Transsib, Trans-Siberian Railway (modern names) or the Great Siberian Way ( historical name) Is a perfectly equipped rail track across the entire continent, connecting European Russia, its largest industrial regions and the capital of the country, Moscow, with its middle (Siberia) and eastern ( Far East) regions. This is the road that holds Russia together - a country stretching for 10 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 coast. The Pacific- how she could not keep Alaska, which is in no way connected with the Russian Empire by stable communication routes. The Transsib is also a road that gave impetus to the development of the eastern regions and involved them in economic life the rest of the vast country.

Some people think that the term "Transsib" should be interpreted as a path connecting the Urals and the Far East, and literally passing "through" Siberia (Trans-Siberian). But this is contrary to the state of affairs and does not reflect the true meaning of this highway. And the name? This name was given to us by the British, who christened the path not “Great Siberian Way”, as the literal translation from Russian should have been, but “Trans-Siberian Railway” - and then it took root and took root in speech.

And now "Transsib" as a geopolitical concept makes sense as a path connecting the Center and the Pacific Ocean, Moscow and Vladivostok, and more broadly - as a path connecting the ports of the West and the capital of Russia, as well as exits to Europe (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Brest, Kaliningrad) with ports of the East and outlets to Asia (Vladivostok, Nakhodka, Vanino, Zabaikalsk); but not a local path connecting the Urals and the Far East.

A narrow interpretation of the term "Transsib" suggests that we are talking about the main passenger route Moscow - Yaroslavl - Yekaterinburg - Omsk - Irkutsk - Chita - Vladivostok, the exact route of which is given below.

Length of the Transsib.

The actual length of the Trans-Siberian Railway along the main passenger route (from Moscow to Vladivostok) is 9288.2 km, and by this indicator it is the longest on the planet, crossing almost all of Eurasia by land. The fare length (at which ticket prices are calculated) is slightly longer - 9298 km and does not coincide with the real one. There are several parallel cargo bypasses at different sections. The track gauge on the Transsib is 1520 mm.

The length of the Great Siberian Route before the First World War from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok along the northern passenger route (through Vologda - Perm - Yekaterinburg - Omsk - Chita - Harbin) was 8913 versts, or 9508 km.
The Transsib passes through the territory of two parts of the world: Europe (0 - 1777 km) and Asia (1778 - 9289 km). Europe accounts for 19.1% of the length of the Transsib, Asia, respectively - 80.9%.

The beginning and end of the highway.

At present, the starting point of the Transsib is the Yaroslavsky railway station in Moscow, and the ending point is the Vladivostoksky railway station.
But this was not always the case: until about the mid-20s, the Kazan (then Ryazan) railway station was the gateway to Siberia and the Far East, and to the very initial period the existence of the Transsib - at the beginning of the 20th century - the Kursk-Nizhny Novgorod (now Kursk) railway station in Moscow. It should also be mentioned that before the 1917 revolution, the starting point of the Great Siberian Way was considered the Moscow railway station of St. Petersburg - the capital Russian Empire.

Vladivostok was not always considered the final destination: for a short time, starting from the very end of the 90s of the XIX century and up to the decisive land battles of the Russian-Japanese war of 1904-05, contemporaries considered the naval fortress and the city of Port to be the end of the Great Siberian Way. -Arthur, located on the coast of the East China Sea, on the Liaodong Peninsula rented from China.
About the geographical limits of the Transsib (extreme points in the west, east, north and south) you can.

Construction: milestones.

Start of construction: May 19 (31), 1891 in an area near Vladivostok (Kuperovskaya Pad), Tsarevich Nikolai Alexandrovich, the future Emperor Nicholas II, was present at the foundation.

The actual start of construction took place somewhat earlier, at the beginning of March 1891, when the construction of the Miass - Chelyabinsk section began.
The linking of rails along the entire length of the Great Siberian Way occurred on October 21 (November 3), 1901, when the builders of the Sino-Eastern Railway, laying the track from the west and east, met each other. But there was no regular train movement along the entire length of the highway at that time.

