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Trans-Siberian Railway

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Trans-Siberian Railway
Bridge over Kama River, near Perm in 1912
Bridge over Kama River, near Perm in 1912
Trans-Siberian line in red; Baikal Amur Mainline in green
Trans-Siberian line in red; Baikal Amur Mainline in green
Line length: 9,259 km (5,753 mi)
Gauge: Broad 1,520 mm (4 ft 11+7⁄8 in)
km Station                                                                                      
BHF
284 Yaroslavl
WASSERq WBRÜCKE WASSERq
2706 Irtysh River
WASSERq WBRÜCKE WASSERq
3332 Ob River
BHF
4098 Krasnoyarsk
BHF
4516 Taishet
BHF
5642 Ulan Ude
WASSERq eGRENZE+WBRÜCKE WASSERq
8515 Amur J.A. Oblast - Khabarovsk Krai border
KBHFe
9289 Vladivostok

The Trans-Siberian Railway or Trans-Siberian Railroad (Транссибирская магистраль, Транссиб in Russian, or Transsibirskaya magistral', Transsib) is a network of railways connecting Moscow and European Russia with the Russian Far East provinces, Mongolia, China and the Sea of Japan.

Contents

[edit] History

[edit] Route development

The original plans and funding for construction of the Trans-Siberian railway to connect the capital, St. Petersburg, with the Pacific Ocean port of Vladivostok were approved by the Tsar Alexander II in St. Petersburg. His son, the Tsar Alexander III supervised the construction; the Tsar personally appointed Sergei Witte Director of Railway Affairs in 1889. The Imperial State Budget spent 1.455 billion rubles from 1891 to 1913 on the railway's construction, an expenditure record which was surpassed only by the military budget in World War I.

In March 1891, the future Tsar Nicholas II personally opened and blessed the construction of the Far East segment of the Trans-Siberian Railroad on their stop in Vladivostok, after visiting Japan at the end of his journey around the world. Nicholas II made notes in his diary about his anticipation of travelling in the comfort of The Tsar's Train across the unspoiled wilderness of Siberia. The Tsar's Train was designed and built in St. Petersburg to serve as the main mobile office of the Tsar and his staff for traveling across Russia.

The main route of the Trans-Siberian originates in St. Petersburg at Moskovsky Vokzal, runs through Moscow, Chelyabinsk, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Ulan-Ude, Chita, Blagoveshchensk and Khabarovsk to Vladivostok via southern Siberia and was built from 1891 to 1916 under the supervision of government ministers of Russia who were personally appointed by the Tsar Alexander III and by his son, Tsar Nicholas II. The additional Chinese Eastern Railway was constructed as the Russian-Chinese part of the Trans-Siberian railway, connecting Russia with China and providing a shorter route to Vladivostok, and it was operated by a Russian staff and administration based in Harbin.

The Trans-Siberian railway is often associated with the main transcontinental Russian train that connects hundreds of big and small cities of the European and Asian parts of Russia. At 9,288 kilometres (5,772 miles), spanning a record 7 time zones and taking several days to complete the journey, it is the third-longest single continuous service in the world, after the Moscow–Pyongyang (10267 km, 6380 mi) [1] and the Kiev–Vladivostok (11085 km, 6888 mi) [2] services, both of which also follow the Trans-Siberian for much of their routes. The route was opened by Tsarevich Nicholas Alexandrovitch of Russia after his eastern journey ended.

A second primary route is the Trans-Manchurian, which coincides with the Trans-Siberian as far as Tarskaya (a stop 12 km east of Karymskaya, in Zabaykalsky Krai), about 1,000 km east of Lake Baikal. From Tarskaya the Trans-Manchurian heads southeast, via Harbin and Mudanjiang in China's Northeastern Provinces (from where a connection to Beijing is used by one of Moscow–Beijing trains), joining with the main route in Ussuriysk just north of Vladivostok. This is the shortest and the oldest rail route to Vladivostok. Some trains split at Shenyang, China, with a portion of the service continuing to Pyongyang, North Korea.

