IRAN: Shah’s Dream

His Imperial Majesty, Reza Shah Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, ceremoniously hammered a golden spike into a railway tie last week. Later, excited Iranians in Teheran watched the first train to make the trip from Bandar Shahpur, on the inlet Khor Musa of the Persian Gulf, pull in to Iran’s inland capital. Thus the Trans-Iranian Railway, most spectacular, most expensive railroad enterprise undertaken since the World War, was pronounced completed. The railroad is the dream come true of a westernizing, wilful ruler who still believes in the 19th-Century notion that railroad-building is a matter of national prestige.

It took eleven years to complete the 865-mile railway which more than tripled Iran’s previously existing lines. Heading north from the Persian Gulf, the railroad crosses the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co.’s pipeline; passes through Ahwaz, where Alexander the Great’s fleet landed 2,263 years ago; bridges the swift Karun River; climbs mountains to reach Dizful, famed city of rats. Thence the line passes northeast through Sultanabad, city of rugs, and Qum, holy city of the Shi’ites, to reach Teheran. From the capital the road continues east, northeast, over a 7,200-foot-high mountain pass to reach Bandar Shah, new German-built port near the ancient city of Astarabad and on the semitropical shores of the Caspian Sea. A train will now be able to haul oil from the southwest to the granaries of the northeast, can return to the Persian Gulf loaded with Mazanderan cotton and Caspian Sea caviar. How much the freight charges will be is another matter.

Little did it matter last week to loyal Iranians that the railroad had cost $160,000,000, that its financing out of revenue had bled the country white, had caused a prohibitive tax to be levied on sugar and tea and forced down the exchange value of the currency. Not one rial of foreign money went into its construction. Skipping most of Iran’s largest centres, crossing mountain ranges, connecting with no foreign railways, the line is patently uneconomic. But Danish engineers, with the help of U. S., German, Italian, French, Swedish contractors, made it a striking engineering job with its numerous spectacular tunnels (one a bizarre spiral affair), many high bridges, frequent gorge-crossing viaducts.