Bagdad Railway

Baghdad Railway

CIOB in red (CFOA route to Constantinople in blue)
Baghdad railway circa 1900–10
Reporting mark	CIOB
Locale	Southeastern Turkey,
Dates of operation	1903–(?)
Successor	TCDD, CNS
Track gauge	4 ft 8 1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge
Headquarters	Adana

The Berlin-Baghdad Railway, also known as the Baghdad Railway (Turkish: Bağdat Demiryolu, German: Bagdadbahn, Arabic: سكة حديد بغداد‎‎, French: Chemin de Fer Impérial Ottoman de Bagdad), was built from 1903 to 1940 to connect Berlin with the (then) Ottoman Empire city of Baghdad, from where the Germans wanted to establish a port in the Persian Gulf, with a 1,600 kilometres (1,000 mi) line through modern-day Turkey, Syria, and Iraq.

Completion of the project took several decades and by the outbreak of World War I, the railway was still 960 km (600 miles) away from its intended objective. The last stretch to Baghdad was built in the late 1930s and the first train to travel from Istanbul to Baghdad departed in 1940.

Funding, engineering and construction was mainly provided by German Empire banks Deutsche Bank and companies Philipp Holzmann, which in the 1890s had built the Anatolian Railway (Anatolische Eisenbahn) connecting Constantinople, Ankara and Konya. The Ottoman Empire wished to maintain its control of Arabian Peninsula and to expand its influence across the Red Sea into the nominally Ottoman (until 1914) Khedivate of Egypt, which had been under British military control since the Urabi Revolt in 1882. If the railway had been completed, the Germans would have gained access to suspected oil fields in Mesopotamia, as well as a connection to the port of Basra on the Persian Gulf. The latter would have provided access to the eastern parts of the German colonial empire, and avoided the Suez Canal, which was controlled by British-French interests.