Trans-Siberian Railway
The Trans-Siberian Railway, historically known as the Great Siberian Route and often shortened to Transsib, is a large railway system that connects European Russia to the Russian Far East. Spanning a length of over, it is the longest railway line in the world. It runs from the city of Moscow in the west to the city of Vladivostok in the east.
During the period of the Russian Empire, government ministers—personally appointed by Alexander III and his son Nicholas II—supervised the building of the railway network between 1891 and 1916. Even before its completion, the line attracted travelers who documented their experiences. Since 1916, the Trans-Siberian Railway has directly connected Moscow with Vladivostok., expansion projects remain underway, with connections being built to Russia's neighbors Mongolia, China, and North Korea. Additionally, there have been proposals and talks to expand the network to Tokyo, Japan, with new bridges or tunnels that would connect the mainland railway via the Russian island of Sakhalin and the Japanese island of Hokkaido.
Route
The railway is often associated with the main transcontinental Russian line that connects many large and small cities of the European and Asian parts of Russia. At a Moscow–Vladivostok track length of, it spans a record eight time zones. Taking eight days to complete the journey, it was the third-longest single continuous service in the world, after the Moscow–Pyongyang service and the former Kiev–Vladivostok service, both of which also follow the Trans-Siberian for much of their routes.The main route begins in Moscow at Yaroslavsky Vokzal, runs through Yaroslavl or Chelyabinsk, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Ulan-Ude, Chita, and Khabarovsk to Vladivostok via southern Siberia. A second primary route is the Trans-Manchurian, which coincides with the Trans-Siberian east of Chita as far as Tarskaya, about east of Lake Baikal. From Tarskaya the Trans-Manchurian heads southeast, via Harbin Harbin–Manzhouli railway and Mudanjiang Harbin–Suifenhe railway in China's Northeastern provinces, joining the main route in Ussuriysk just north of Vladivostok.
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 Ulaanbaatar 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, 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, and reaches the Tatar Strait at Sovetskaya Gavan.
History
Demand and design
In the late 19th century, the development of Siberia was hampered by poor transport links within the region and with the rest of the country. Aside from the Great Siberian Route, roads suitable for wheeled transport were rare. For about five months of the year, rivers were the main means of transport. During winter, cargo and passengers traveled by horse-drawn sledges over the winter roads, many of which were the same rivers but frozen.The first steamboat on the River Ob, Nikita Myasnikov's Osnova, was launched in 1844. However, early innovation had proven to be difficult, and it was not until 1857 that steamboat shipping had begun major development on the Ob system. Steamboats began operation on the Yenisei in 1863, and on the Lena and Amur in the 1870s. While the comparative flatness of Western Siberia was served by good river systems, the major river systems Ob–Irtysh–Tobol–Chulym of Eastern Siberia had difficulties. The Yenisei, the upper course of the Angara River below Bratsk which was not easily navigable because of the rapids, and the Lena, were mostly navigable only in the north–south direction, making west–east transportation difficult. An attempt to partially remedy the situation by building the Ob–Yenisei Canal had not yielded great success. These issues in the region created the need for a railway to be constructed.
The first railway projects in Siberia emerged after the completion of the Saint Petersburg–Moscow Railway in 1851. One of the first was the Irkutsk–Chita project, proposed by the American entrepreneur Perry Collins and supported by Transport Minister Constantine Possiet with a view toward connecting Moscow to the Amur River, and consequently the Pacific Ocean. Siberia's governor, Nikolay Muravyov-Amursky, was anxious to advance Russian colonization of the now Russian Far East, but his plans were unfeasible due to colonists importing grain and food from China and Korea. It was on Muravyov's initiative that surveys for a railway in the Khabarovsk region were conducted.
Before 1880, the central government had virtually ignored these projects, due to weaknesses in Siberian enterprises, an inefficient bureaucracy, and financial risk. By 1880, there was a large number of rejected and upcoming applications for permission to construct railways in order 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 actual route constructed, alternative projects were proposed:
- Southern route: via Kazakhstan, Barnaul, Abakan and Mongolia.
- Northern route: via Tyumen, Tobolsk, Tomsk, Yeniseysk and the modern Baikal Amur Mainline or even through Yakutsk.
Unlike the rejected private projects that intended to connect the existing cities that required 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. However, due to the swampy banks of the Ob River near Tomsk, the idea to construct a bridge was rejected.
The railway was laid to the south ; a dead-end branch line connected with Tomsk, depriving the city of the prospective transit railway traffic and trade.
Construction
On 9 March 1891, the Russian government issued an imperial rescript in which it announced its intention to construct a railway across Siberia. Tsarevich Nicholas inaugurated the construction of the railway in Vladivostok on 19 May that year.Lake Baikal is more than long and more than deep. Until the Circum–Baikal railway was built the line ended on either side of the lake. The ice-breaking train ferry built in 1897 and smaller ferry SS Angara built in about 1900 made the four-hour crossing to link the two railheads.
The Russian admiral and explorer Stepan Makarov designed Baikal and Angara but they were built in Newcastle upon Tyne, by Armstrong Whitworth. They were "knock down" vessels; that is, each ship was bolted together in the United Kingdom, every part of the ship was marked with a number, the ship was disassembled into many hundreds of parts and transported in kit form to Listvyanka where a shipyard was built especially to reassemble them. Their boilers, engines and some other components were built in Saint Petersburg and transported to Listvyanka to be installed. Baikal had 15 boilers, four funnels, and was long. it could carry 24 railway coaches and one locomotive on the middle deck. Angara was smaller, with two funnels.
Completion of the Circum-Baikal Railway in 1904 bypassed the ferries, but from time to time the Circum–Baikal railway suffered from derailments or rockfalls so both ships were held in reserve until 1916. Baikal was burnt out and destroyed in the Russian Civil War but Angara survives. It has been restored and is permanently moored at Irkutsk where it serves as an office and a museum.
In 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 Amur River Line north of the Chinese border being completed in 1916, there was a continuous railway from Petrograd to Vladivostok that, to this day, is the world's second longest railway line. Electrification of the line, begun in 1929 and completed in 2002, allowed a doubling of train weights to. There were expectations upon electrification that it would increase rail traffic on the line by 40 percent.
The entire length of the Trans-Siberian Railway was double tracked by 1939.
Effects
Siberian agriculture began to send cheap grain westwards beginning around 1869. Agriculture in Central Russia was still under economic pressure after the end of serfdom, which was formally abolished in 1861. To defend the central territory and prevent possible social destabilization, the Tsarist government introduced the Chelyabinsk tariff-break in 1896, a tariff barrier for grain passing through Chelyabinsk, and a similar barrier in Manchuria. This measure changed the nature of export: mills emerged to produce bread from grain in Altai Krai, Novosibirsk and Tomsk, and many farms switched to corn production.The railway immediately filled to capacity with local traffic, mostly wheat. From 1896 until 1913 Siberia exported on average of grain and flour annually. During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, military traffic to the east disrupted the flow of civil freight.
The Trans-Siberian Railway brought with it millions of peasant-migrants from the Western regions of Russia and Ukraine. Between 1906 and 1914, the peak migration years, about four million peasants arrived in Siberia.
Historian Christian Wolmar argues that the railroad was a failure, because it was built for narrow political reasons, with poor supervision and planning. The costs were vastly exaggerated to enrich greedy bureaucrats. The planners hoped it would stimulate settlement, but the Siberian lands were too infertile and cold and distant. There was little settlement beyond from the line. The fragile system could not handle the heavy traffic demanded in wartime, so the Japanese in 1904 knew they were safe in their war with Russia. Wolmar concludes: