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
. Today, the railway is part of the
Eurasian Land Bridge.
History
Route development
The 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 Tsar Alexander II in St.
Petersburg. His son, Tsar
Alexander III supervised the
construction; the Tsar 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 Railway
during his stop at 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 travelling 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 Russo-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 large and small cities of the European and Asian parts
of Russia.
At 9,259 kilometres
(5,753 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
(10,267 km, 6,380 mi) and the Kiev
–Vladivostok
(11,085 km, 6,888 mi) 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 railway
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
.
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.
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.
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 Vancouver
in Canada
, through
Canada to Europe, or the Panama Canal
to Europe also through Japan, Hong Kong
, Singapore
, Port
Said
and Terst.
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 travelled by horse-drawn
sleds over
the
winter roads, many of which were the
same rivers, now ice-covered.
The first
steamboat on the
River 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
railway 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.
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 colonisation 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.
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.
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), 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.
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 centre.
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 railway 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 centre—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, as well as a smaller one, the SS Angara, were built at
Newcastle
upon Tyne
, 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
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 Krai,
Novosibirsk and Tomsk, and many
farms switched to butter production.
From 1896 until 1913 Siberia exported on average 501,932 tonnes
(30,643,000
pood) 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 19th — Early 20th 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 transportation
link within Russia; around 30% of Russian exports travel on the
line. While it attracts many foreign tourists, it gets most of its
use from domestic passengers.
Today the Trans-Siberian Railway carries about 200,000 containers
per year to Europe. Russian Railways intends to increase the volume
of container traffic on the Trans-Siberian still further by 2-2.5
time and is developing a fleet of specialised cars and increasing
terminal capacity at the ports by a factor of 3 to 4! By 2010, the
volume of traffic between Russia and China could reach some 60
million tons, most of which will go by the Trans-Siberian.).
With
perfect coordination of the participating countries' railway
authorities, a trainload of containers can be taken from Beijing to Hamburg
, via the Transmongolian and Transsiberian lines in
as little as 15 days, but typical cargo travel times are usually
significantly longer - e.g., typical cargo travel time from Japan
to major destinations in European Russia was reported as around 25
days.
Passenger fares
Return tickets from Central Europe to Vladivostok and back can be
as cheap as
€250.00 with so called CityStar or
Sparpreis Europa special offers. In addition a reservation
supplement for long-distance trains is mandatory, the prices range
between €30.00 to €60.00 each way for trains in four-berth sleeper
on the Trans-Siberian railroad. Overall, buying tickets for Russian
trains in Germany, the Czech Republic or Poland can be cheaper and
easier (language-wise) than in Russia.
In addition to these services, a number of privately-chartered
services are operated and one tour operator even commissioned the
construction of their own train, jointly owned by themselves and
Russian railways. The train, officially named
Golden Eagle
Trans-Siberian Express was launched on 26 April 2007 by
Prince Michael of Kent.
Routes
In general, the lower the train number the fewer stops it makes and
therefore the faster the journey. The train number makes no
difference to the duration of border crossings.
Trans-Siberian line
View from the rear platform of the
Simskaia railway station of the Samara-Zlatoust Railway, ca.
1910
A commonly used main line route is as follows. Distances and travel
times are from the scheduleof train No.002M, Moscow-Vladivostok.
- Moscow, Yaroslavsky
Rail Terminal
(0 km, Moscow Time).
- Vladimir
(210 km, MT)
- Nizhny Novgorod
(461 km, 6 hours, MT) on the Volga River. Its railroad station
is still called by its old Soviet
name
Gorky, and is so
listed in most timetables.
- Kirov
(917 km, 13 hours, MT) on the Vyatka River
.
- Perm
(1,397 km, 20 hours, MT+2) on the Kama
River
- Official boundary between Europe and Asia (1,777 km),
marked by a white obelisk.
- Yekaterinburg
(1,778 km, 1 day 2 h, MT+2) in the Urals
, still
called by its old Soviet name Sverdlovsk in most
timetables.
