Ottoman Railroad Archive

The Octave Fradet Collection holds the papers of the French engineer Octave Fradet (1842–1887), which chronicle the years he spent working on railroad projects in the Ottoman Empire and beyond. Donated by his descendants to the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (ENPC) in 2002, the collection amounts to around 10,000 pages in twenty boxes, ranging from maps to treaties and from handwritten letters to wage lists.

Instead of leaving the documents to the few academics who first come across them, the project digitized the whole collection to make it openly available, and handed the raw documents to a diverse group of students from France, Turkey and Spain—mostly engineers with no background in history—to see what they would make of them. The digitization of all twenty boxes was completed in April 2026.

The students presented their findings in the exhibition and conference Ottoman Europe: A History on Rails at ENPC in Champs-sur-Marne: the exhibition opened on 28 January 2026, and the conference followed on 29 and 30 January. Videos of the conference and a tour of the exhibition are online.

The work goes on: detailed metadata (names, places, languages) to make the collection searchable; further primary sources from partners across the post-Ottoman world, towards a transnational database on Ottoman railroad history; and a course prototype that can be used to activate dormant source collections elsewhere. The collection and the students’ findings will be presented in full on the project’s own site.