Kathie Somerwil Ayrton - The train that disappeared into his

The Train that Disappeared into History is the story of the railway that the Germans were building from Constantinople (modern Istanbul) to Baghdad just before the First World War. This German concept was more than just a railway line. Known as the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway, it was to be a 'Pan-Railway' which would run from Berlin, or rather the port of Hamburg, all the way to Baghdad and then on to Basra and the Persian Gulf. While this would already cover a distance of four thousand kilometres, there were definite plans to prolong it to Bombay in British India, on which Germany, among other envious powers, had long had her eye. Conceived in the late 1880's and underwritten chiefly by the Deutsche Bank, construction started in 1903. Notwithstanding grave political difficulties and almost insuperable logistical complications, in 1916 it was well on the way to completion, the last difficulties with France and Britain ironed out in 1914 just before the war broke out. After the allied victory in 1918 however, with the collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, the Baghdad Railway literally ceased to exist and its rails became the property of the states formed in the region after the War.