Construction of the Trans-Siberian railway. Trans-Siberian Railway

On March 29, 1891, Emperor Alexander III signed a decree on the construction of the Great Siberian Road, better known as the Trans-Siberian Railway.

The anniversary is not widely celebrated in Russia. Society and the state treat the Trans-Siberian Railway without emotion: yes, and it’s good.

Meanwhile, contemporaries called the Trans-Siberian Railway one of the greatest technical achievements of mankind, comparing its launch with the laying of the Suez Canal and even with the discovery of America.

According to modern historian Alexander Goryanin, Russia has no less reason to be proud of the Trans-Siberian Railway than its first satellite.

Interesting facts about the Trans-Siberian Railway and more

The first steam locomotives in Russia were called steamships.
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During the 40 pre-revolutionary years, 81 thousand kilometers of railways were built in the country, and from 1920 to 1960 - 44 thousand kilometers. More than half of the main routes currently at the disposal of RAO Russian Railways are a royal heritage.
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For a huge country, railway construction was a vital necessity. In the middle of the 19th century, delivering a pound of coal from England to St. Petersburg cost 12 kopecks, and from Donbass - a ruble. Periodic outbreaks of famine occurred mainly not because of a physical shortage of bread, but because of the inability to bring it from productive provinces to lean ones.
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Having built railways from St. Petersburg to Tsarskoe Selo (1842) and from St. Petersburg to Moscow (1851), Nicholas I did not welcome their further development. “Railroads are not a consequence of pressing necessity, but more often an object of artificial needs and luxury. They encourage unnecessary movements from place to place,” said Finance Minister Yegor Kankrin.
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Alexander II revised his father's policies because the Crimean War showed that the lack of transport infrastructure weakened military power.
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The Ministry of Railways in Russia was established on June 15, 1865. The total length of railways at that time did not exceed 3 thousand km.

The state corporation "Main Society of Russian Railways", created to build a route from Moscow to Crimea, did not build anything and went bankrupt, causing a loss of 130 million rubles to the treasury, but its director bought himself a mansion in St. Petersburg and an estate in the Oryol region.
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In 1866, it was decided to transfer railway construction, as well as the production of rails, locomotives and carriages, into private hands. Over the next three years, investors received 139 licenses.
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The world's first electrified railway was to appear in Russia. In 1913, it was decided to launch electric trains from St. Petersburg to Helsinki, but the war prevented the implementation of the plan.
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The Transsib project originated in 1837. A certain Nikolai Ivanovich Bogdanov (nothing else is known about him) proposed to extend the railway to Kyakhta, the main transshipment point of Russian-Chinese trade.
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The idea had opponents who called it madness and a hoax. Two years before the start of construction, Minister of Internal Affairs Ivan Durnovo argued that the creation of the Trans-Siberian Railway would lead to a massive resettlement of peasants to Siberia, and labor costs would rise in the internal provinces.
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“The first thing to expect from the road is an influx of various swindlers, artisans and traders, then buyers will appear, prices will rise, the province will be flooded with foreigners, monitoring the preservation of order will become impossible,” the Tobolsk governor worried.
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In 1890, Anton Chekhov traveled from Moscow to Sakhalin for three months.

Construction officially began on May 31, 1891. The heir to the throne, Nikolai Alexandrovich, in the Kuperova Pad tract near Vladivostok, personally filled a wheelbarrow with earth and poured it onto the canvas. The builders began to move towards each other from Vladivostok and Miass (Chelyabinsk region), to which the path had been laid earlier.
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The future Nicholas II was appointed chairman of the state committee for supervision of construction. Sergei Witte, who held the post of Minister of Railways at that time, claimed in his memoirs that the proposal came from him. Alexander III was allegedly surprised: “The heir is still a boy, how can he head the committee?”, and Witte replied that if you don’t entrust the crown prince with anything important, he won’t learn.
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The initiators of the creation of the Trans-Siberian Railway were inspired by the example of the longest railway at that time, the Union Pacific from Omaha to San Francisco, which was put into operation in 1870 and also breathed life into little-developed lands. But the length of the Union Pacific was 2974 km, and the Trans-Siberian Railway - 7528 km (together with the section from Moscow to Miass - 9298.2 km). Together with the branches, 12,390 km of tracks were laid.
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The American road was technically more difficult in one respect: the builders had to overcome higher mountains (the Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada has an altitude of 2191 meters above sea level, and the highest point of the Trans-Siberian Railway, Yablonovaya station, is 1040 meters).

