BAGDAD RAILWAY

Greymouth Evening Star, 28 July 1936, Page 12

BAGDAD RAILWAY

| PLANS FOR COMPLETION.

— j The once-famous Bagdad Railway is to be completed at last, opening up the promise of through trains from , Europe to ancient Ninevah, Babylon, and the Garden of Eden, writes .Charles Pound in the “New York Times.” The last-named may be a bit difficult to find nowadays, but Nineveh and Babylon need puzzle nobody, for their sites are well known. Nineveh was destroyed about 600 jB.C., and its two great mounds, both 'of which have been excavated with

'abundant results, lie just across the (Tigris from modern Mosul. Babylon lasted to about 300 B.C. and lies in a ■scries of excavated mounds about eight miles south of modern Bagdad. Nineveh is in the centre of the one gap which remains in the whole 1600 miles of the Bagdad Railway as originally projected from Istanbul to Bagdad. This is an easy distance of 290 miles which lies on both sides of Mosul on the flatlands of Northern Iraq. All the heavy work on the Asia Minor sections of the great railway was rushed to completion by the Germans before the armistice was signed in 1918. Ever since then the lines of heavy German rails have ended “in the air.”

Of lato years through trains have run from Istanbul across the high plateau of Asia Minor, through the tremendous tunnel system of the 12,000-foot Taurus Mountains and so down to the endless floor of the up- ’ per Euphrates Valley to reach the end of the line at the lonely fortified I post of Nisibin, a total distance of 11100 miles from Istanbul. Motorbuses have been used to bridge the [gap, travellers spending the night en route at Mosul and reaching the railway the next day at Baiji on the Tigris, about 160 miles north of Bagdad.

OIL IS THE REASON. This is the gap which is now to bo filled in. The reason is not a sudden access of interest in Nineveh and Babylon—although incidentally the completed Bagdad Railway will make the ’ancient Assyrian capital of Nineveh much more accessible than it is now—but the more modern reason of oil. The British Oil Development Company has tapped a rich field south of Mosul, and its oil is too thick and heavj r to be sent to the Mediterranean ports through the new pipe-line across the Syrian desert. Tank-cars are the only practicable means of transporting it. Hence the need of a railway from the oil wells to the end of the existing line at Nisibin.

This would fill in the larger part of the gap, and the Iraq Government has stipulated, as one of its conditions for granting a railway concession, that the new' line must fill in the whole of it. The company has accepted these terms and the new line is accordingly to begin at Baiji, where

the railway from Bagdad ends, and to continue through the oilfield, and Mosul to connect at Nisibin with the line to Istanbul. Completion of the Bagdad Railway is thus provided for at last, and it is interesting to note that although the oil company is British by name a controlling interest is held by Italians. The new line presents no great engineering difficulties and is expected

to be finished in three years. Thereafter the Simplon-Orient express, from Paris to Istanbul, may. be expected to include, once a week, a through sleeping car to Bagdad. But passengers who travel by it will find no mention of the old Bagdad Railway anywhere along the Asiatic sections of their route to-day. The line itself remains, but its once German ownership has been broken up since the war and shared out among the Turks, the French in Syria, and the Iraq Government. The French call fh6ir aontinn nf it tha TaiirilQ Pnil-

way, and it is most generally known | by that name to-day.

So far as its European passenger traffic goes, most of the original purpose has been forgotten. Instead of a line becoming part of the new overland route from Paris to Cairo. Twice a. week the Wagons-Lits Company runs a through sleeping-car service from Paris for Beirut, Jerusalem, and Cairo, while once a week a through sleeping car runs to Nisibin for Bagdad. The Cairo route, like the Bagdad route, has a gap which has to be covered by motor-bus and its commercial usefulness has not so far proved great enough to justify filling in the gap. But oil has at last made the completion of the original Bagdad route imperative.

For tourists it will hardly be a line to be tackled lightly in the warm months. The journey need not be uncomfortable on the central plateau of Asia Minor and certainly not in the mountains, but once it has dropped into the north of Syria, it rounds the north of the Syrian desert, running for hundreds of miles across an uninhabited country as flat as a floor. In' these parts the hot season is a thing to bo spoken of with respect. The thermometer gets up to 100 degrees soon after 7 o’clock in the morning, and Europeans who live in the fortified posts which serve as 1 railway stations get their tennis over before 7,

after which they do as little moving about as possible. But in winter there is no climatic reason why the completion of the railway should not encourage visitors to Iraq. The country has few assets of natural scenery to offer, for much of it is flat and featureless, but in archaeological resources it is one of the richest countries in the world. Yet ancient Nineveh and modern Mosul,

lying on opposite sides of the Tigris, which is here nearly half a mile wide, are not at present within 100 miles of a railways, and Mosul is the third 1 largest city in Iraq to-day.

