The total length of the road thus ordered to be built—extending from the shores of the Caspian Sea, the outpost of European Russia, to the far-away city of Samarcand, the ancient capital of Timur the Tartar, and the very stronghold of Asiatic barbarism—was little short of a thousand miles, of which several hundred were bleak and barren desert. Two immense steppes, waterless, and scorching hot in summer, lay on the route, while it traversed the oases of Kizil-Arvat, Merv, Charjui, and Bokhara. In the northern section of the last lay the famous city of Samarcand, the eastern terminus of the road. The western terminus was at Usun-ada, on the Caspian, and opposite the petroleum region of Baku, perhaps the richest oil-yielding district in the world.
General Annenkoff had special difficulties to overcome in the building of this road, of a kind never met with by railroad engineers before. Chief among these were the lack of water and the instability of the roadway, the wind at times manifesting an awkward disposition to blow out the foundation from under the ties, at other times to bury the whole road under acres of flying sand.
These difficulties were got rid of in various ways. Fresh water, made by boiling the salt water of the Caspian and condensing the steam, was carried in vats or tuns over the road to the working parties. At a later date water was conveyed in pipes from the mountains to fill cisterns at the stations, whence it was carried in canals or underground conduits along the line, every well and spring on the route being utilized.
To overcome the shifting of the sand, near the Caspian it was thoroughly soaked with salt water, and at other places was covered with a layer of clay. But there are long distances where no such means could be employed, at least two hundred miles of utter wilderness, where the surface resembles a billowy sea, the sand being raised in loose hillocks and swept from the troughs between, flying in such clouds before every wind that an incessant battle with nature is necessary to keep the road from burial. To prevent this, tamarisk, wild oats, and desert shrubs are planted along the line, and in particular that strange plant of the wilderness, the saxaoul, whose branches are scraggly and scant, but whose sturdy roots sink deep into the sand, seeking moisture in the depths. Fascines of the branches of this plant were laid along the track and covered with sand, and in places palisades were built, of which only the tops are now visible.
Yet despite all these efforts the sands creep insidiously on, and in certain localities workmen have to be kept employed, shovelling it back as it comes, and fighting without cessation against the forces of the desert and the winds. In the building of the road, and in this battling with the sands, Turkomans have been largely employed, having given up brigandage for honest labor, in which they have proved the most efficient of the various workmen engaged upon the road.
Aside from the peculiar difficulties above outlined, the Transcaspian Railway was remarkably favored by nature. For nearly the whole distance the country is as flat as a billiard-table, and the road so straight that at times it runs for twenty or thirty miles without the shadow of a curve. In the entire distance there is not a tunnel, and only some small cuttings have been made through hills of sand. Of bridges, other than mere culverts, there are but three in the whole length of the road, the only large one being that over the Amu-Daria. This is a hastily built, rickety affair of timber, put up only as a make-shift, and at the mercy of the stream if a serious rise should take place.
The whole road, indeed, was hastily made, with a single track, the rails simply spiked down, and the work done at the rate of from a mile to a mile and a half a day. Before the Bokharans fairly realized what was afoot, the iron horse was careering over their level plains, and the shrill scream of the locomotive whistle was startling the saints in their graves.
Over such a road no great speed can be attained. Thirty miles an hour is the maximum, and from ten to twenty miles the average speed, while the stops at stations are exasperatingly long to travellers from the impatient West. To the Asiatics they are of no concern, time being with them not worth a moment's thought.