Regular communication between the capital of the empire - St. Petersburg and the Pacific ports of Russia - Vladivostok and Dalny by rail was established in July 1903, when the Sino-Eastern Railway passing through Manchuria was taken into permanent (“correct”) exploitation. The date of July 1 (14), 1903, also marked the commissioning of the Great Siberian Way along its entire length, although there was a break in the rail track: trains had to be ferried across Baikal on a special ferry.

The continuous rail track between St. Petersburg and Vladivostok appeared after the beginning of the working movement along 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 segment of the Great Siberian Way, was taken into permanent operation; and regular passenger trains for the first time in history were able to follow only on rails, without using ferry crossings, from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean (from Western Europe) to the shores of the Pacific Ocean (to Vladivostok).

The end of construction on the territory of the Russian Empire: October 5 (18), 1916, with the launch of a bridge across the Amur near Khabarovsk and the start of trains on this bridge.

The cost of building the Transsib from 1891 to 1913 amounted to 1,455,413 thousand rubles, about the cost of building specific sections of the Great Siberian Way.

The modern route of the Transsib.

Since 1956, the Transsib route is as follows: Moscow-Yaroslavskaya - Yaroslavl-Gl. - Danilov - Bui - Sharya - Kirov - Balezino - Perm-2 - Yekaterinburg-Pass. - Tyumen - Nazyvaevskaya - Omsk-Pass. - Barabinsk - Novosibirsk-Glavny - Mariinsk - Achinsk-1 - Krasnoyarsk - Ilanskaya - Taishet - Nizhneudinsk - Winter - Irkutsk-Pass. - Slyudyanka-1 - Ulan-Ude - Petrovsky Zavod - Chita-2 - Karymskaya - Chernyshevsk-Zabaikalsky - Mogocha - Skovorodino - Belogorsk - Arkhara - Khabarovsk-1 - Vyazemskaya - Ruzhino - Ussuriisk - Vladivostok. This is the main passenger passage of the Transsib. It was finally formed by the beginning of the 30s, when the normal operation of the shorter Sino-Eastern Railway became impossible due to military and political reasons, and the South Ural Railway was too overloaded due to the beginning of the industrialization of the USSR.

Until 1949, in the Baikal region, the main course of the Transsib passed along the Circum-Baikal road, through Irkutsk - along the Angara bank - the Baikal station - along the Baikal coast - to the Slyudyanka station, in 1949-56. there were two routes - the old one, along the coast of Lake Baikal, and the new one, the pass one. Moreover, the crossover route was initially built in a 1-way version (1941-1948), and by 1957 it had become a 2-way and main one.

Since June 10, 2001, after the introduction of the new summer timetable of the Ministry of Railways, almost all long-distance trans-Siberian trains have been launched on a new route through Vladimir - Nizhny Novgorod, with access to the "classic course" in Kotelnich. This move allows trains with a higher route speed to pass through. But the mileage of the Transsib still passes through Yaroslavl - Sharya.

The historical route of the Transsib.

Before the revolution of 1917 and some time after it (until the end of the 20s of the XX century), the main route of the Great Siberian Way passed:
From Moscow, starting from 1904: through Ryazan - Ryazhsk - Penza - Syzran - Samara - Ufa - Chelyabinsk - Kurgan - Petropavlovsk -

(historical name) is a rail track connecting the European part of Russia with its middle (Siberia) and eastern (Far East) regions.
The actual length of the Trans-Siberian Railway along the main passenger route (from Moscow to Vladivostok) is 9288.2 kilometers and, according to this indicator, it is the longest on the planet. The fare length (at which ticket prices are calculated) is slightly longer - 9298 km and does not coincide with the real one.
The Trans-Siberian Railway passes through the territory of two parts of the world. Europe accounts for about 19% of the length of the Transsib, Asia - about 81%. The 1778th kilometer of the highway was adopted as the conditional border of Europe and Asia.

