166 THE TRANSCASPIAN RAILWAY IN 1903. 



and the edge of the Tekke oasis was mooted ; but 

 a far more important project came into being when 

 General Skobeleff, who had taken with him General 

 Annenkoff, the controller of military transport, decided 

 in favour of Krasnovodsk as aofainst Tchikishlar as 

 his base of operations. A hundred miles of steel rails, 

 lying idle at Bender, which had been purchased and 

 stored "for use in the Balkan peninsula in 1878 in 

 the event of the collapse of the Congress of Berlin," ^ 

 were transported to the eastern shore of the Caspian, 

 and the first link of the railway which now runs 

 for over 1200 miles to Andijan and Tashkent, and 

 is destined in the future to join hands with the 

 great trans - continental railway in the north, was 

 forged under the powerful influence and able direc- 

 tion of General Annenkoff. 



The line which had thus been built solely w4th a 

 view to affording the transport necessary for the army 

 advancing against the Turkomans failed in its im- 

 mediate object, since Skobeleff" had secured his great 

 victory of Geok Teppe before the line was completed. 

 But the far-reaching possibilities of a railway running 

 east along the frontiers of Persia and Afghanistan had 

 at length begun to dawn on the minds of Russian 

 statesmen, and though the original reason for its con- 

 struction was no longer there, the building of the line 

 was nevertheless carried out; and in December 1881, 

 eleven months after the collapse of the Turkoman 

 power, the first train steamed into Kizil Arvat. 



At this point the railway rested for three and a half 

 years, the suspicions of England, aroused by the 

 surveys of Lessar on the Afghan borderland, and 

 the opposition of the Turkestan party, headed by 

 the governor of Tashkent, General Tchernaieff, who 



^ Russia in Central Asia. Lord Curzon. 



