Photography gives only passing mention to a chapter of the 19th century Russian colonial history that predated the Russian railroad boom and set the stage for further surveying steps. The earlier forbidden zone, the Russian Turkestan, was opening up to the Russian infrastructure, its scientific and political agenda, offering to photographs express a relatively coherent point of view. They were not railroad photographers: they pictured the Central Asian landscape as awe and horror inspiring in its grandeur and immensity, and as the iron will and technological prowess of the Russians. Seizing the advantage, they presented only a version of the Russian colonial history that was curiously blind to the struggles between and among peoples in Russian Turkestan. Some revisions of the Transcaspian railroad history have raised doubts about how spectacular that revolution truly was, how much the line united and divided. Once seen as a great Emporium for artistic production, the construction scenes – painted, sketched, stitched into the moving panoramas – will focus on the volatile, opportunistic, profit-grabbing ethos, the loose artistic ends and the ongoing ideological market to conjure the process through the inventory of the photographic caches by the Russian photographic practitioners.