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Trans-Siberian Railway

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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 European Russia with Russian Far East provinces, Mongolia and China.

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) and spanning 8 time zones, it is the longest single continuous service in the world, and it takes about 7 days to complete its journey.

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 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, 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.

Route

Trans-Siberian line

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.



History

A station on the railway in 1910.

Russia's longstanding desire for a Pacific port was realised 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 41 miles east of Irkutsk. Lake Baikal is more than 400 miles (640 km) long and over 5,000 feet (1,600 m) 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

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

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.

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 very much used by Russian people to travel around their country.

Trivia

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 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

  • Thomas, Bryn (2003). The Trans-Siberian Handbook (6th Ed). Trailblazer. ISBN 1873756704

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Travel tales:

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