MOSUL, Iraq—South of Mosul, Saleh stood in front of a ruined station with his son. Along the tracks, train cars lie wrecked, pocked with bullet holes. A pair of skinny cats looked out from the doorway of the former ticket hall. “My father was the stationmaster here,” he said. “But he died in 2003 and I took over. That was also the year the trains stopped running on time. After ISIS, they stopped running at all.” He doesn’t know when they will begin again.

“My happiest memory as a child was laying my head on the tracks and listening for the trains coming,” he told me. “We knew these tracks went all the way to Turkey and onwards to Europe. ‘I’ll take us all on a trip there one day,’ my father said.”

MOSUL, Iraq—South of Mosul, Saleh stood in front of a ruined station with his son. Along the tracks, train cars lie wrecked, pocked with bullet holes. A pair of skinny cats looked out from the doorway of the former ticket hall. “My father was the stationmaster here,” he said. “But he died in 2003 and I took over. That was also the year the trains stopped running on time. After ISIS, they stopped running at all.” He doesn’t know when they will begin again.

“My happiest memory as a child was laying my head on the tracks and listening for the trains coming,” he told me. “We knew these tracks went all the way to Turkey and onwards to Europe. ‘I’ll take us all on a trip there one day,’ my father said.”

I was at Saleh’s ruined station as I retraced the route of the never-completed Berlin-Baghdad railway. Started in 1903, it was an audacious attempt by the German and Ottoman empires to bypass the Suez Canal and create a fast, overland route to the Persian Gulf.

Years after the fall of the Islamic State in Mosul, Iraq, the city’s grand train station still bears witness to destruction, photographed on July 9.

For the Germans, it was a way to cement their alliance with the Ottomans and put pressure on Britain’s empire in India. Suspicions of oil in Mesopotamia only sweetened the prize.

For the Ottomans, who had seen the heart of their empire in the Balkans fragment and break away, the railway was an effort to make sure their Asian provinces didn’t go the same way. As Eugene Rogan, author of The Fall of the Ottomans, told me, “Railways were a way for the Ottomans to extend their effective reach into an area where they really had a very poor record of direct rule. To keep the Kurds close, keep the Arabs close, keep the Armenians close. Try to keep the disparate peoples of the empire bound to Istanbul’s rule.”

For both the German and Ottoman powers, it was also a way to move weapons across the continents as the world prepared for war.

A century after Berlin and Istanbul tried to bind Europe to the Gulf by rail, the unfinished line still traces today’s fractures and points to a new race to redraw Eurasian connectivity. Turkey touts its Middle Corridor, a Trans-Caspian route that seeks to compete with the Suez and sidestep Russia. Baghdad, meanwhile, is selling its ambitious “Dry Canal,” a proposed road and rail ink from the Grand Faw Port to Turkey and onward to Europe. Like the Berlin-Baghdad Railway, it promises to cut days off Suez transit times. Further west, Chinese capital funds Balkan rails for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), while the European Union talks “de-risking” and hardens its borders with “pre-accession” funds and Frontex deployments.

But like the original Berlin-Baghdad railway, these projects remain incomplete. Along the itinerary I traveled, oil and containers move slowly, while people often can’t move at all. Following the ghost route of the railway from Hamburg, Germany, to Basra, Iraq, reveals that the same track gauge can carry radically different dreams—from the kaiser’s eastern aspirations to those of the migrants and refugees today for whom connectivity is still just a mirage.

A man waits for a train at a transit stop in Hamburg, Germany, on June 28. The city is the northern terminus of the historic Berlin-Baghdad line.

My journey to Saleh’s ruined station near Mosul began at the end of June in Hamburg, the railway’s intended northern terminus. A narrow tidal port on the shore of the North Sea, Hamburg still relies on its connection to the rails to stay competitive.

On the train south to Berlin, I met Bahar, an Iranian artist. Her reaction, when I told her about the Berlin-Baghdad railway, captured the broken promise of connectivity that I heard again and again along the route. “It is hard to imagine such a connection,” she said, “with so many wars and borders. … It is like something from a fairytale.”

Bahar, an Iranian artist, on public transit in Berlin on June 29.

Left: A visitor admires one of the many Middle Eastern artifacts held in Berlin museums on June 29. Right: Prayer beads and turbah prayer tablets at Imam Riza Mosque in Berlin on June 29.

In Berlin, I spoke to dozens of Iraqis and Syrians, many of whom walked here over months, some almost drowning on the boat from Turkey to Greece. Munzer, a Syrian man from Homs, said that of the 50 people he set out with, only five made it. He........

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