WW2: India-Persia railway in 1942?

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Assuming that Winston Churchill looks at the losses to shipping from u-boats in early 1942 and decides that one way to help the logistical situation is to build a railway connecting the Indian and Persian networks (allowing Indian troops and supplies to be moved back and forth to the Middle-East without the need for ships moving across the Arabian Sea) how long would it take to actually build such a line and to get it running if the go-ahead is given in May 1942?
 

Ak-84

Banned
Build a railroad through a mountain range and two deserts as well as plains which are stewing in the summer and frozen tundra in the winter.*......this might be the final daft suggestion Win makes, the one that finally gets Brooke to stop complaining in his diary and you know, shoot him.

Plus the normal road and rail links in the region run North to South, not East to West.
 
Agreed it is a big project that has to be undertaken prior to the war. Perhaps the Anglo Russian Entente can do India to Iran and Iran to Russia prior to the first war to boost trade. Then there will be less of a project in 42 for Iran to Iraq.

Or after a ww1 where Britain forces collateral from Russia (which they seize when Russia defaults) a wealthier Britain could choose to do it.
 
Even if built that only gets them as far as Basrah or Baghdad. Then its a road journey to Palestine for the Haifa to Alexandria railway or by ship from Basrah to Egypt which is about as long a journey as sailing direct to Egypt from India.

OTOH if the proposed Baghdad to Haifa railway which was proposed in the 1930s had been built that would have been a different matter.
 
Build a railroad through a mountain range and two deserts as well as plains which are stewing in the summer and frozen tundra in the winter.*......this might be the final daft suggestion Win makes, the one that finally gets Brooke to stop complaining in his diary and you know, shoot him.

Plus the normal road and rail links in the region run North to South, not East to West.
Hmm. I thought New Zealand engineers built a railway to Tobruk along the North African coast during WW2, although granted that would probably be shorter than any India-Persia line and not have had many rivers to contend with crossing. (wikipedia 'Western Desert Campaign' article at time of this post makes it look like that took two years, but makes no reference to how much that line being built so close to an active front may have slowed things down; can't imagine it helps the speed of building a railway if an Axis plane is popping by every couple of days to try to strafe/bomb you. Still, I can see India-Persia might have problems completing within a relevant time-frame and with manpower demands elsewhere...)
 
Even if built that only gets them as far as Basrah or Baghdad. Then its a road journey to Palestine for the Haifa to Alexandria railway or by ship from Basrah to Egypt which is about as long a journey as sailing direct to Egypt from India.

OTOH if the proposed Baghdad to Haifa railway which was proposed in the 1930s had been built that would have been a different matter.
I was also interested in things possibly being movable from India to Russia (via the existing Persian network) without needing to go by ship, but if the India-Persia gap can't be closed within any vaguely relevant wartime time-frame, then it can't be done...
 
The Allies were able to conduct logistical networks in impossible places where they thought the had to, especially if the Americans with their bottomless resources were involved, with the Alaska Highway and all that effort to ship supplies between India and China, and between Scotland and the Russian Artic ports, being examples. There just wasn't any need to send anything overland between India and Iraq.
 
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