The question of the construction of the Transsib has been brewing in the country for a long time. At the beginning of the 20th century, vast areas of Western and Eastern Siberia and the Far East remained cut off from the European part of the Russian Empire, so there was a need to organize a path along which it would be possible to get there with a minimum investment of time and money.

In 1857, the Governor-General of Eastern Siberia Nikolai Muravyov-Amursky officially voiced the need to build a railway on the Siberian outskirts of Russia.
However, the government only by the 1880s began to address the issue of the Siberian railway. They refused the help of Western industrialists, they decided to build at their own expense and on their own.
In 1887, under the leadership of engineers Nikolai Mezheninov, Orest Vyazemsky and Alexander Ursati, three expeditions were organized to explore the route of the Central Siberian, Transbaikal and South Ussuri railways, which by the 90s of the XIX century had basically completed their work.
In February 1891, the committee of ministers recognized it possible to begin work on the construction of the Great Siberian Route simultaneously from both sides - from Chelyabinsk and Vladivostok.

The beginning of work on the construction of the Ussuriysky section of the Siberian railway, the Emperor Alexander III gave meaning to an extraordinary event in the life of the empire.
The official start date for the construction of the Transsib is May 31 (May 19, old style), 1891, when the heir Russian throne and the future emperor Nicholas II laid the foundation stone of the Ussuriysk railway to Khabarovsk on the Amur near Vladivostok. The actual start of construction took place somewhat earlier, at the beginning of March 1891, when the construction of the Miass - Chelyabinsk section began.
Construction 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 uninhabited areas, in impassable taiga. It crossed the mighty Siberian rivers, numerous lakes, areas of increased swampiness and permafrost.

During the First World War and the Civil War, the technical condition of the road deteriorated sharply, after which restoration work began.
During the Great Patriotic War The Transsib carried out the tasks of evacuating the population and enterprises from the occupied regions, uninterrupted delivery of goods and military contingents to the front, while not stopping intra-Siberian transportations.
V post-war years The Great Siberian Railway was actively built and modernized. In 1956 the government approved general plan electrification of railways, according to which one of the first electrified directions was to be the Transsib in the section from Moscow to Irkutsk. This was done by 1961.

In the 1990s - 2000s, a number of measures were taken to modernize the Transsib, designed to increase the capacity of the highway. In particular, the railway bridge across the Amur near Khabarovsk was reconstructed, as a result of which the last single-track section was eliminated.
In 2002, the full electrification of the line was completed.

Currently, the Trans-Siberian Railway is a powerful double-track electrified railway line equipped with modern means informatization and communication.
In the east, through the border stations of Khasan, Grodekovo, Zabaikalsk, Naushki, the Trans-Siberian Railway provides access to the railway network of North Korea, China and Mongolia, and in the west, through Russian ports and border crossings with former republics Soviet Union- to European countries.
The highway passes through the territory of 20 constituent entities of the Russian Federation and five federal districts... More than 80% of the industrial potential of the country and the main natural resources, including oil, gas, coal, timber, ferrous and non-ferrous metal ores. There are 87 cities on the Transsib, of which 14 are the centers of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation.
More than 50% of foreign trade and transit cargoes are transported via the Transsib.
The Trans-Siberian Railway is included as a priority route in communication between Europe and Asia in 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 material was prepared on the basis of information from open sources

