Although often considered mundane, infrastructure plays a crucial role in shaping lived experiences of space. An investigation of the interplay between emergent tourism and the early railroads of the Ottoman Empire provides an opportunity to explore this dialectic between infrastructure and experience. Motivated by modernizing impulses, the Ottoman government engaged with global networks of capital and expertise by inviting British industrialists to construct two rail lines connecting the port city of Izmir with its fertile hinterland in the mid-19^th century. At the same time, this landscape was emerging as central to identity formation processes among European and American audiences, who looked to Classical and Biblical sites for the origins of their civilization. New infrastructural mobilities, together with a burgeoning tourism industry epitomized by guidebooks, began to enable ever wider segments of these populations to directly experience the ancient sites of Anatolia. Thus, the train and the guidebook facilitated and choreographed the touristic experience. A close examination of this historical moment adds to our understanding of infrastructure’s role in altering quotidian spatial encounters.