...And one day they linked north to south and east to west by vehicles which ran along iron rails. Puffing out clouds of steam, trains were soon clattering along vast networks of rails all over the world.
In Ottoman Turkey the history of the railroad begins with the Cairo-to-Alexandria line which opened in 1854. This was followed by short local lines in Anatolia and the Empire’s Balkan territories. But successive setbacks meant that construction was constantly behind schedule, so that usually the locomotives arrived before the railway line was completed, and had to lie idle. A french traveller named Bertrand Bareilles, in his book entitled “Constantinople” written at the turn of this century, observed that “everyone has seen locomotives, carriages and other railroad equipment on the Bursa-Mudanya road which have been waiting for over twenty years under the rain and sun for the first rail to be laid”.
Only with the advent of the Turkish Republic did the dream of weaving “an iron web” of railway lines from end to end of the country come true at last.
Camlık was once a main stop on the Izmir-Aydın line, one of the earliest railways in Turkey. Here teams of railway workers waited to clear away the snow on the line in winter. Here were extra locomotives ready to give a helping hand to trains as they struggled up steep gradients.
Seven kilometres past Selçuk, Camlık is now the site of an open air museum, the initiative of a handful of State Railways employees who could not bear to see the steam train fall into oblivion. Turn right into the village and you will see the museum ahead. It has no sign and no staff! But that does not prevent you taking a journey back in time. Here is a 1910 German Schwarzkopf engine which worked on the Erzurum to Kars run. Massive it might be, but who does not feel a desire to stroke it, to polish up its once gleaming paint? Beyond is a British made 1912 Humboldt locomotive, capable of travelling at an unprecedented 65 km per hour. To the Turkish observer it conjures up images of the War of Independence with soldiers in drab uniforms filling its carriages as it lumbers westwards across Anatolia to the battle front. Many other trains made in various places around the world stand here to delight the train enthusiast. Their working lives might be over, but they have been saved from the scrap yard to enjoy a new lease of life as the inhabitants of a museum.

Bahri Kâmil Fırat, “Skylife”, November 1995