Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/135

 their opinion the renunciation of these important rights was bait held out to win foreign diplomatic support and to induce the participation of foreign capital in the Railway and its subsidiary enterprises. Lord Curzon, for example, expressed to the House of Lords his belief that technical and financial difficulties made it impossible for the German bankers to proceed with the construction of the Bagdad line without the assistance of outside capital. He was firmly of the opinion that no railway stretching from the Bosporus to the Gulf could be financed by a single Power.[39]

The unsettled political conditions in Turkey, meanwhile, had delayed, but not halted, construction of the Bagdad Railway. The years 1910 and 1911 were marked by progress on the sections in the vicinity of Adana. From that Cilician city the railway was being laid westward to the Taurus Mountains, eventually to pass through the Great Gates and meet the tracks already laid to Bulgurlu. Eastward the line was being constructed in the direction of the Amanus mountains, although there seemed to be little chance for an early beginning of the costly tunneling of the barrier. During 1911 and 1912 attention was concentrated on the building of the sections east of Aleppo, which in 1912 reached the Euphrates River. The branch line to Alexandretta was completed and opened to traffic November 1, 1913.[40] Financial difficulties in the way of further construction of the main line were overcome in the latter part of 1913, when the Deutsche Bank disposed of its holdings in the Macedonian Railways and the Oriental Railways to an Austro-Hungarian syndicate. The funds thus obtained were re-invested in the Bagdad Railway, and the necessity was obviated for a further sale of securities on the open market.[41] In 1914 the Amanus tunnels were begun, a great steel bridge was thrown across the Euphrates, the sections east of Aleppo were constructed