In the middle of the 19th century, after the campaigns and discoveries of Captain Nevelskoy and the signing in 1858 by Count N.N. Muravyov of the Aigun Treaty with China, the eastern borders of the Russian Empire were finally formed. In 1860 the Vladivostok military post was founded. The Khabarovsk post in 1893 became the city of Khabarovsk. Until 1883 the population of the region did not exceed 2000 people.
From 1883 to 1885, the Yekaterinburg-Tyumen road was laid, and in 1886 from the Governor-General of Irkutsk A.P. Ignatiev and the Amur Governor-General Baron A.N. Korf arrived in Petersburg to justify the urgency of work on the Siberian iron pot. Emperor Alexander III responded with a resolution “There are already so many reports of the governors-general of Siberia. I have read and must confess with sadness and shame that the government has so far done almost nothing to meet the needs of this rich but neglected region. And it's time, it's high time. "
On June 6, 1887, by order of the emperor, a meeting of ministers and managers of the highest state departments was held, at which it was finally decided: to build. Three months later, survey work began on the route from the Ob to the Amur region.
In February 1891, the Cabinet of Ministers decided to simultaneously start work from opposite ends of Vladivostok and Chelyabinsk. They were separated by a distance of more than 8 thousand Siberian kilometers.
On March 17 of the same 1891, the emperor issued a rescript addressed to the Crown Tsarevich Nikolai Alexandrovich: “I command now to begin the construction of a continuous railway across all Siberia, which has (the goal) to connect the abundant gifts of nature of the Siberian regions with the network of internal rail communications. I instruct you to declare such my will, upon entering the Russian land again, after observing the foreign countries of the East. At the same time, I entrust you with the commissioning in Vladivostok of the laying of the permitted for construction, at the expense of the treasury and by the direct order of the government, the Ussuriysk section of the Great Siberian Railroad. "
On March 19, Tsarevich Nikolai Alexandrovich took the first wheelbarrow of earth to the bed of the future road and laid the first stone in the building of the Vladivostok railway station.


In 1892, the sequence of driving the route was proposed, divided into six sections.
The first stage is the design and construction of the West Siberian section from Chelyabinsk to the Ob (1418 km), the Central Siberian from the Ob to Irkutsk (1871 km), as well as the Yuzhno-Ussuriysky from Vladivostok to st. Grafskaya (408 km). The second stage included the road from the station. Mysovaya on the eastern shore of Lake Baikal to Sretensk on the river. Shilke (1104 km) and the Severno-Ussuriysky section from Grafskaya to Khabarovsk (361 km). And last of all, as the most difficult to pass, the Krutobaikalskaya road from the station. Baikal at the source of the Angara to Mysovaya (261 km) and the no less difficult Amur road from Sretensk to Khabarovsk (2130 km).


In 1893, the Committee of the Siberian Road was established, the chairman of which was appointed by the emperor, the heir to the throne, Nikolai Alexandrovich. The committee was given the broadest powers.
At one of the very first meetings of the Siberian Railway Committee, the construction principles were announced: "... To complete the construction of the Siberian railroad, which has begun, is cheap, and most importantly, quickly and firmly"; "To build well and firmly, so as to subsequently complement, not rebuild"; "... that the Siberian railway, this great national cause, was carried out by the Russian people and from Russian materials." And the main thing is to build at the expense of the treasury. After long hesitations, it was allowed "to involve in the construction of the road convicts, exiled settlers and prisoners of various categories, with the provision of them for their participation in the work of reducing the terms of punishment."
The high cost of construction forced to go to the lighter technical standards for laying the track. The width of the subgrade decreased, the thickness of the ballast layer was almost halved, and on straight sections of the road between the sleepers, they often did without ballast at all, the rails were lighter (18-pound instead of 21 pounds per meter), steeper climbs were allowed in comparison with the normative ones. and slopes, wooden bridges were hung across small rivers, station buildings were also erected of a lightweight type, most often without foundations. All this was calculated for the small capacity of the road. However, as soon as the loads increased, and many times during the war years, it was necessary to urgently pave the second paths and inevitably eliminate all "reliefs" that did not guarantee traffic safety.
From Vladivostok, they led the way in the direction of Khabarovsk immediately after the consecration of the beginning of construction in the presence of the heir to the throne. And on July 7, 1892, a solemn ceremony was held to start the oncoming traffic from Chelyabinsk. The first crutch on the western end of the Siberian Way was entrusted to a student-trainee of the Petersburg Institute of Railways Alexander Liverovsky.



