The Trans-Siberian Railroad, begun in the 1880s and completed in 1913, and the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway, sabotaged by the British in their attempt to undermine the Continental powers, followed in the wake of the U.S. Transcontinental. Brig. Gen. Joshua T. Owen, a veteran of the American Civil War, speaking at a dinner in Philadelphia in 1869, organized by American System economist Henry Carey in honor of Andrew Curtin, who had just been appointed U.S. envoy to Russia, urged the Tsar to begin construction on a Trans-Siberian railroad, effectively "girdling the globe with a tramway of iron."
In the 1870s, there were attempts to create a Trans-Hemispheric Railroad from Alaska to Patagonia, but these never reached fruition. The firing of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck by the German Kaiser in 1890, and the subsequent rush to war in the European capitals, which began years prior to the Great War of 1914-18, put an end to that vision. It has now been taken up by the Chinese leadership, with particular emphasis on the latest developments in mass-transportation technology, high-speed rail and magnetically levitated (maglev) trains.
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