The third primary route is the Trans-Mongolian Railway, which coincides with the Trans-Siberian as far as Ulan Ude on Lake Baikal's eastern shore. From Ulan-Ude the Trans-Mongolian heads south to Ulaan-Baatar before making its way southeast to Beijing.

In 1991, a fourth route running further to the north was finally completed, after more than five decades of sporadic work. Known as the Baikal Amur Mainline (BAM), this recent extension departs from the Trans-Siberian line at Taishet several hundred miles west of Lake Baikal and passes the lake at its northernmost extremity. It crosses the Amur River at Komsomolsk-na-Amure (north of Khabarovsk), and reaches the Pacific at Sovetskaya Gavan.

[edit] War and revolution

After the revolution of 1917, the railway served as the vital line of communication for the Czechoslovak Legion and the Allied armies that landed troops at Vladivostok during the Siberian Intervention of the Russian Civil War. These forces supported the White Russian government of Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, based in Omsk, and White Russian soldiers fighting the Bolsheviks on the Ural Front. The intervention was weakened, and ultimately defeated, by partisan fighters who blew up bridges and sections of track, particularly in the volatile region between Krasnoyarsk and Chita.[3]

The Trans-Siberian also played a very direct role during parts of Russia's history, with the Czechoslovak Legion using heavily armed and armoured trains to control large amounts of the railway (and of Russia itself) during the Russian Civil War at the end of World War I.[4] As one of the few organised fighting forces left in the aftermath of the Imperial collapse, and before the Red Army took control, the Czechs and Slovaks were able to take use their organisation and the resources of the railway to establish a temporary zone of control before eventually continuing onwards towards Vladivostok, from where they emigrated back to Czechoslovakia through America and Germany.

[edit] Demand and design

In the late 19th century, the development of Siberia was hampered by poor transport links within the region as well as between Siberia and the rest of the country. Aside from the Great Siberian Route, good roads suitable for wheeled transport were few and far between. For about five months of the year, rivers were the main means of transportation; during the cold half of the year, cargo and passengers traveled by horse-drawn sleds over the winter roads, many of which were the same rivers, now ice-covered.

The first steamboat on the Ob, Nikita Myasnikov's Osnova, was launched in 1844; but the early starts were difficult, and it was not until 1857 that steamboat shipping started developing on the Ob system in a serious way. Steamboats started operating on the Yenisei in 1863, on the Lena and Amur in the 1870s.

While the comparably flat Western Siberia was at least fairly well served by the gigantic Ob–Irtysh–Tobol–Chulym river system, the mighty rivers of Eastern Siberia — the Yenisei, the upper course of the Angara River (the Angara below Bratsk was not easily navigable because of the rapids), and the Lena — were mostly navigable only in the north-south direction. An attempt to partially remedy the situation by building the Ob-Yenisei Canal was not particularly successful. Only a railroad could be a real solution to the region's transportation problems.

The first railroad projects in Siberia emerged after the completion of the Moscow-Saint Petersburg Railway in 1851.[5] One of the first was the Irkutsk–Chita project, proposed by an American entrepreneur W. Collins and supported by Transport Minister Constantine Possiet with a view toward connecting Moscow to the Amur river, and consequently, to the Pacific Ocean. Siberia's governor, Nikolay Muravyov-Amursky, was anxious to advance the colonization of the Russian Far East, but his plans could not materialize as long as the colonists had to import grain and other food from China and Korea.[6] It was on Muravyov's initiative that surveys for a railroad in the Khabarovsk region were conducted.

