Closely connected with these financial guarantees were grants of public lands. Lands owned by the Government and needed for right-of-way were transferred to the concessionaires free of any charge. Additional land required for construction purposes might be occupied without rental as well as worked by the Company for sand and gravel. Wood and timber necessary for the construction and operation of the railway might be cut from State-owned forests without compensation. The concessionaires were permitted to operate mines within a zone twenty kilometres each side of the line, subject to such regulations as might be laid down by the Ministry of Public Works. As a public utility, the railway was granted the right of expropriation of such privately owned land as might be essential for the right-of-way, as well as quarries, gravel-pits, or other properties necessary for purposes of construction. The Company was authorized, also, to conduct researches for objects of art and antiquity along the route of the railway![50] In the foregoing respects the Bagdad Railway Convention was by no means revolutionary in character. In issuing its bonds for the purpose of financing railway construction, in pledging public revenues as a guarantee of traffic receipts, in granting public lands for right-of-way, the Imperial Ottoman Government was following wellestablished precedents of the nineteenth century. The United States, for example, had adopted similar measures to encourage the building of transcontinental railways. To cite a single instance, Congress granted the promoters of the Union Pacific system a right-of-way through the public domain, twenty sections of land on each side of each mile of the railway, and a loan of bonds of the United States to an amount of fifty million dollars. Between 1850 and 1873 alone the Government transferred to the railways some thirty-five million acres of public lands, an area in excess of that of the State of New York.[51]