After the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the ruling elite, known as the ‘Kemalists’, aimed not only to catch up with the Western civilization and surpass it, but also to demonstrate that the new Turkey was capable of surpassing the Ottoman Empire primarily in terms of the economic performance and national security. Even though the roughly 4000 km of the railway network within the new boundaries of Turkey was constructed under the late Ottoman Empire, the founding fathers of the republic were inclined to deny the legacy of their Ottoman predecessors. Instead, they underscored their own contribution and instrumentalized the railways which were perceived as a symbol of modernity, catalyst of the national economy and a conditio sine qua non of the national defense. Similarly, the academic literature, which focused on the role played by the foreign capital, presented the railway development in the late Ottoman period as a chaotic, disorderly and inefficient process. By doing so, the Ottoman Empire was mostly portrayed as a playground of the imperialist powers which competed for the concessions. However, the question whether this competition enabled the Ottoman statesmen to implement their own projects was rather overlooked. In this paper, I aim to find out to what extent the Ottoman statesmen were able to take advantage of the competition between the British, French and German railway companies and how they influenced their Kemalist successors. Furthermore, I assess the change and continuity over time by contrasting and comparing the economic, political and military considerations of the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic, which were ostensibly very different. Focusing on the construction of the Samsun-Sivas, Sivas-Erzurum, Ulukisla-Kayseri, Kayseri-Sivas, Sivas-Malatya and Malatya-Diyarbakir railroads, the paper shows that the ruling elite of the 1920s and 30s by far carried out the detailed project drawn up by the Ottoman Minister of Public Works, Hasan Fehmi Pasha in 1880. As a result, they have somewhat complemented the modernist ideals of the sultan, Abdulhamid II (1876-1909), who is seen as the mirror image of the former by both his proponents and opponents.