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Trans-Siberian Railway

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Trans-Siberian line in red; Baikal Amur Mainline in green.
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Trans-Siberian line in red; Baikal Amur Mainline in green.

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.

The main route, the Trans-Siberian, runs from Moscow to Vladivostok via southern Siberia and was built between 1891 and 1916. It is often associated with the main Russian train that connects these two cities. At 9,288 kilometres (5,772 miles), spanning 8 time zones and taking about 7 days to complete its journey, it is the third longest single continuous service in the world, after the Donetsk - Vladivostok and Moscow - Pyongyang services, both of which follow the Trans-Siberian.

A second primary route is the Trans-Manchurian, which coincides with the Trans-Siberian as far as Tarskaya, about 1000 km east of Lake Baikal. From Tarskaya the Trans-Manchurian heads southeast into China and makes its way down to Beijing.

The Trans-Mongolian train passing through the Gobi Desert
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The Trans-Mongolian train passing through the Gobi Desert

The third primary route is the Trans-Mongolian, 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 several hundred miles west of Lake Baikal and passes the lake at its northernmost extremity. It reaches the Pacific to the northeast of Khabarovsk, at Sovetskaya Gavan (i.e., Soviet Haven, a.k.a. Sovgavan, Sovietgavan, and earlier Imperatorskaya Gavan, i.e., Imperial Haven). While this route provides access to Baikal's stunning northern coast, it also passes through some rather forbidding terrain.

Contents

Route

Trans-Siberian line

The marker for kilometer 9288, at the end of the line in Vladivostok
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The marker for kilometer 9288, at the end of the line in Vladivostok

The main line follows the following route:

From 1956 to 2001 trains went via Yaroslavl instead of Nizhny Novgorod.

Trans-Manchurian line

The Trans-Manchurian line follows the same route as the Trans-Siberian between Moscow and Chita, and then follows this route to China:

Trans-Mongolian line

The Trans-Mongolian line follows the same route as the Trans-Siberian between Moscow and Ulan Ude, and then follows this route to Mongolia and China:

The railway features many remarkable bridges, the longest being Khabarovsk Bridge (1916).
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The railway features many remarkable bridges, the longest being Khabarovsk Bridge (1916).

Demand and Designing

Based on a chapter of: Problem Regions of Resourse Type: Economical Integration of European North-East, Ural and Siberia. / Managing editors: V. V. Alexeev, M. K. Bandman, V. V. Kuleshov — Novosibirsk, [IEIE], 2002. ISBN 5-89665-060-4 The first projects of railroads in Siberia emerged since the creation of the railroad Moscow-St. Petersburg. One of the first was Irkutsk-Chita project, intended to connect the former to Amur river and, consequently, to the Pacific Ocean. By the Muravyov-Amursky's initiative, surveys on a railroad in Khabarovsk region were conducted.

But before 1880 the central government almost not responded to these projects, because of weakness of Siberian enterprises, heavy and clumsy bureaucracy, and fear of financial risk. Financial minister count 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.Столетие железных дорог // Труды научно-технического комитета Комиссариата путей сообщения. Вып.20 — М., 1925. Century of Railways // Works of scientific and technical committee of Communications Comissariat. Issue 20 — Moscow, 1925.

The abovementioned Irkutsk-Chita project, proposed by an American entrepreneur W. Collins, was rejected by the government, and a lesson was given to the major-general Muravyov-Amurskiy who thoughtlessly showed benevolence to the American project. Thus the government tried to prevent the involvement of Siberia in the American and British sphere of influence in the Pacific region.

By the 1880 there was a large number of rejected and upcoming applications for permission to construct railways to connect Siberia only with the Pacific. This worried the government and made clear that connecting Siberia with Central Russia must not be delayed anymore.

Krasnoyarsk Bridge had the longest spans in the world, won Grand Prix of the 1900 World's Fair and is included into UNESCO World Heritage list
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Krasnoyarsk Bridge had the longest spans in the world, won Grand Prix of the 1900 World's Fair and is included into UNESCO World Heritage list

The designing lasted 10 years. Along with the built way, alternative projects were proposed:

Railwaymen fought against suggestions to save funds, for example, to install ferryboats instead of bridges over the rivers, and then, if traffic would be sufficient, to build bridges. The designers insisted and secured the decision to construct a continuous uninterrupted way.