He, AV Liverovsky, twenty-three years later, as the head of the East Amur road, hammered the last, "silver" crutch of the Great Siberian Way. He also headed work on one of the most difficult sections of the Circum-Baikal road. Here, for the first time in the practice of railway construction, he used electricity for drilling operations, for the first time, at his own peril and risk, he introduced differentiated norms for directed explosives, for individual purposes - for ejection, loosening, etc. He also led the laying of second tracks from Chelyabinsk to Irkutsk. And he also completed the construction of the unique, 2600 meters long, Amur Bridge, the very last structure on the Siberian road, commissioned only in 1916.
The Great Siberian Route moved eastward from Chelyabinsk. Two years later, the first train was in Omsk, a year later - at the Krivoshchekovo station in front of Ob (future Novosibirsk), almost simultaneously, due to the fact that work was carried out on four sections at once from Ob to Krasnoyarsk, the first train was met in Krasnoyarsk, and in 1898 year, two years earlier than the originally designated date - in Irkutsk. At the end of the same 1898, the rails reached Lake Baikal. However, before the Circum-Baikal road, there was a stop for six years. Further to the east from the Mysovoy Way station, they were led back in 1895 with the firm intention in 1898 (this year, after a successful start, was taken as the finishing year for all roads of the first stage) to finish laying on the Trans-Baikal highway and connect the railway line leading to the Amur. But the construction of the next - Amur - road was stopped for a long time.
First blow struck permafrost... The flood of 1896 washed away the almost everywhere erected embankments. In 1897, the waters of the Selenga, Khilka, Ingody and Shilki demolished villages, the district town of Doroninsk was completely washed off the face of the earth, there was no trace left at four hundred versts from the railway embankment, building materials were smashed and buried under silt and debris. A year later, an unprecedented drought fell, an epidemic of plague and anthrax broke out.
Only two years after these events, in 1900, it was possible to open traffic on the Trans-Baikal road, but it was half laid "on zhivulka".
On the opposite side - from Vladivostok - the Yuzhno-Ussuriyskaya road to the Grafskaya station (Muravyov-Amursky station) was commissioned back in 1896, and the North Ussuriyskaya road to Khabarovsk was completed in 1899.
The Amurskaya road, moved to the last stage, remained untouched, and the Circum-Baikal road remained inaccessible. On Amurskaya, having bumped into impassable places and being afraid of getting stuck there for a long time, in 1896 they preferred the southern option through Manchuria (CER), and across Baikal they hurriedly made a ferry crossing and transported from England prefabricated parts of two icebreaking ferries, which for five years were supposed to take trains.
But an easy road did not happen even in Western Siberia. Of course, the Ishim and Barabinsk steppes were lined with a flat carpet on the western side, so the rail track from Chelyabinsk to the Ob, like a ruler, went exactly along the 55th parallel of northern latitude, exceeding the shortest mathematical distance of 1290 versts by only 37 versts. Here, excavation work was carried out with the help of American earth moving graders. However, there was no forest in the steppe area; it was transported from the Tobolsk province or from the eastern regions. Gravel, stones for the bridge over the Irtysh and for the station in Omsk were transported by rail 740 versts from Chelyabinsk and 900 versts on barges along the Irtysh from the quarries. The bridge across the Ob took 4 years to build, the Central Siberian road began from the right bank.