The Trans-Siberian Railway cost 1 billion 455 million rubles (about 25 billion modern dollars). Unlike most Russian railways, government funding was also attracted.
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The average laying speed was one and a half kilometers per day.
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Construction took 25 years. The last object, a 2.6 km long bridge over the Amur, was put into operation on October 18, 1916.
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Regular traffic began much earlier, on July 14, 1903, but from Chita to Vladivostok trains did not follow the unfinished Trans-Siberian Railway, but along the Chinese Eastern Railway through Manchuria.
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An agreement on the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway was reached during the visit of Chinese Prime Minister Li Hong Zhang to Moscow for the coronation of Nicholas II in May 1896. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia of 1935 claimed, without citing a source, that Li Hong Zhang allegedly received a million-dollar bribe from the tsarist government.
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The CER shortened the route by several hundred kilometers and was considered an outpost of Russian influence in Manchuria, however, according to a number of researchers, it did more harm than good, since, passing through Chinese territory, it was a constant source of problems and conflicts. After the Communists came to power in 1949, the road was transferred free of charge to the PRC.

In addition, at first there was a gap in the Trans-Siberian Railway: trains crossed Baikal on ferries, and in winter the rails were laid on ice. On October 20, 1905, the Circum-Baikal Road, 260 km long with 39 tunnels, was put into operation.
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At the same time, a monument to Alexander III in the form of a railway conductor was unveiled in Irkutsk, and at the Slyudyanka station - the only station in the world built entirely of marble.
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Up to 20 thousand workers were employed in the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. For political reasons, Chinese and Korean guest workers were not involved. The belief, widespread in the Soviet era, that the road was built by convicts is a myth.
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The highest paid workers, bridge builders-riveters, received a ruble for each rivet and hammered seven rivets per shift. Exceeding the plan was not allowed so that quality would not suffer.
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Part of the cargo was delivered by the Northern Sea Route. Hydrologist Nikolai Morozov guided 22 steamships from Murmansk to the mouth of the Yenisei.
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The Amur Bridge took three years to build. The ship carrying steel spans from Odessa was sunk by a German submarine in the Indian Ocean, and the work dragged on for 11 months.
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At the Amur site, the world's first tunnel was built in permafrost.
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Steam locomotives, carriages and a 27-arshin model of the bridge across the Yenisei became the highlight of the World Exhibition in Paris in 1900 and received the Grand Prix there. French journalists called the Trans-Siberian Railway "the backbone of the Russian giant" and "a grandiose continuation of the era of the Great Geographical Discoveries."
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Vladimir Lenin argued that “the road was great not only in its length, but also in the immeasurable robbery of government money, in the immeasurable exploitation of the workers who built it.”

The express passenger train traveled from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok for 12 days (now, thanks to electric traction and the elimination of single-track sections, travel time has been reduced to seven days).
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A 1st class ticket cost 148 rubles 15 kopecks (the average salary of an industrial worker for six months); 2nd class - 88 rubles 90 kopecks; 3rd class - 59 rubles 25 kopecks.
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1st class passengers had a lounge carriage with a library and a piano, bathrooms and a gym. The carriages, decorated in mahogany, bronze and velvet, are exhibited at the Railway Museum in St. Petersburg.
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In the 1930s, Japanese diplomats traveling along the Trans-Siberian Railway to Europe and back took turns counting oncoming military trains for days on end, so many dummies moved along the road.
Electrification of the Trans-Siberian Railway was fully completed in 2002.
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The road's capacity, according to experts, can reach 100 million tons of cargo per year.
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The delivery time for containers from the Far East to Europe by rail is on average 10 days, about three times faster than by sea, but the Trans-Siberian Railway serves less than two percent of international trade turnover in this direction, primarily due to the lack of powerful transshipment sea ports.
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In 1999, then-Minister of Railways Nikolai Aksenenko lobbied for the construction of an 8-kilometer tunnel from the port of Vanino to Sakhalin to subsequently connect Russian railways with Hokkaido. The project is currently frozen.

The Trans-Siberian Railway was called by its contemporaries as one of the great and significant achievements of the human mind, placing this constructed structure on a par with the construction of the Suez Canal or the discovery of the American continent by Christopher Columbus.

Our contemporary, historian Alexander Goryanin claims that Russians are as proud of the built Trans-Siberian Railway as they are of the first launched artificial satellite of our planet Earth.

