Trans-Caspian Railway

“ I never had reason to regret my bargain; a better servant, pluckier traveller, or cheerier companion no man could wish for. Gerôme had just returned from a visit to Bokhára, and his accounts of Central Asia were certainly not inviting. The Trans-Caspian railway was so badly laid that trains frequently ran off the line. There was no arrangement for water, travellers being frequently delayed three or four hours, while blocks of ice were melted for the boiler; while the so-called first-class carriages were filthy, and crowded with vermin. ”

“ Whatever may be their faults, they are not a lazy people; they gave up their raiding habits very unwillingly; but when once convinced that they must live by industry, they seem to have accepted the situation.
TURCOMAN COURT OF JUSTICE.
Mr. Ivanovich, the gentleman who invited our friends to cross the Caspian, was connected with the management of the Trans-Caspian Railway, as the line from Mikhailovsk is called. ”

“ The Trans-Siberian system linked Moscow and Petrograd with Vladivostok and Pekin; the Trans-Caspian and Trans-Persian railways stretched almost to the mountain barrier of northern India; the Trans-Caucasian lines provided the link between the Caspian and Black Seas.
The heart of the central route of Eastern trade in the fifteenth century was the Mesopotamian Valley. ”

“ No one can foretell what it may become before the locomotive travels past it. For under present circumstances all the postal service, the light goods and time-saving passenger traffic from all parts of Russia to Astrakhan, the Caspian and the Trans-Caspian region, or vice versâ, must pass between the Tsaritzin pier on the Volga and the platforms of the Tsaritzin railway station. ”

“ Its length in Transcaspian338 territory is 663 miles, and an extension from Merv to Kushk, on the Afghan frontier, a distance of 192 miles, will be completed before the 1st June 1899. The old caravan roads southward lay through Persia and Afghanistān; but the insecurity which reigns there, and the transit duties levied, have driven merchants to adopt the longer but safer route by steamer and railway. Thus goods for China and India travel by way of Bombay, Batum, and Baku. The Caspian is traversed by steamer,675 and at Krasnovodsk the railway is met with. ”

“ Not to know the direction taken by the engine, to be ignorant if the train is going northeast or southeast, would be insupportable to me, all the more as when night comes, I shall see nothing, for I cannot see in the dark as if I were an owl or a cat.
My time-table shows me that the railway skirts for a little distance the carriage road between Tiflis and the Caspian, running through Saganlong, Poily, Elisabethpol, Karascal, Aliat, to Baku, along the valley of the Koura. We cannot tolerate a railway which winds about; it must keep to a straight line as much as possible. ”

“ The second-class travelers are not so comfortably treated, and besides, they have to bring their victuals with them, unless they prefer to take their meals at the stations. There are not many, however, who travel the complete journey between the Caspian and the eastern provinces of China—that is to say about six thousand kilometres. Most of them go to the principal towns and villages of Russian Turkestan, which have been reached by the Transcaspian Railway for some years, and which up to the Chinese frontier has a length of over 1,360 miles. ”

“ Owing to the rearrangement of the railway chess-board in the East in consequence of the Russo-Japanese war, it is quite possible that the Trans-Siberian railway will be completed as originally planned—that is, through Russian territory entirely, by the completion of the Amur railway from Stretensk to Khabarovsk. ”

“ The building of this railroad was a gigantic undertaking and its construction cost the Russian Government four hundred million dollars. With all our boasted American hustle it took twenty years to build the Canadian Pacific railway from coast to coast. The Trans-Siberian is more than [Pg 44] twice as long and was completed in half that length of time. Before the war there was hardly ever an accident on this railway. Every verst (about two-thirds of a mile) there is a little guardhouse and there was always a man or woman, generally a woman, standing with a flag as the train passed. ”

