The construction of the Ottoman Anatolian Railroad in the early 1890s extended the infrastructure of European economic and cultural penetration to the Anatolian interior. There was a sharp Ottoman awareness of this German-built railroad as a foreign project, and locals along its route would sometimes refer to it as a “European train” or “the infidel’s train.” While Europeans did use the railroad for their own commercial and political gains, this does not completely justify the characterization of the railroad as a foreign element, nor of the Europeans who came with it into provincial Anatolia as mere foreign agents (although many were that too). This paper examines long-term foreign residents in the Northwest Anatolian town of Eskisehir, a crucial railroad junction, and argues that it is impossible to make a pure dichotomy between foreign and local actors. These foreigners, mainly Europeans, included railroad workers and managers, as well as others whose work was often indirectly tied to the railroad, such as the proprietors and managers of some of Eskisehir’s earliest European-style hotels, instructors at the railroad school, which was established for the families of European workers, these workers’ families themselves, missionaries, and others. Through an examination of a variety of sources, including Ottoman archival documents, travel narratives and memoirs of both Europeans and Ottoman subjects, and Ottoman newspapers, I trace some of these long-term residents, and attempt to determine their positions within local social structures in a way that goes beyond the local-foreign dichotomy. These foreigners with deep local ties include Madame Tadia, a locally- well known Czech woman who was a hotelier for 30 years, stayed through World War I and lodged Atatürk’s National Forces during the Turkish War of Independence, a German widow who made extensive charitable contributions to the city’s poor, the high-society wife of a local Christian mining magnate, and others. By challenging the notions of the foreign- local dichotomy, I portray a city in a period of transformation, a transformation being realized through the negotiation between foreign and local elements, a negotiation for which resident Europeans were more intermediaries than belonging purely to one side or the other.