Before 1880, the central government had virtually ignored these projects, because of the weakness of Siberian enterprises, a clumsy bureaucracy, and fear of financial risk. Financial minister Count Egor Kankrin wrote:

The idea of covering Russia with a railroad network not just exceeds any possibility, but even building the railway from Petersburg to Kazan must be found untimely by several centuries.[7]

By 1880, there were a large number of rejected and upcoming applications for permission to construct railways to connect Siberia with the Pacific but not eastern Russia. This worried the government and made connecting Siberia with central Russia a pressing concern. The design process lasted 10 years. Along with the route actually constructed, alternative projects were proposed:

Railwaymen fought against suggestions to save funds, for example, by installing ferryboats instead of bridges over the rivers until traffic increased. The designers insisted and secured the decision to construct an uninterrupted railway.

Unlike the rejected private projects that intended to connect the existing cities demanding transport, the Trans-Siberian did not have such a priority. Thus, to save money and avoid clashes with land owners, it was decided to lay the railway outside the existing cities. Tomsk was the largest city, and the most unfortunate, because the swampy banks of the Ob River near it were considered inappropriate for a bridge. The railway was laid 70 km to the south (instead crossing the Ob at Novosibirsk city), just a blind branch line connected with Tomsk, depriving the city of the prospective transit rail traffic and trade.

The railway was instantly filled to its capacity with local traffic, mostly wheat. Together with low speed and low possible weights of trains, it upset the promised role as a transit route between Europe and East Asia. During the Russian-Japanese war, the military traffic to the East almost disrupted the flow of civil freight.

[edit] Construction

Train entering a Circum-Baikal tunnel west of Kultuk
Vladivostok terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway

Full-time construction on the Trans-Siberian Railway began in 1891 and was put into execution and overseen by Sergei Witte, who was then Finance Minister.

Similar to the First Transcontinental Railroad in the USA, Russian engineers started construction at both ends and worked towards the center. From Vladivostok the railway was laid north along the right bank of the Ussuri River to Khabarovsk at the Amur River, becoming the Ussuri railway.

In 1890, a bridge across the river Ural was built and the new railroad entered Asia. The bridge across the Ob River was built in 1898 and the small city of Novonikolaevsk, founded in 1883, metamorphosed into a large Siberian center—Novosibirsk. In 1898, the first train reached Irkutsk and the shores of Lake Baikal. The railway ran on to the East, across the Shilka and the Amur rivers and soon reached Khabarovsk. The Vladivostok-Khabarovsk branch was built a bit earlier, in 1897.

Russian soldiers, as well as convict labourers from Sakhalin and other places were pressed into railway-building service. One of the largest challenges was the construction of the Circum-Baikal Railway around Lake Baikal, some 60 km (40 mi) east of Irkutsk. Lake Baikal is more than 640 km (400 mi) long and over 1,600 m (5,000 feet) deep. The line ended on each side of the lake and a special icebreaker ferryboat, the SS Baikal, was built at Newcastle, England, to connect the railway. In the winter sleighs were used to move passengers and cargo from one side of the lake to the other until the completion of the Lake Baikal spur along the southern edge of the lake. With the completion of the Amur River line north of the Chinese border in 1916, there was a continuous railway from Petrograd to Vladivostok that remains to this day the world's longest railway line. Electrification of the line, begun in 1929 and completed in 2002, allowed a doubling of train weights to 6,000 tonnes.

[edit] Effects

The Trans-Siberian Railway gave a great boost to Siberian agriculture, facilitating substantial exports to central Russia and Europe. It influenced the territories it connected directly, as well as those connected to it by river transport. For instance, Altai Krai exported wheat to the railway via the Ob River.

As Siberian agriculture began to export cheap grain towards the West, agriculture in Central Russia was still under economic pressure after the end of serfdom, which was formally abolished in 1861. Thus, to defend the central territory and to prevent possible social destabilization, in 1896 the government introduced the Chelyabinsk tariff break (Челябинский тарифный перелом), a tariff barrier for grain passing through Chelyabinsk, and a similar barrier in Manchuria. This measure changed the nature of export: mills emerged to create bread from grain in Altai, Novosibirsk and Tomsk, and many farms switched to