“ It would be shortsighted to minimize the importance of the present drift of population to Eastern Siberia, which is likely to assume immense proportions on the opening of the railway, or the commercial value of that colossal undertaking, which is greatly enhanced by the treaty under which Russia has taken powers to run the Trans-Siberian line through Chinese Manchuria. The creation of a new route which will bring the Far East within 6,000 miles and 16 days of London, and cheapen the cost of the transit of passengers very considerably, cannot be overlooked either. ”

“ Meanwhile Great Britain, Russia and France continued negotiations with Germany over the Bagdad Railway. In the Potsdam Agreement of 1911, Russia finally turned down the British scheme for a Trans-Persian line linking the Russian Trans-Caucasian railways with the Nushki Railway from Quetta, and chose to link its Trans-Caucasian system with the Bagdad Railway instead, undertaking to build feeder lines from the Russian zone in north Persia to the main Bagdad line in Mesopotamia. ”

“ Towards the end of 1896, in return for the great services which she considered she had rendered to China in the war between that country and Japan, Russia obtained the concession for a railway which, starting from Chita, Trans-Baikalia, about 200 miles west of Strietensk, would pass through Manchuria to Vladivostok, avoiding the great bend of the Amur, though still offering the disadvantage that one important section of the through route would not be on Russian territory. ”

“ In the near future there will perhaps be a second route along the Persian frontier connecting the South Russian railways with those of British India, and that will save travelers the navigation of the Caspian. And when this vast basin has dried up through evaporation, why should not a railroad be run across its sandy bed, so that trains can run through without transhipment at Baku and Uzun Ada? ”

“ Begun originally as a purely military railway, which contributed in a great measure to the successful and bloody storming of the Turcoman stronghold of Geok Tepe, the railway, built and even now exclusively worked by officers and soldiers selected from 'the railway battalions' of the Russian army, has gradually been pushed on over sandy deserts, through fertile oases, and across broad streams, until it stretches from Uzun-Ada, on the Caspian, to Samarcand, on the Zerafshan, a distance of nine hundred and sixty-five miles. ”

“ Engineers build railroads and are largely represented in their management, but both in building and operating them they are dependent, at one time or another, upon some kind of police protection. Indeed, there are railroads that could not have been constructed at all without the aid of either soldiers or policemen. The Trans-Caspian railroad was built largely by soldiers, and is still superintended by the war department at St. ”

“ The events which finally brought Russia and Japan into collision arose out of the obvious need for the construction of a railway from St. Petersburg to the Pacific having its terminus on an ice-free port. Only so could Russia develop the resources of Siberia and the Amur Province. In the sixties and seventies trans-continental railways were being planned and successfully laid in North America. But there is this difference: in the New World the iron horse has been the friend of peace; in the Far East of Asia it has hurried on the advent of war ”

“ One of the principal agents in the work of transforming Asia Minor is the railroad, to which the natives have taken with unusual readiness. The locomotive is already competing with the hundred and sixty thousand camels employed in the peninsula caravan-trade. At Geiveh, the last station on the Trans-Bosporus Railway, where we left the track to follow the Angora highway, the “ships of the desert” are beginning to transfer their cargoes to the [pg 5] “land steamer,” instead of continuing on as in former days to the Bosporus. ”

“ General Kurapatkine, while governor of Transcaspia, had detailed surveys made for a line between Merv and Orenburg. A strong faction advocates one which would commence at Tashkent and run by way of Chimkent, Turkestān, Turgai, Nicholaievsk, and Troitzk to Chelyabinsk, the starting-point of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Another party urges the superior advantages of a route viâ Turkestān, Albasar, Kokchetav, and Petropavlovsk to Ishim. ”

“ Being somewhat under the weather from a recent attack of fever, he has contracted for a Russian fourgon to carry him as far as Shahrood, the farthest point on our route to which vehicular conveyance is practicable. Our purpose is to reach the Caspian port of Bunder Guz, thence embark on a Russian steamer to Baku, over the Caucasus Railway to Batoum, thence by Black Sea steamer to Constantinople. ”