The length of the entire Trans-Siberian Railway is 9288.2 kilometers, which connected the capital of our Russia with the major cities of Siberia and the Far Eastern region. It is considered one of the longest roads on a global scale. The highest point of the tracks is located at Yablonovy Pass with an altitude above sea level of one thousand and forty meters. It should also be noted that the complete completion of the electrification of the entire route was completed only in the twenty-first century, in 2002.

History of construction

The history of the Trans-Siberian Railway begins at the end of the eighteenth century, on March 29, 1891, the Russian Emperor Alexander III signed a decree on the start of construction work to create the Great Siberian Road. This is the name originally given to the Trans-Siberian Railway in documents.

There were no lavish celebrations for the road's centenary. The reasons may be different, if you remember, in 1991, a hundred years after the start of the operational period of the Trans-Siberian Railway, such a country as the USSR ceased to exist. The years that followed were not the best. The country was now trying to build capitalism, however, for the majority of people, such an economic system, basically, showed its bestial grin.

In society, the existence of this railway was treated with a philosophical worldview: it exists, it works, which means everything is fine, and at the same time, people did not show any emotions.

The official birth of the Trans-Siberian Railway is considered to be 07/01/1903 according to the Julian calendar. Russia switched to the Gregorian calendar in 1918. As for the movement of trains along the Trans-Siberian Railway, the first of them began operating in the mid-nineties of the nineteenth century.

Tomsk on the Transsib map

In the entire history of the Trans-Siberian Railway there are many different anecdotal and not very funny cases. Somewhere, in the distance, on a July day in 1896, the townspeople of Tomsk heard the sound of locomotive whistles. But they did not sound at the Tomsk railway station, which did not exist yet, but were heard on the highway that ran south of Tomsk. All this could mean that from a city of provincial significance, Tomsk could turn into a provincial town, and the young ladies would become ordinary provincials. In fact, the reason that the main Trans-Siberian route was laid south of the provincial city was due to economic problems.

If the tracks were laid through Tomsk, then the railway would become longer by as much as eighty-six miles, and this is 91,744 kilometers. Considering the complexity of the local terrain, and the fact that it is possible to deliver any cargo directly to the railway, the rulers decided that the laying of tracks would be carried out south of Tomsk, although the city public and merchants actively opposed such a decision. In 1910, townspeople petitioned the then Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin. There were several plans to solve this problem, starting with a connection with the Altai railway, then another proposal appeared to build tracks from the Ural region, from Krasnoufimsk through the city of Tobolsk. During the period when civil war was raging throughout Russia, this issue was not removed from the agenda of the government of the young socialist republic.

Despite the fact that the townspeople of Tomsk had a grudge against the Russian authorities, there were those who did not lose out, according to a common myth - these were local cab drivers. The legend said that the road designers were bribed by representatives of horse transport, and the railway began to be laid south of Tomsk. In those days, the cab drivers' stables numbered 5,000 horses. In fact, at the end of the nineteenth century, every fifth resident of the Tomsk province was engaged in transport transportation. People then claimed that it was not the arable land that fed them, but the hard work of cab drivers on the transport route. If the railways were initially laid through Tomsk, then horse-drawn transport in this province would simply cease to be considered the main type of transportation, and the Tomsk city treasury would lose a significant part of its profits. True, scholars of historical sciences testify to the absence of such real events related to the bribery of road designers, just as the myth about the Tomsk elder Fyodor Kuzmich, who allegedly was in fact Alexander the First, remains only an invented myth. After all, the main mission of all existing legends is nothing more than an attempt to present reality in a different color or perspective, thereby embellishing reality.

The start of the Trans-Siberian Railway allowed the economy of the Siberian region to rush forward. The people of the Tomsk province began to actively engage in butter making. It became profitable for peasants to donate milk received on their farmsteads, delivering it to collection points, and receiving cash in return. Small butter factories also appeared. The value of Siberian oil was no lower than Vologda products of this type, but now it became possible to transport their best goods over longer distances to other Russian regions, where they were in great demand. Oil products were also exported to Western European countries. All this became possible thanks, after all, to the appearance of that very dead-end railway line that connected to the main highway. And the majority of people were satisfied that their city of Tomsk did not lose its provincial status.

But there are no downsides in such situations. First of all, the economy of the provincial town was influenced by its distance from the main main line. Tomsk has ceased to be a significant transit point in the Siberian region. The palm went to the newly formed city of Novosibirsk, built on the site of the godforsaken settlement of Krivoshchekovo. The modern city grew rapidly, becoming a huge metropolis, thanks to the Trans-Siberian railway.

