railway — a Decauville-system portable narrow-gauge line with animals as its motive power — to carry ore from the mines to a staging point on the coastal plain at Palamutluk. From there, wagons rumbled to a pier at Akçay for export to European smelters. The system worked, after a fashion, but the Palamutluk junction proved troublesome. Plans for a proper steam-powered connection to the coast had been forming since 1917, when mine manager Yengi Efendi received authorization to build one — though the Ottoman Empire's involvement in World War I and the subsequent Turkish War of Independence meant nothing happened for years.

By the early 1920s, Georges Ralli, the director of the Balya mine, was negotiating with the newly established Turkish Republic. He won a 40-year concession, granted on 13 May 1923, to build and operate the line. Rights were transferred to the Ilıca-İskele–Palamutluk Demiryolu Türk Anonim Şirketi. Construction moved quickly: the 28-kilometer line, laid on 750-millimeter-gauge track, opened in either September or November 1924 (contemporary records give both dates). The route ran from Palamutluk through Havran, Bostancı, Edremit, and Zeytinli, then curved north to reach the Gulf of Edremit at Akçay — with a pier for ore loading — before terminating at a second pier at Ilıca, now part of the village of Güre. Seven-ton locomotives hauled both ore wagons and passenger carriages. Havran station, one of six principal stops along the route, came equipped with a station building, a warehouse, a 10-tonne railcar scale, and a 500-kilogram baggage scale.

The railway never quite made its financial targets. At the company's general meeting on 3 July 1926, shareholders heard that the ore company had supplied less tonnage than expected and that the public had 'not quite yet familiarised itself with this new mode of transport.' In its first ten months, the line carried 18,482 long tons of freight and 106,670 passengers — but still ran a deficit of 19,652 Turkish lira. Yet something unexpected grew from this unpromising start: the summer excursion trade. From 1 June to 15 September each year, the railway marshaled all ten of its dual-compartment passenger carriages for Sunday services to Akçay. Timetables were published in advance in major newspapers through the 1930s and into the 1940s. On summer Sundays, trains ran until 22:00, returning bathers to Edremit long after dark. On Fridays, reduced tariffs served Havran's weekly market. For one generation of families along the Gulf of Edremit, this modest narrow-gauge line was how you reached the sea.

Service on the line was suspended in October 1939, then nationalized under Turkish State Railways (TCDD) on 13 May 1941, with service resuming on 29 October 1942. TCDD even built a holiday camp and recreational facilities beside the Akçay station and pier — later adding a retirement home for former railway employees on the same site. But the line's economics remained fragile. In December 1945, the Turkish Parliament debated its future. Balıkesir Representative Hayrettin Karan and Transport Minister Ali Fuat Cebesoy agreed that the Havran–Palamutluk section was largely idle, while the coast-facing section still carried real passengers and cargo. Cebesoy floated a plan to tear up the eastern track and relay it toward Burhaniye. Nothing came of the proposal. When production fell at the Balya lead mines in October 1950, the economics finally collapsed entirely. Operations ceased. By 1952, parliament was debating liquidation. The rails were torn up in 1959 and sold for scrap.

Not all of it is gone. The station building in Edremit still stands on İstasyon Caddesi. The Akçay station building survives today as İstasyon Restaurant, serving meals in the space where ore wagons once unloaded and summer families once waited for the last train home. The Balya mines that the railway served were themselves ancient: Romans worked the same veins at a site they called Pericharaxis, and historians believe the silver of Troy II — the layer Heinrich Schliemann excavated and called Priam's Treasure — may have come from these very mountains. The narrow-gauge line that Ralli built was just one thread in a continuous cord of extraction and movement that runs from the Bronze Age to the mid-twentieth century, all along the northern face of Mount Ida.