- Tyumen
(2,104 km)
- Omsk
(2,676 km, 1 day 14 h, MT+3) on the Irtysh River
- Novosibirsk (3,303 km, 1 day 22 h, MT+3) on the Ob River
- Krasnoyarsk (4,065 km, 2 days 11 h, MT+4) on the Yenisei River
- Taishet (4,483 km), junction with the Baikal-Amur
Mainline
- Irkutsk (5,153 km, 3 days 4 h, MT+5) near Lake Baikal's southern extremity
- Ulan
Ude (5,609 km, 3 days 12 h, MT+5)
- Junction with the Trans-Mongolian line (5,622 km)
- Chita (6,166 km, 3 days 22 h, MT+6)
- Junction with the Trans-Manchurian line at Tarskaya (6,274 km)
- Birobidzhan
(8,312 km, 5 days 13h), the capital of
Jewish
Autonomous Region
- Khabarovsk (8,493 km, 5 days 15 h, MT+7) on the Amur River
- Ussuriysk (9,147 km), junction with the Trans-Manchurian
line and Korea branch
- Vladivostok (9,289 km, 6 days 4 h, MT+7), on the Pacific Ocean
Services to North Korea continue from Ussuriysk via:
- Primorsk (9,257 km, 6 days 14h,
MT+7)
- Khasan
(9,407 km, 6 days 19h, MT+7, border with North Korea)
- Tumangang
(9,412 km, 7 days 10h, MT+6, North Korean side
of the border)
- Pyongyang (10,267 km, 9 days 2h, MT+6)
There are many alternative routings between Moscow and Siberia. For
example:
- Some
trains would leave Moscow from Kazansky Rail Terminal
instead of Yaroslavsky Rail Terminal; this would save some 20 km off the
distances, because it provides a shorter exit from Moscow onto the
Nizhny Novgorod main line.
- One
can take a night train from Moscow's Kursky Rail
Terminal
to Nizhny Novgorod, make a stopover in the Nizhny and then transfer to
a Siberia-bound train
- From
1956 to 2001 many trains went between Moscow and Kirov via Yaroslavl
instead of Nizhny Novgorod. This would add some 29 km to the
distances from Moscow, making Vladivostok Kilometer 9,288.
- Other
trains get from Moscow (Kazansky Terminal) to Yekaterinburg via
Kazan.
- Between Yekaterinburg and Omsk it is
possible to travel via Kurgan Petropavl
(in Kazakhstan
) instead of Tyumen.
- One
can bypass Yekaterinburg altogether by travelling via Samara
, Ufa
, Chelyabinsk, and Petropavl; this was historically the earliest
configuration.
Depending on the route taken, the distances from Moscow to the same
station in Siberia may differ by several tens of kilometers.
Trans-Manchurian line
The
Trans-Manchurian line, as e.g. used by train No.020, Moscow-Beijing
follows the same route as the Trans-Siberian between Moscow and Chita, and then follows thisroute to China:
- Branch off from the Trans-Siberian-line at Tarskaya (6,274 km from Moscow)
- Zabaikalsk
(6,626 km), Russian border town
- Manzhouli
(6,638 km from Moscow, 2,323 km from
Beijing), Chinese border town
- Harbin
(7,573 km, 1,388 km)
- Changchun
(7,820 km from Moscow)
- Beijing (8,961 km from Moscow)
The express train (No.020) travel time from Moscow to Beijing is
just over six days.
There is no direct passenger service along the entire original
Trans-Manchurian route (i.e., from Moscow—or anywhere in
Russia-west-of-Manchuria—to Vladivostok via Harbin), due to the
obvious administrative and technical (
gauge break) inconveniences of crossing the
border twice.However, assuming sufficient patience and possession
of appropriate visas, it is still possible to travel all the way
along the original
route, with a few stopovers (e.g. in
Harbin, Grodekovo
, and Ussuriysk).Such an itinerary would pass through the
following points from Harbin east:
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 (5,655 km from
Moscow)
- Naushki (5,895 km, MT+5), Russian border town
- Russian–Mongolian border (5,900 km, MT+5)
- Sükhbaatar
(5,921 km, MT+5), Mongolian border
town
- Ulan
Bator
(6,304 km, MT+5), the Mongolian
capital
- Zamyn-Üüd
(7,013 km, MT+5), Mongolian border
town
- Erenhot
(842 km from Beijing,
MT+5), Chinese border town
- Datong
(371 km, MT+5)
- Beijing (MT+5)
Cultural importance
Developments in shipping
Russia and Japan are working together to set up a system to safely
ship goods to Europe through the Trans-Siberian.
With the
intensification of Somalian piracy,
Russia hopes to look increasingly attractive as an alternate route
for some goods as compared to sailing around the Horn of Africa and especially around the
Cape of Good
Hope
. .
On January 11, 2008, China, Mongolia, Russia, Belarus
, Poland
and
Germany
agreed to collaborate on a cargo train service
between Beijing and Hamburg.
One of the complicating factors related to such ventures is the
fact that the
CIS
states'
broad railway gauge is
incompatible with China and
Western
and
Central Europe's
standard gauge. Therefore, a train travelling
from China to Western Europe would encounter
gauge break twice — at the Chinese-Mongolian
or Chinese-Russian frontier and at the Ukrainian or Belorussian
border with Central European countries.
See also
References
- Faulstich, Edith. M. "The Siberian Sojourn" Yonkers, N.Y.
(1972-1977)
External links
, Abakan
and
Mongolia
, Tomsk
and the modern Baikal Amur Mainline or even through
Yakutsk
.
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