The Baghdad Railway (, , ), was built from 1903 to 1940 to connect Berlin with the (then) Ottoman Empire city of Baghdad, where the Germans wanted to establish a port in the Persian Gulf, with a line through modern-day Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Completion of the project took several decades and by the outbreak of World War I, the railway was still 960 km (600 miles) away from its intended objective. The last stretch to Baghdad was built in the late 1930s and the first train to travel from Istanbul to Badhdad departed in 1940.