THE TASHKENT - ORENBURG LINE. 201 



you came— ^.e., along the Transcaspian railway — you 

 must give yourself up to the tender mercies of the 

 tarantass and the post-road. I say for the present, 

 because the railways which Eussia has built in Asia m 

 the course of the last twenty-five years will ere long be 

 increased by lines which will connect her vast terri- 

 tories in Central Asia with European Russia on the 

 one hand and with the great Trans-Siberian railway 

 system on the other. 



The first of the two great lines of railway which she 

 has in view is the Tashkent- Orenburg Hne, to be com- 

 pleted by January 1 (14), 1905. Running north from 

 Tashkent to Tchimkent, and thence north-west via 

 Turkestan to Orenburg, where it will join the railway 

 system of European Russia, it will cover in all a dis- 

 tance of 1600 versts, or 1056 miles. It will be seen 

 that, in constructing this line, Russia is merely giving 

 material shape to her original scheme of a railway to 

 Central Asia, the project, that is, which was ofiicially 

 reported upon in 1873, and vigorously advocated by 

 General Kaufmann, the Governor of Tashkent at that 

 time, and which was taken up with feverish energy in 

 the more grandiose guise of an overland route to India 

 by the indefatigable de Lesseps, long before the present 

 Transcaspian railway had even been thought of The 

 large outlay which it was at that time recognised would 

 be necessary to construct and maintain a railway across 

 many hundred miles of unpopulated and unproductive 

 steppe no longer appears to constitute an obstacle to its 

 construction, while the objection to the line on the 

 grounds of its becoming a damaging rival to the Ivans- 

 caspian railway seems to have disappeared, or at any 

 rate to have been overruled, since it is now well on the 

 road to completion. The necessity of bringing water 

 from a distance has proved a source of difticulty and 