To Krasnoyarsk, the "chugunka" was carried out quickly, work was going on at the same time in four sections. The 18-pound rails were stacked. There were areas where it was necessary to raise the canvas by 17 meters (on the Trans-Baikal road, the height of the embankment reached 32 meters), and there were areas where excavations, and even stone ones, were comparable to undergrounds.
The project of the bridge across the Yenisei, which has already gained a kilometer width near Krasnoyarsk, was made by Professor Lavr Proskuryakov. According to his drawings, the most grandiose bridge on the European-Asian continent was hung later over the Amur in Khabarovsk, more than two and a half kilometers long. The Krasnoyarsk bridge demanded, based on the nature of the Yenisei during the ice drift, a significant increase in the length of the spans, exceeding the accepted norms. The distance between the supports reached 140 meters, the height of the metal trusses rose to the upper parabolas by 20 meters. At the 1900 Paris World's Fair, the 27-yard model of this bridge was awarded the Gold Medal.
The Transsib advanced on an extensive front, leaving behind not only its own track and repair facilities, but also schools, schools, hospitals, and churches. The stations, as a rule, were set up in advance, before the arrival of the first train, and there were beautiful and festive architecture - both stone in large cities and wooden in small ones. The station in Slyudyanka, on Lake Baikal, faced with local marble, cannot be perceived otherwise than as a remarkable monument to the builders of the Circum-Baikal section. The road brought with it beautiful forms of bridges, and graceful forms of stations, station villages, booths, even workshops and depots. And this, in turn, required a decent type of buildings around the station squares, landscaping, beautification. By 1900, 65 churches and 64 schools were built along the Transsib, 95 more churches and 29 schools were built at the expense of the specially created Fund of Emperor Alexander III to help resettlement settlers. Moreover, the Transsib forced us to intervene in the chaotic development of old cities, to do their improvement and decoration.
And most importantly, the Transsib settled more and more millions of immigrants in the vast Siberian spaces. The Transsib was built by all of Russia. All the ministries, whose participation in the construction was caused by necessity, all the provinces gave workers. So it was called: workers of the first hand, the most experienced, skilled, workers of the second hand, third. In some years, when the sections of the first stage began work (1895-1896), up to 90 thousand people went out on the highway at the same time.
Under Stolypin, migratory flows to Siberia, thanks to the announced benefits and guarantees, as well as the magic word "cut", giving economic independence, immediately increased significantly. Since 1906, when Stolypin headed the government, the population of Siberia began to increase by half a million people annually. More and more new arable lands were mastered, the gross grain harvest rose from 174 million poods in 1901-1905. up to 287 million poods in 1911-1915 So much grain went along the Transsib that it was necessary to introduce the "Chelyabinsk barrier", a special kind of customs duty, in order to limit the grain roll from Siberia. Oil went to Europe in huge quantities: in 1898 it was loaded two and a half thousand tons, in 1900 - about eighteen thousand tons, and in 1913 - for seventy thousand tons. Siberia was turning into a richest granary, a breadwinner, and there was still to be discovered its fabulous depths ahead.
In the course of several years of operation of the Transsib, transportation, including industrial, has grown so much that the railway has ceased to cope with them. We urgently needed a second track and a transfer of the road from a temporary state to a permanent one.
And he, PA Stolypin, resolutely rescued the Transsib from the Manchu "captivity" (CER), returning the through passage of the Siberian road, as it was designed from the very beginning, to Russian soil.
The originally set amount of expenses of 350 million rubles was exceeded three times, and the Ministry of Finance went to these allocations of the Transsib. But also the result: 500-600-700 kilometers of addition annually, such a pace of railway construction has not happened either in America or in Canada.
The laying of the track on the Amur road, at the very last run of the Russian Transsib, was completed in 1915. Head of the construction of the easternmost, final section of the Amur road, A.V. Liverovsky scored the last, silver crutch.
This was the end of the history of the construction of the Transsib, the history of its operation began.

By the middle of the 19th century, the borders of the Russian Empire began to take their final shape. A colossal power, stretching across the vastness of Eurasia, seemed to many to be unviable. Remote regions of the country, Siberia and the Far East, were connected to the capital by a thin line of impassable roads, which was a huge obstacle to their successful development.

"Senate rejected this proposal"

Governor-General of Eastern Siberia Nikolai Nikolaevich Muravyov-Amursky, the founder of Khabarovsk and Vladivostok, in the mid-1850s applied to St. Petersburg with a request to build a railway to the Pacific Ocean.