} AIR-LINES TO BAGDAD. Heretofore the railways and bus service from and to Europe have been

patronised largely by the British with [interests in Mosul and the north of I Iraq. Bagdad is well served by British. French and Dutch air lines from Europe, which are slightly more ex- ■ pensive, but considerably faster. It I may be assumed that the completed! railway to Bagdad will always be able to compete with the air services for passenger traffic, for the railways to

Cairo have had no trouble in doing so. But just how large the passenger traffic to Bagdad will be remains to be seen. Certainly the sleeping-car traffic is not likely for some time to bo served by more than the present I once a week train. All the scenic joys of the route will lie in Asia Minor. If you come from Paris by the Simplon-Orient express, your through sleeping car to Bagdad will be detached at Sirkedji station in Istanbul and run on to the Bosphorus train-ferry, which takes you across to the big harbour station at Haidar Pasha, on the Asiatic side. Some of the more renowned places on the map prove to be a bit disappointing when seen, but the view from Haidar Pasha looking back across the blue busy

Bosphorus to the domest and minerets of Istanbul is decidedly not one of them.

From Haidar Pasha the line follows the shore of the Sea of Marmaro with tho wooden villas of the wealthier classes of Istanbul dotted along the steep wooden banks on one hand and the blue sheet of Marmora stretching away to the horizon on the other. At Ismid, where the beach lies just behind the station buildings, you take your last look at salt water. There-

after the train begins labouring up towards the plateau of the interior, with the terraced slopes of the foothills wheeling slowly past on both sides. The richness of the country continues until you are well on to the central steppe of the interior. Every station is full of noise and activity. Motor-trucks, donkey carts, and strings of laden camels are all unloading side by side at the freight platforms. All this presently gives away to the emptiness of the. steppe, where there is little to see but the inevitable band of shepherds, their savage dogs and their flocks. The dust-grey orchards

of Konia may be smothered in swirls

of dust as you enter its big station; if they are not you are in luck, for Konia may be smothered in swirls of

dust as you enter its big station; if they are not you are in luck for Konia has some of the finest mosques in Turkey and its graceful minarets are a memory worth having. After Konia you begin to sense the approach to the Taurus. The winds bluster across the steppe, rattling the train windows and the cinders from the . labouring locomotive keep up a constant patter on the roof.

As far back as the reach of history goes, the Taurus Mountains have been an impassable barrier, ilirust into the very heart of Asia Minor, and the piercing of this historic barrier was the great achievement of the Bagdad railway. A total of fifty-five tunnels, the longest of them three miles, car-

ries tho line through the Taurus and down on to the low plains of Cilicia. Men who know the world’s mountain railways say that there are few tunnel • systems like it to be found anywhere. I- From Konia the train crosses the I windy steppe for hours, climbing gradually until it gets into the high foothills. At the lonely mountain station of Bozanti it stops to rest, with

towering precipices of naked grey rock ahead and on both sides of it. There is no way out except by the sooty black tunnel mouth at the bottom of the tremendous face of rock ahead. . For the next two hours, irrespective of the direction of the watercourses, the train creeps under the summits of the Taurus, tunnelling the mountains and bridging the gorges. All through the two hours there are only brief slices of perpendicular daylight to cut the darkness of the constant tunnels. Once through the tunnels, the train coasts rapidly down into the still heat of the rich Cilician plain, and a day that begins with the cold piney air of Bozanti ends with the steamy warmth of cotton fields. Beyond

Cilicia the train climbs again to surmount the lower and more rounded barrier of the Amanns Range, and

then drops down into the north of Syria. It is at about this point that the traveller in future is likely to see his first trains of tank cars and to catch his first whiff of oil, for the British Oil Development Company’s port concession is at Alexandretta, at the end of a branch line from Kale Keui junction on the main Bagdad line.

At the big market tovni of Aleppo, in the north of Syria, the traffic for Cairo, turns off to the south. The Bagdad traffic continues straight on to the east, but after Aleppo there is nothing interesting to see until yon reach Mosul.