Constantinople-Baghdad Railway
Second part to the Berlin to Baghdad Railway, and a means of extending German influence into the middle east. Through a series of banking deals, Germany and its proxy Deutsche bank, became the underwriter to the Ottoman empire. Through this, Germany sought methods to modernize the Turkish economy, army and transport. All worked hand in hand, for to build factories and give further loans, transport was required. To expand farm output and quickly get the farm produce to market and even export, railways would be needed.
Another aspect was to put pressure on the British and their growing influence in the oil-laden Persian gulf area. It could also serve as a possible spring board to get Germany into Persia and India. Thus after 1908, work progressed on the railine through Anatolia. Bridges, mountain ranges and deserts hindered swift progress. By the outbreak of the First World War the line was mostly finished, with a few hundred kilometers needed to be built in the Mountains of southern Turkey. Allied prisoners of War captured at the debacle at Kut, were soon slaving and dying on the railway, as Turkey needed to quickly finish the railway to move supplies, now that T.E. Lawrence had disrupted the Hejaz railway.
In the end, the railway never fulfilled the goal of a direct link from Potsdam to Persia. Rather, due to debts owing, it promulgated the Great War and dragged Turkey in on the side of the to-be-defeated German power. Parts in Turkey were finished by the Americans with the Chester concession in the 1920's.
