Encyclopedia
The
Trans-Siberian Railway or
Trans-Siberian Railroad is a network of
railways connecting
Moscow and European
Russia with the
Russian Far East provinces,
Mongolia,
China and the Sea of Japan.
History
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 , 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 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 . While this route provides access to Baikal's stunning northern coast, it also passes through some rather forbidding terrain.
Demand and design
The first railroad projects in Siberia emerged after the creation of the
Moscow-
St. Petersburg railroad. One of the first was the
Irkutsk-Chita project, intended to connect the former to the
Amur river, and consequently, to the
Pacific Ocean. On the initiative of
Nikolay Muravyov-Amursky, 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.
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 American and British sphere of influence in the Pacific from extending to Siberia.
By the 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, 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 unfortunate, because the swampy banks of the
Ob river near it was considered inappropriate for a bridge. The railway was laid 70 km to the south. 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 disorganized the civic freight flow.
Construction
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 east of Irkutsk. Lake Baikal is more than 640 km long and over 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.
Electrification of the line, begun in 1929 and completed in 2002, allowed a doubling of train weights to 6,000 tonnes.
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 cancelled in 1861. Thus, to defend the central territory and to prevent possible social destabilization, in 1896, the government introduced the Chelyabinsk tariff break , 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
butter production. From 1896 untill 1913 Siberia exported averagely 30,643 thousand pood of bread annually.
The Trans-Siberian line remains the most important transportation link within
Russia; around 30% of Russian exports travel on the line. While it attracts many foreign tourists, it also gets considerably use from domestic passengers.
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.
Costs
The train has 2nd class 4-berth compartments and 1st class 2-berth compartments and a restaurant car. One-way fares start at about 9,226 rubles in a 4-berth sleeper or 18,200 rubles in a 2-berth sleeper.
Routes
Trans-Siberian line
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:
- Branch off from the Trans-Siberian-line at Tarskaya
- Zabaikalsk , Russian border town
- Manzhouli , Chinese border town
- Harbin
- Beijing
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:
- Branch off from the Trans-Siberian line
- Naushki , Russian border town
- Russia-Mongolia border
- Sühbaatar , Mongolian border town
- Ulaan-Baatar , the Mongolian capital
- Zamiin Uud , Mongolian border town
- Erlyan , Chinese border town
- Datong
- Beijing
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 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
- Thomas, Bryn . The Trans-Siberian Handbook . Trailblazer. ISBN 1-873756-70-4
External links
- .
- by .
- from U.S. Department of State
- For timetables, see and ; note that Moscow time applies for railways throughout Russia.
Travel tales:
