The first move of the Sultan in his plan to develop railway communication in his Asiatic provinces was to authorize important extensions to the existing railways of Anatolia. The French owners of the Smyrna-Cassaba line were granted a concession for a branch from Manissa to Soma, a distance of almost 100 kilometres, under substantial subsidies from the Ottoman Treasury. The British-controlled Smyrna-Aidin Railway was authorized to build extensions and branches totalling 240 kilometres, almost doubling the length of its line. A Franco-Belgian syndicate in October, 1888, received permission to construct a steam tramway from Jaffa, a port on the Mediterranean, to Jerusalem—an unpretentious line which proved to be the first of an important group of Syrian railways constructed by French and Belgian promoters. Shortly afterward the concession for a railway from Beirut to Damascus was awarded to French interests.[3] But the great dream of Abdul Hamid was the great dream of Wilhelm von Pressel: the vision of a trunk line from the Bosporus to the Persian Gulf, which, in connection with the existing railways of Anatolia and the new railways of Syria, would link Constantinople with Smyrna, Aleppo, Damascus, Beirut, Mosul, and Bagdad. As early as 1886 the Ottoman Ministry of Public Works had suggested to the lessees of the Haidar Pasha-Ismid Railway that they undertake the extension of that line to Angora, with a view to an eventual extension to Bagdad. The proposal was renewed in 1888, with the understanding that the Sultan was prepared to pay a substantial subsidy to assure adequate returns on the capital to be invested. The lessees of the Haidar Pasha-Ismid line, however, were unable to interest investors in the enterprise and were compelled to withdraw altogether from railway projects in Turkey-in-Asia. Thereupon Sir Vincent Caillard, Chairman of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration, endeavored to form an Anglo-American syndicate to undertake the construction of a Constantinople-Bagdad railway, but he met with no success.[4]