What happened was what should have happened; during the second decade of the twentieth century, the city of Tomsk ceased to be considered a provincial center. The Tomsk province also disappeared from the map, and only with the onset of 1944 the Tomsk region was formed.

After a whole century, the Trans-Siberian transit still has a negative impact on the Tomsk regional economy. The presence of distance from the main route leads to an increase in the cost of various incoming products. There is practically no benefit for large wholesale companies to transship small shipments traveling in two or three wagons. This does not affect the overall volume of cargo, and delivery times increase significantly. Sometimes no one even dared to predict the end date of such a transaction.

The Bely Yar station is a working-class village, but the rail track laid to it only aggravates similar economic problems in Tomsk.

One of the main disadvantages of the Tomsk railway line is the presence of only one track. In the summer months, for the most part, road repair work intensifies. The daily size of the time period for repairing tracks forces trains to stand idle for exactly the same amount of time, which leads to significant direct losses.

Restrictions on transport accessibility to Tomsk Grad have a social impact and on student outflows. For various reasons, their number in regional universities continues to decline.

Historical direction

The historical part of the Trans-Siberian Railway is considered only its eastern branch of the route, which begins in Miass, in the southern Urals, in the Chelyabinsk region, and ends in Vladivostok. The length of this route is seven thousand kilometers; its construction was carried out from 1891 to 1916.

Since the beginning of construction, nine thousand six hundred people have worked on the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. During the peak period of construction from 1895 to 1896, eighty-nine thousand people were already involved in the work. At the completion of this type of structure, in the grand scheme of things, only five thousand three hundred people remained. Almost all construction work was carried out “hand-to-hand”, where the main tools were: primitive wooden wheelbarrows, picks, shovels, saws and axes. Despite such technical equipment of the builders, the annual laying of railway tracks reached the six hundred kilometer mark.

The Trans-Siberian Railway made it possible to carry out the movement of trains from European cities located on the oceanic coast of the Atlantic, along rail roads, excluding ferry crossings, to the Russian city of Vladivostok, located on the Pacific coast of Russia.

In total, the Trans-Siberian railway lines connected the Far Eastern region with Siberia, the Urals and the European part of the earth. The unified transport system includes Russian ports in the west: St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad, in the north: Arkhangelsk and Murmansk and in the south: Novorossiysk, in the Far Eastern region ports: Nakhodka and Vladivostok, and the border urban village of Zabaikalsk.

The history of the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway testifies to the main milestones of the laying of railway tracks, which began in Kuperovskaya Pad, near Vladivostok on May 31, 1891. On this solemn occasion, the future Russian Emperor Nicholas II, who was then still in the statue of the Tsarevich, took part in the ceremony to begin construction of the route. A young man of imperial blood filled a whole wheelbarrow with earthen soil with his own hands and took it to the embankment of the future railway track. The actual date of construction is counted from March 1891, when the construction of the road began in the city of Miass, Chelyabinsk province.

The amount of the preliminary estimate for such a grandiose construction was three hundred and fifty million gold rubles. The actual expenditure of funds has increased many times over.

The Sviyagino station point bears the name of one of the leaders, engineer Nikolai Sergeevich Sviyagin. Some of the cargo intended for the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway was delivered along the Northern Sea Route, stopping at the mouth of the Yenisei River. N.V. Morozov, being a hydrologist, took part in providing guidance for twenty-two steamships.

It is also noteworthy that Tsarevich Nikolai Alexandrovich was appointed to the position of chairman of the state committee, whose duties included mandatory supervision of the progress of construction work on the Trans-Siberian Railway. When the Russian autocrat of that time, Alexander III, noticed this appointment, he expressed his surprise at such an early age of the chairman of the state committee, calling his son a boy. By that time, the Tsarevich had only reached his third decade of age.

To which the Minister of Railways of the Russian Empire, Mr. Sergei Witte, allowed the emperor to object: “If today the heir is not given such responsible assignments, then he will never learn to carry them out.” With such an answer from his subject, autocrat Alexander the Third had nothing to object to.

In the third decade of the twentieth century, diplomats from Japan sat day and night at the carriage openings, counting the oncoming military trains. In connection with this, camouflaged trains, representing ordinary dummies, followed along the road.

The current capacity of this road, according to expert estimates, can reach a level equal to one hundred million tons of annual cargo turnover.

The time factor for container transportation is equal to a ten-day period, which is three times faster compared to sea routes. Despite such convincing indicators, the Trans-Siberian Railway serves only two percent of the total amount of international trade carried out in this direction. The reason lies in the absence of large and powerful sea harbors in the Far Eastern region.

