On Saturday of last week, the Shah of Iran, Reza
Khan Pahlevi, drove the last golden bolt of Iran's first trunk railway, running 865 miles from North to South, and uniting the Caspian Sea with the Persian Gulf. The railway has taken eleven years to build, at a cost of £28,000,000, provided entirely out of Iran's own resources. The Shah's care to keep financial control in his own hands reflects his suspicions of foreign interference ; so also does the route which the railway has taken. A line, or a road from east to west, would have been of greater economic value ; but, partly for that reason, it would also have encouraged foreign penetration. Thus Iran's first railway may stand as a monument to national- ism, a symbol both of Iran's renaissance under its new dynasty and of the suspicions bred of earlier plans for railway construction by German or Russian enterprise. The immense technical difficulties involved in building the railway will no doubt only increase Iran's pride in her new possession ; and even if utilitarian advantages have had to be sacrificed to patriotism, nevertheless in time the new route cannot but contribute greatly to the task of modernisation and develop- ment which the Shah has undertaken.
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