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Rh on the surplus of the revenues assigned to the guarantee of the Anatolian railway collected by the Public Debt Administration, on the excess revenue, after certain deductions, accruing to the government under the “Annex-Decree to the Decree of Muharrem” above described, on the sheep tax of the vilayets of Koniah, Adana and Aleppo, and on the railway itself. The first series (54,000,000 francs or £2,160,000), was duly handed over to the concessionaires in 1903, and was floated in Berlin at 86.4% realizing the sum of £1,868,000. The division of the line into equal sections of 200 kilometres apiece produced at once a somewhat ridiculous result. The little town of Eregli, some 190 kilometres distant from Konia, presented the only excusable locality for the terminus of the first section, and even that place is 90 kilometres distant from Karaman, the last town of any importance for some hundreds of miles on the way to the Euphrates valley, the country between the two towns being desolate and sparsely inhabited. But the Bagdad Railway Company (the share capital of which is £600,000 half paid up), naturally anxious to earn the whole of the capitalized subvention, completed the construction of the entire 200 kilometres. The line was thus continued to a station taking its name from Bulgurlu, a small straggling village four miles away, between which and Eregli there is not a single habitation. But even this did not quite complete the distance, and the line was carried on for still another kilometre and there stopped, “with its pair of rails gauntly projecting from the permanent way” (Fraser, The Short Cut to India, 1909). The outside cost of construction of the first section, which lies entirely in the plains of Konia, is estimated to have been £625,000; the company retained, therefore, a profit of at least 1¼ millions sterling on this first part of the enterprise. In the second section the Taurus range is reached, after which the construction becomes much more difficult and costly. On the 2nd of June 1908 a fresh convention was signed between the government and the Bagdad Railway Company providing, on the same financial basis, for the extension of the line from Bulgurlu to Helif and of the construction of a branch from Tel-Habesh to Aleppo, covering a total aggregate length of approximately 840 kilometres. The principle of equal sections of 200 kilometres was thus set on one side. The payments to the company were to be made in two lump sums forming “series 2 and 3” of the “Imperial Ottoman Bagdad railway loan,” series 2 amounting to £4,320,000, which was delivered to the company on the signature of the contract, and series 3 to £4,760,000. The Bagdad railway must for much time be a heavy

weight on the Turkish budget, the country through which it passes—with the exception of the sections passing from Adana to Osmanieh, through the Killis-Aleppo-Euphrates district (that is, the first point at which the line crosses the Euphrates some 600 m. from Bagdad), and to a lesser extent through the plains of Seruj and Harran—being very sparsely populated, while the financial system adopted offers no inducement to the concessionaire company to work for

increasing earnings. It should be mentioned that the Bagdad Railway Company has sublet the working of the line to the Anatolian Railway Company at the rate of £148 per kilometre, as against the £180 per kilometre guaranteed by the Turkish Ottoman Railways worked at end of 1908.

Results of 1908 according to the Nationality of the Capital.