The Trans-Siberian Railway in the Far East region has a number of railway branches connecting to the station points of the Eastern and Nakhodka ports and Cape Astafiev.

The longest routes of the Trans-Siberian Railway began in Kharkov and Kyiv. The length of the first route was nine thousand seven hundred and fourteen kilometers. The time factor indicator reached a value equal to seven days, six hours and ten minutes. On May 15, 2010, this route was shortened, and the named trains only went to Ufa. The direct carriage train continued to travel to the final destination of the previous route. A year later, this train was finally cancelled. The length of the second route from the Ukrainian capital was ten thousand two hundred and fifty-nine kilometers, the travel time was seven days, nineteen hours and fifty minutes. Canceled at the same time that the route from Kharkov.

According to the results of October 2014, one of the long routes was the route from Beijing to Moscow and from Vladivostok to Moscow.

The Rossiya train is recognized as the most comfortable and fastest, covering its journey from Moscow to Vladivostok in six days, one hour and fifty-nine minutes. The average speed is sixty-four kilometers per hour. The Yaroslavl station of the Russian capital city can boast of mounted historical pillars, which indicate the mileage of the entire route. The same pillars were installed in Vladivostok and Novosibirsk.

Trans-Siberian Railway, Trans-Siberian Railway (modern names) or the Great Siberian Way (historical name) is a well-equipped rail track across the entire continent, connecting European Russia, its largest industrial areas and the country's capital Moscow with its middle (Siberia) and eastern (Far East) districts.

This is the road that binds Russia, a country stretching across 11 time zones, into a single economic organism, and most importantly, into a single military-strategic space.

If it had not been built in due time, then with a very high probability Russia would hardly have retained the Far East and the Pacific coast.

Nowadays foreigners travel across the country on the Trans-Siberian Railway in reserved seat carriages. Why do they need this? And then, that the Trans-Siberian Railway is Russia. Having driven along it, you understand what was spent on one and a half billion gold, 34 years of struggle with permafrost, impassable mountains and forests, and what it is - 9 thousand kilometers to the Pacific Ocean.

The Trans-Siberian Railway set many records that have not yet been surpassed.

The road was continuously built for 25 years - from 1891 to 1916, and cost the Russian treasury 1.5 billion rubles in gold. Another 300 million rubles in gold were spent on its restoration after the Civil War (reconstruction of almost all bridges, many embankments, relaying of tracks). During the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, up to 30 thousand workers died on it (of which about 20 thousand were guest workers of that time, Koreans and Chinese).

Here are a few more facts and records of the Trans-Siberian Railway:

The two extreme points of the Trans-Siberian Railway are Moscow and Vladivostok, the journey between them takes 6 days and 2 hours. Despite the fact that the official terminal station of the Trans-Siberian Railway is Vladivostok, on the branch to Nakhodka there are stations more distant from Moscow - Vostochny Port and Cape Astafiev. Thus, the Trans-Siberian Railway actually goes straight to the Pacific Ocean.

Until May 2010, the longest train in the world was train No. 53/54 Kharkov-Vladivostok (travel time was 7 days and 11 hours). Now he goes only to Ufa. But the record for the longest route in the world still stands: it is Kyiv-Vladivostok (travel time 7 days and 10 hours).

There are 87 cities on the Trans-Siberian Railway. On the way from Moscow to Vladivostok, the Rossiya fast train makes 64 stops.

The highway passes through the territory of 20 constituent entities of the Russian Federation and five federal districts. More than 80% of the country's industrial potential and major natural resources, including oil, gas, coal, timber, ferrous and non-ferrous metal ores, are concentrated in the regions served by the highway.

- On the Trans-Siberian Railway there is the only station in the world built entirely of marble. This is Slyudyanka-1 station. This station is located near the shore of Lake Baikal (5311th km of the Trans-Siberian Railway).

During the construction of the Circum-Baikal Railway, 2 carriages of explosives were used for every kilometer of the track - they broke through the rocks. Subsequently, the road was nicknamed “The Golden Buckle of Russia’s Steel Belt.”

- More than 50% of foreign trade and transit cargo is transported via the Trans-Siberian Railway.

The Trans-Siberian Railway is included as a priority route in communication between Europe and Asia in the projects of international organizations UNECE (UN Economic Commission for Europe), UNESCAP (UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific), OSJD (Organization for Cooperation between Railways).