“ From the purely commercial side of the question, however, there can be no doubt that a very long time may elapse before the Trans-Siberian Railway can compete with the sea route in transporting heavy merchandise to and from the Far East, and the great commercial centres of Europe and Asia. ”

“ China time and time again has pledged national revenues in support of railway construction; the Latin-American countries have been conspicuous exemplars of the same practice; more than half of the railways of Russia were constructed with government funds.44
There was every reason to believe that the Bagdad Railway would be built with some system of state guarantees. Almost every railway in Asiatic Turkey at one time or another had been the recipient of a government subvention, and the proposed trans-Mesopotamian railway faced many more obstacles than had faced any then in operation. ”

“ Such overland route, also, passing through foreign countries, would be especially liable to attack and interruption. Where, however, the overland route goes entirely through national territory (as in the case of the Trans-Siberian Railway) , and when the questions of time and safety, in regard to an alternative sea route, suggest possible disadvantages, railways will be preferred to ships in spite of the said inferiority.
Railways are inferior to roads in so far as, like rivers and canals, they are on fixed spots. ”

“ The increasing demands of trade and the need of rapid communication make the construction of railways in Asia as necessary as in other parts of the world, but the lover of the picturesque will hope that the time will never come when the locomotive will entirely displace the camel, which seems to be an essential feature in every eastern landscape. This thought comes to me with special insistence as the shriek of the railway whistle announces our arrival at Aleppo, where a train of cars—in place of a caravan of camels—appears to be as incongruous as at the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem. ”

“ The Russians have always given the impression that they did not intend to develop their railways, and yet they have gone on developing them all the same. They have gone south from Merv to the River Kush, on the Afghanistan frontier, and east from Khodgent to Andigan and Kokand. They have brought a main line from Petrograd, by way of Orenburg, over the deserts of Sirdaria, to the cities of Turkestan and Tashkent, and have thus a railway all the way from the Baltic to within a few hundred miles of India. ”

“ Why, then, should the railroad be long delayed? It - 183 - may be built from Kalgan to Urga, or by way of Kwei-hua-cheng—either route is feasible. It will mean a direct connection between Shanghai, China's greatest port, and Verkhin Udinsk on the Trans-Siberian Railroad via Tientsin, Peking, Kalgan, Urga, Kiakhta. It will shorten the trip to London by at least four days for passengers and freight. It will open for settlement and commercial development a country of boundless possibilities and unknown wealth which for centuries has been all but forgotten. ”

“ When the Trans-Siberian was first built, the desire to avoid undue expenditure on a line which must necessarily involve a huge expenditure, with little or no prospect of yielding a return sufficient for the payment of interest thereon, led to the adoption of an economy which was to hamper very materially the transport capacity of the railway. ”

“ The Caucasus section is just opposite. In a large separate building a panorama represents the new Siberian railway-line. The Sleeping-car Company has exposed the model of a Transcaspian train, composed of an engine and three cars belonging to the International Company, in which one experiences the illusion of a journey through Siberia. The guard whistles, the train seems to move, but in reality it is only the panorama on the walls which is put into motion by a special mechanism. The travellers perceive through the windows the whole way leading from Moscow right to the terminus station—Pekin. ”

“ Uzun-ada, which is the present starting-point of the Transcaspian Railway, well deserves the description given of it to us by a Russian lady, 'Un trou sablonneux.' It consists of nothing but hills and valleys of deep yellow sand, which contrasts brilliantly with the dark blue of the sea and the lighter blue of the sky. Not a tree or a vestige of vegetation is anywhere visible, and life here in the small wooden huts which constitute the 'town' must be utterly dreary. ”

“ Askabad and Merv Krasnovodsk, the western terminus of the Transcaspian Railway, stands on the northern side of the Balkan Bay, through which the Oxus once discharged into the Caspian. It is protected from the groundswell by a natural breakwater of jagged rock which stretches nearly twenty-five miles southwards ”