Unlike the rejected private projects, that intended to connect the existing cities demanding transport, Trans-Siberian did not have such a priority. Thus, to save money and avoid collisions with land owners, it was decided to lay the road aside the existing cities. Tomsk was the largest city, and the most misfortuned, because the swampy banks of Ob river near it was considered inapropriate to build a bridge. The railway was laid in 70 km to the South, thus deprived the city of the prospective rail traffic.

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 disorganized the civic freight flow.

Construction

A station on the railway in 1910.
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A station on the railway in 1910.

Russia's longstanding desire for a Pacific port was realized with the founding of Vladivostok in 1860. By 1880, Vladivostok had grown into a major port city, and the lack of adequate transportation links between European Russia and its Far Eastern provinces soon became an obvious problem. 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 Novonikolaevsk, founded in 1883, metamorphosed into a large Siberian center - Novosibirsk city. In 1898 the first train reached Irkutsk and the shore of Lake Baikal. The railroad 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.

Convict labour, from Sakhalin Island and other places, and Russian soldiers were drafted into railway-building service. One of the largest obstacles was 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 was purchased from 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.

Bashkir switchman near the town Ust' Katav on the Yuryuzan River between Ufa and Cheliabinsk in the Ural Mountain region, ca. 1910
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Bashkir switchman near the town Ust' Katav on the Yuryuzan River between Ufa and Cheliabinsk in the Ural Mountain region, ca. 1910

Electrification of the line, begun in 1929 and completed in 2002, allowed a doubling of train weights to 6,000 tonnes.

Effects

Trans-Siberian gave a great boost to Siberian agriculture, allowing large export to the Central Russia and European countries. It pushed not only the closest to the railway territories, but also those, connected with rivers. Altai exported wheat by Ob river.

Siberian agriculture exported a lot of cheap grain towards the West. The agriculture in Central Russia was still under pressure of serfdom, formally cancelled in 1861. Thus, to defend it and to prevent a possible social destabilization, in 1896, the government introduced Chelyabinsk tariff break (Челябинский тарифный перелом), a tariff barier for grain in Chelyabinsk, and a similar barrier in Manchuria. This measure changed the form of bread export: mills emerged in Altai, Novosibirsk and Tomsk, many farms switched to butter production. Since 1896 till 1913 Siberia exported averagely 30,643 thousand pood (501,932 tonnes) of bread (grain, flour) annually.Храмков А. А. Железнодорожные перевозки хлеба из Сибири в западном направлении в конце XIX — начале XX вв. // [Предприниматели и предпринимательство в Сибири. Вып.3]: Сборник научных статей. Барнаул: Изд-во АГУ, 2001.
Khramkov A. A. Railroad Transportation of Bread from Siberia to the West in the Late XIX — Early XX Centuries. // [Entrepreneurs and Business Undertakings in Siberia. 3rd issue]. Collection of scientific articles. Barnaul: Altai State University publishing house, 2001. ISBN 5-7904-0195-3

The Trans-Siberian line remains the most important traffic connection within Russia, and around 30% of Russian exports travel on the line. While it attracts many foreign tourists, it is much used by Russian people to travel around their country.

Today the Trans-Siberian Railway carries about 20,000 containers per year to Europe, including 8,300 containers from Japan. This is a fairly small amount, considering that for all means of transport combined Japan sends 360,000 containers to Europe per year. Thus there is potential for growth, and the Russian Ministry of Transport plans to increase the number of containers shipped on the railway to 100,000 by the year 2005 and satisfy the passage and cargo needs of 120 trains per day. This requires that stretches that are now single track and form a bottleneck are made double track.

Trivia

Changing the wheels from Mongolian gauge to Chinese gauge at the border
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Changing the wheels from Mongolian gauge to Chinese gauge at the border

Since Russia and Mongolia use broad gauge railways while China uses the standard gauge, there is a break-of-gauge, meaning that carriages to or from China cannot simply cross the border, and each carriage has to be lifted in turn to have its bogies changed. The whole operation, combined with passport and customs control, can take several hours.

The lower the train number the fewer stops it makes and therefore the faster the journey. Unfortunately, the train number makes no difference to the duration of border crossings.

See also

References

  • Nevzgodine, Ivan (2003). The impact of the Trans-Siberian Railway on the architecture and urban planning of Siberian cities. In: Ralf Roth & Marie-Noëlle Polino (Eds.), The city and the railway in Europe (Historical urban studies), Abingdon: Ashgate, ISBN 0-7546-0766-6, pp. 79-103
Vladivostok terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway.
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Vladivostok terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway.

External links

from Wikitravel

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