Late Ottoman Anatolia was a region of great diversity and rapid change. Like most of the world at the time, the Ottoman Empire was going through the great acceleration that frequently takes the label of modernization. Simultaneously, this was the age of the concentration of world military and economic power in the hands of a few, mostly European, powers. The Ottoman state, confronted with this unfavorable international situation, was attempting to increase centralization over its provinces. To this end, it pursued its own technological modernization program, extant since at least the mid-nineteenth century but greatly expanded under Sultan Abdülhamid II. While studies of this era often center the Ottoman state and its changing relationships to other nations or to its own subjects, how those subjects experienced modernization on the remains an elusive topic. Even at the end of the empire mainly illiterate Ottoman non-elites left very few written accounts of their lives, so what we know about them is nearly always refracted through the writings of others about them. Another challenge is that frequently histories will focus on one particular type of source. This article, which will address modernizations in transportation infrastructure in Anatolia, will demonstrate that the different perspectives of multiple source types, such as several different categories of Ottoman archival documents (including orders and correspondence between the Porte and provinces, petitions), foreign consular records, Ottoman newspapers and Ottoman elite memoirs can be used to triangulate a more varied account of different Ottoman perceptions of this era. While this cannot, unfortunately, comprehensively restore subaltern voices, a multiplicity of sources can be used to suggest a multiplicity of Ottoman experiences of modernization and, in the process, our knowledge of Ottoman non-elites can be extended, despite source limitations.