In 1856, the Ottoman Empire granted a concession to a group of British entrepreneurs to establish a rail line between the city of Izmir and the provincial market town of Aydın, linking one of the major ports of the eastern Mediterranean with the fertile western Anatolian interior. Following the initial jubilation and excitement surrounding the establishment of the first railway in Ottoman Anatolia, early years of construction for this railway were marred by a succession of unrelenting failures. Ranging from allegations of land speculation and financial mismanagement to engineering ineptness, the mishaps of the Izmir-Aydın railway became a ‘most lamentable reflection on the British name,’ and resulted in a rebalancing of the power dynamic with the Ottoman hosts. The building of Izmir’s second railway, to Kasaba, in comparison, went well. Juxtaposing the early histories of these two lines – one characterized by failure while the other progressed smoothly– helps to lay bare the multiplicity of agencies manifested in the production of railway spaces within the Ottoman Empire.