The longest bridge on the Trans-Siberian Railway spans the Amur. It was built in 1913-1916. Then it became the longest bridge in Russia and the second longest in the world. In 1992, the old bridge over the Amur was dismantled, and a combined road-railway bridge was erected nearby. The length increased from 2568 to 2616 meters.

The construction of such a long railway was a truly important event in the life of the Russian Empire. Evidence of this is the fact that Tsarevich Nikolai Alexandrovich himself was present at the prayer service on the occasion of the laying of the railway on behalf of Alexander III.

The area around Lake Baikal became particularly difficult, where it was necessary to blast rocks, build tunnels, and erect artificial structures in the gorges of mountain rivers flowing into Baikal.

The longest flat section on the highway, without any presence of mountains and hills, was recorded between the Ob and Irtysh rivers. Its length is about 600 km and along almost its entire length the railway is almost straight, with the exception of occasional smooth bends of a few degrees in the railway.

On a section of 3336 km. in 1940, before the Great Patriotic War, the largest station in the pre-war USSR was built. He was located at the Novosibirsk-Glavny station. It is made in a characteristic “Stalinist” style with a higher central pediment, and its façade, facing the railway, is much higher than the opposite one, facing the station square.

Who built it, how and with what

The most acute and intractable problem was the provision of labor for the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The need for skilled workers was satisfied by the recruitment and transfer of construction workers from the center of the country to Siberia.

A significant part of the builders were exiled prisoners and soldiers. The workforce was also replenished by attracting Siberian peasants and townspeople and the influx of peasants and townspeople from European Russia.

In total, there were 9.6 thousand people on the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1891, at the beginning of construction, in 1895-1896, at the height of construction work, - 84-89 thousand people, in 1904, at the final stage - only 5.3 thousands of people. 20 thousand people worked on the construction of the Amur Railway in 1910.

Much of the work was done by hand; the tools were the most primitive - an axe, a saw, a shovel, a pick and a wheelbarrow. Despite this, about 500-600 kilometers of railway were laid annually.

prisoners are building the Trans-Siberian Railway

The first trains began carrying passengers from Moscow to Vladivostok in 1903, even before the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The modern Rossiya train set off on its first journey on September 30, 1966. The carriages were repaired several times. The color also changed. Initially, it was cherry with large metal letters, then red, crimson, green, and since 2000, the carriages of the Rossiya train are painted in the color of the Russian flag with the obligatory stencil of the State Emblem of the Russian Federation.

The Trans-Siberian Railway, the Great Siberian Way (historical name) is a railway across Eurasia, connecting Moscow (southern route) and St. Petersburg (northern route) with the largest East Siberian and Far Eastern industrial cities of Russia. The length of the main line is 9298.2 km - it is the longest railway in the world.

The train departs from Moscow, crosses the Volga and then turns southeast towards the Urals, where it - some 1,800 kilometers from Moscow - passes the border between Europe and Asia. From Yekaterinburg, a large industrial center in the Urals, the route goes to Omsk and Novosibirsk, through the Ob, one of the mighty Siberian rivers with intensive shipping, and further to Krasnoyarsk on the Yenisei. Then the train goes to Irkutsk, overcomes the mountain range along the southern shore of Lake Baikal, cuts off the corner of the Gobi Desert and, having passed Khabarovsk, heads for the final destination of the route - Vladivostok. There are 87 cities on the Trans-Siberian Railway with a population ranging from 300 thousand to 15 million people. The 14 cities through which the Trans-Siberian Railway passes are the centers of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation.

Historically, the Trans-Siberian Railway is only the eastern part of the highway, from Miass (Southern Urals, Chelyabinsk region) to Vladivostok. Its length is about 7 thousand km. This particular site was built from 1891 to 1916.

The birthday of the highway is considered to be March 30 (April 11), 1891, when the imperial decree on the foundation of the “Great Siberian Road” was issued.

Construction officially began on May 19 (31), 1891 in the area near Vladivostok (Cooperovskaya Pad). At the laying ceremony, Tsarevich Nikolai Alexandrovich, the future Emperor Nicholas II, personally drove a wheelbarrow of earth onto the road surface. In fact, construction began earlier, in early March 1891, when construction of the Miass-Chelyabinsk section began.

One of the leaders in the construction of the section was engineer Nikolai Sergeevich Sviyagin, after whom the Sviyagino station was named.

Part of the cargo for the construction of the highway was delivered by the Northern Sea Route; hydrologist N.V. Morozov sailed 22 ships from Murmansk to the mouth of the Yenisei.

