Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/97

 valley to Basra. For a time Basra was to mark the terminus of the railway; the concession made provision, however, for the eventual construction of a branch "from Zubeir to a point on the Persian Gulf to be agreed upon between the Imperial Ottoman Government and the concessionaires."[41]

Of considerable importance was a proposed branch line from Sadijeh, on the Tigris, to Khanikin, on the Persian frontier. This railway, it was believed, would take the place of the existing caravan route from Bagdad to Khanikin and thence to Teheran. The annual value of British trade alone transported via this route was estimated at about three quarters of a million pounds sterling.[42]

The Bagdad Railway, as thus projected, was one of the really great enterprises of an era of dazzling railway construction. Here was a transcontinental line stretching some twenty-five hundred miles from Constantinople, on the Bosporus, to Basra, on the Shatt-el-Arab—a project greater in magnitude than the Santa Fé line from Chicago to Los Angeles or the Union Pacific Railway from Omaha to San Francisco.[43] It was a promise of the rejuvenation of three of the most important parts of the Ottoman Empire—eastern Anatolia, northern Syria, and Mesopotamia. It was to open to twentieth-century steel trains a fifteenth-century caravan route. It was to replace the camel with the locomotive.

There are special and peculiar problems connected with the construction of railways in the economically backward areas of the world. In well populated regions, such as western Europe, railways have been built to accommodate existing traffic; in sparsely populated regions, such as eastern Russia and western United States, they have been con