164 THE TRANSGASPIAN RAILWAY IN 1903. 



The idea of rapid communication between Russia 

 and her recently acquired possessions in Central 

 Asia had been mooted long before the days of the 

 advance from the Caspian, it is true ; but it was 

 the lack of suitable transport required by the 

 expedition which was to be hurled against the 

 Turkoman horde to revenge the defeat of Lomakin 

 in 1879 that was responsible for the actual con- 

 struction of the Transcaspian railway. 



When Tashkent became a Russian possession in 

 1865, the streams of the Sir Daria, and, after the 

 conquest of Khiva and practical absorption of Bok- 

 hara in 1873, of the Oxus were looked to to supply 

 the need of rapid communication between Russia 

 proper and Turkestan, and it was not until the 

 difficulties of navigation on these rivers proved the 

 scheme impracticable that the project of a Central 

 Asian railway was seriously thought of With 

 Tashkent, in the heart of Turkestan, in the hands 

 of the Russians, and the fierce and unruly tribes 

 of Transcaspia still beyond the zone of Russian 

 ambition, it was only natural that that place should 

 have been the objective of the earlier schemes of 

 railway extension, and in 1873 a Russian official was 

 ordered to prepare a report on the possibility of a 

 line from Orenburg. Out of these suggestions grew 

 the chimerical conception of M. de Lesseps of a rail- 

 way from Calais to Calcutta — a project, however, 

 which soon sank into oblivion with the cold re- 

 ception of England, and the departure of its origin- 

 ator to Panama. The less ambitious though, never- 

 theless, costly undertaking of uniting Orenburg and 

 Tashkent by a line across the many hundreds of 

 miles of unpopulated and unproductive desert, in 

 spite of the patronage of General Kaufmann, was 