Train traffic on the Trans-Siberian Railway began on October 21 (November 3), 1901, after the “golden link” was laid on the last section of the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway.

Regular communication between the capital of the empire - St. Petersburg and the Pacific ports of Russia - Vladivostok and Port Arthur by rail was established in July 1903, when the Chinese Eastern Railway, passing through Manchuria, was accepted into permanent (“correct”) operation . The date July 1 (14), 1903 also marked the commissioning of the Great Siberian Route along its entire length, although trains had to be transported across Baikal on a special ferry.

A continuous rail track between St. Petersburg and Vladivostok appeared after the start of working traffic on the Circum-Baikal Railway on September 18 (October 1), 1904; and a year later, on October 16 (29), 1905, the Circum-Baikal Road, as a section of the Great Siberian Road, was accepted for permanent operation; and for the first time in history, regular passenger trains were able to travel only on rails, without using ferries, from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean (from Western Europe) to the shores of the Pacific Ocean (to Vladivostok).

After the end of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, there was a threat of losing Manchuria and control over the Chinese Eastern Railway, and therefore over the eastern part of the Trans-Siberian Railway. It was necessary to continue construction so that the highway passed only through the territory of the Russian Empire.

Almost all work was done by hand, using an axe, saw, shovel, pick and wheelbarrow. Despite this, about 500-600 km of railway track were laid annually. History has never seen such a pace. The most acute and intractable problem was the provision of labor for the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The need for skilled workers was satisfied by the recruitment and transfer of construction workers from the center of the country to Siberia. At the height of construction work, 84-89 thousand people were employed on the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway was carried out in harsh natural and climatic conditions. Almost the entire length of the route was laid through sparsely populated or deserted areas, in impassable taiga. It crossed mighty Siberian rivers, numerous lakes, areas of high swampiness and permafrost (from Kuenga to Bochkarevo, now Belogorsk). The area around Lake Baikal (Baikal station - Mysovaya station) presented exceptional difficulties for the builders. Here it was necessary to blow up rocks, build tunnels, and erect artificial structures in the gorges of mountain rivers flowing into Lake Baikal.

The construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway required enormous funds. According to preliminary calculations by the Committee for the Construction of the Siberian Railway, its cost was determined at 350 million rubles. gold, therefore, in order to speed up and reduce the cost of construction, in 1891-1892. for the Ussuriyskaya line and the West Siberian line (from Chelyabinsk to the Ob River) simplified technical conditions were taken as a basis. Thus, according to the recommendations of the Committee, they reduced the width of the roadbed in embankments, excavations and mountain areas, as well as the thickness of the ballast layer, laid lightweight rails and shortened sleepers, reduced the number of sleepers per 1 km of track, etc. Capital construction was envisaged only for large railways bridges, and medium and small bridges were supposed to be built wooden. The distance between stations was allowed up to 50 versts; track buildings were built on wooden poles. Here builders first encountered permafrost. Traffic along the Trans-Baikal Railway was opened in 1900. And in 1907, at Mozgon station, the world’s first building on permafrost was built, which still stands today. A new method of constructing buildings on permafrost has been adopted in Canada, Greenland and Alaska.

In terms of the speed of construction (within 12 years), the length (7.5 thousand km), the difficulties of construction and the volume of work performed, the Great Siberian Railway had no equal in the whole world. In conditions of almost complete roadlessness, a lot of time and money was spent on delivering the necessary building materials - and in fact everything had to be imported except timber. For example, for the bridge over the Irtysh and for the station in Omsk, the stone was transported 740 versts by rail from Chelyabinsk and 580 versts from the banks of the Ob, as well as by water on barges from quarries located on the banks of the Irtysh 900 versts above the bridge. Metal structures for the bridge over the Amur were manufactured in Warsaw and delivered by rail to Odessa, and then transported by sea to Vladivostok, and from there by rail to Khabarovsk. In the fall of 1914, a German cruiser sank a Belgian steamer in the Indian Ocean that was carrying steel parts for the last two trusses of the bridge, which delayed the completion of the work by a year.

End of construction on the territory of the Russian Empire: October 5 (18), 1916, with the launch of the Khabarovsk Bridge over the Amur.

On October 5, the Trans-Siberian Railway, the longest on the planet, celebrated its 100th anniversary. Its length is 9288.2 km. The starting point of the Trans-Siberian Railway is the Yaroslavsky station in Moscow, and the final point is the Vladivostok station. It took 25 years to build, the road passes through 8 time zones, through Europe and Asia, 11 regions, 5 territories, two republics and one autonomous region, 88 cities, crosses 16 major rivers. This review contains the history of the creation of the Millennium Road.

On March 30, 1891, the head of the Russian state issued a decree to begin construction of a route across the entire territory of Siberia. The state committee created on its basis passed a resolution in which it approved such an important task and welcomed the use of domestic labor and material resources for a great cause.

First stage of construction

In May of the same year, the ceremonial laying of the first stone took place, in which the future Russian Emperor Nicholas was directly involved. The creation of the Trans-Siberian road began in very difficult conditions. All along the route there was centuries-old taiga, and rocks awaited the builders near Lake Baikal. To lay sleepers, it was necessary to blast and create embankments.

Huge amounts of money were required to implement the Emperor's plans. The initial estimate was calculated at 350 million rubles. If we take into account the difference in the weight of the modern Russian currency and the full-fledged gold ruble, the project will seem very expensive. To reduce financial costs, free labor was involved in construction: soldiers and convicts. At the peak of construction, 89 thousand people were involved in the work.

Extraordinary pace

The railway line was laid with unprecedented speed at that time. In 12 years, the builders managed to create 7.5 thousand kilometers of first-class tracks, although during the intervening period they had to overcome many difficulties. We have never worked at such a pace in any country.

The most primitive mechanisms and tools were used to lay sleepers and rails: hand wheelbarrows, shovels, axes and saws. About 600 km of road were laid every year. The workers worked tirelessly, sometimes to the point of complete loss of strength. The harsh conditions of Siberia had a negative impact on health, and many construction workers died while working.

Engineering personnel

During construction, many well-known engineers in Russia at that time participated in the project. Among them, Orest Vyazemsky, who owned a large plot of land in the Ussuri taiga, was very popular. The Vyazemskaya station was named in his honor and today preserves the name of the great Russian specialist. The connection between Novosibirsk and Chelyabinsk railways was carried out by another specialist in the field of construction - Nikolai Garin-Mikhailovsky. Today he is better known to descendants for his literary works.

The engineer completed his section of the road in 1896. The section between Irkutsk and Ob was built by Nikolai Mezheninov. Today it is known as the Central Siberian Road. Nikolai Belelyubsky was involved in the design and construction of the bridge across the Ob. He was a connoisseur and expert in mechanics and engine creation. Work on laying the Central Siberian section of the mainline was completed in 1899.

Alexander Liverovsky was in charge of the Circum-Baikal section of the road. Construction took place in very difficult natural conditions. The city of Ussuriysk was connected to Grodekovo by railway tracks in 1901. Thanks to the successful completion of the section, Vladivostok received constant convenient communication with the center of the country. European goods and passengers received a faster and more convenient route to the Pacific Ocean.

Project expansion

The construction of a new route from the central regions of Russia to the Far East created the economic prerequisites for further growth of the regional economy. The expensive project began to provide practical benefits. The war with Japan brought some problems. At this time, passenger and freight traffic by rail decreased many times due to restrictions in several sections.

The highway could handle only 13 trains per day, which was too few for the national economy and the army. On June 3, 1907, at a regular meeting, the Council of Ministers decided to expand the Trans-Siberian Railway. To do this, it was necessary to lay an additional track. Construction management was transferred to Alexander Liverovsky. By the beginning of 1909, the road had doubled its capacity.

The country's leadership decided that one of the main negative factors that influenced the course and result of the war with Japan was poor transport links between Vladivostok and the European part of the country. Among the particularly important tasks, the government highlighted the expansion of the railway network. After the meeting of the Council of Ministers, the creation of the Minusinsk-Achiinsky and Amur sections of the highway began. The total length of the route was almost 2 thousand km.

Completion of construction

The project came to completion in 1916. The railway line connected Chelyabinsk with the Pacific Ocean. At the same time, the construction of the bridge over the Amur and the Amur Mainline was completed. For ease of use, the entire road was divided into four sections. Rail transport grew every year and by 1912 reached 3.2 million passengers. Cargo transportation has also increased significantly. The highway began to generate a lot of income for the country.

Recovery after destruction

The First World War caused enormous damage to the highway. Many kilometers of tracks were destroyed, bridges and service structures were badly damaged. Even the famous bridge over the Amur fell victim to the revolution and was damaged. The new government understood the importance of the railway connection and already in 1924-1925 began restoring the highway. The railway bridge across the Amur was also reconstructed. In 1925, the Trans-Siberian Railway became fully functional.