On one of the documents in 1856 Emperor Alexander II wrote: “With this request, Count N.N. Muravyov-Amursky turned to the late Father Nikolai Pavlovich. But the Senate rejected this proposal... And we are rejecting this costly project. "

Muravyov-Amursky did not give up. Time after time, he reported to the capital: without the railway, Russia will not be able to expand its influence in China, nor to preserve its territories.

In fact, in St. Petersburg they understood the importance of the project, but the length of the road and, accordingly, the cost, frankly frightened.

Price doesn't matter

But in the 1870s, the first scientific studies of the issue began. In 1887, under the leadership engineers Nikolay Mezheninov, Orest Vyazemsky and Alexander Ursati three expeditions were organized to survey the route of the Central Siberian, Trans-Baikal and South Ussuri railways.

In March 1891, the final calculations fell on the table. Emperor Alexander III... The monarch signed supreme decree on the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, or, in other words, the Great Siberian Route.

According to preliminary calculations of the Committee for the Construction of the Siberian Railway, its cost was determined at 350 million rubles in gold. As usual in Russia, this amount turned out to be somewhat inaccurate. According to sources from the Soviet period, by 1916, 1.5 billion rubles were spent on the construction of the Transsib.

According to the approved project, construction was supposed to start simultaneously from Chelyabinsk and Vladivostok.

The tsarevich lays down, the man builds

May 31, 1891, then heir to the throne Tsarevich Nikolay laid the first stone of the Ussuriysk railway to Khabarovsk on the Amur near Vladivostok. So the grandiose construction site was officially started.

Transsib laying ceremony by Tsarevich Nikolai Alexandrovich in Vladivostok. Photo: Public Domain

At the government level, it was decided to carry out the construction on its own, without the involvement of foreign companies. The problem was that there was not enough equipment to carry out such work in Russia. Therefore, the main stake was made per person. Exiled prisoners, soldiers, peasants recruited in Central Russia - this is the force thanks to which the Transsib was born. In the harshest climatic conditions, with axes, saws, shovels and wheelbarrows, Russian men laid kilometers of the country's main road.

By 1896, the Ussuriysk railway (769 km) and the West Siberian railway (1418 km) were completed.

The second stage of construction included the Central Siberian Railway (1,818 km), the Trans-Baikal Railway (1104 km) and the Chinese-Eastern Railway (1,520 km).

In November 1901, the rails were closed along the Great Siberian Track, but there was still a regular service along the entire length of the track.

Map of the route of high-speed trains from Moscow to the port of Dalniy (1903). Photo: Public Domain

First, Baikal was crossed by icebreaker ferries

On July 14, 1903, traffic on the Transsib from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok was opened. The completion of the work, however, was out of the question.

The fact is that trains crossed Lake Baikal on icebreaker ferries "Baikal" and "Angara", built by order Russian government English firm Armstrong, Whitworth & Co.

Back in 1899, the construction of the Circum-Baikal Railway began, which was supposed to ensure the movement of trains without the help of ferries along the entire route.

And the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 showed that the Sino-Eastern Railway, conceived Minister of Finance Sergei Witte as the shortest route to Vladivostok through Chinese territory, in addition to economic benefits, it also entails political problems. Control over the Chinese Eastern Railway could be lost at any moment, and then the Transsib would be paralyzed. Therefore, in 1906, the construction of the Amur railway started, which was supposed to ensure safe traffic along the Transsib through the territory of Russia.

The Circum-Baikal Railway was put into permanent operation in October 1905. The Amurskaya road was commissioned in October 1916, after the Khabarovsk bridge over the Amur River was completed.

Construction of a tunnel on the Amur railway. Photo: Public Domain

A road that always evolves

The formal end of construction at the end of the history of the period of the Russian Empire did not mean that the Transsib would not develop further.

Right after Civil War it took a lot of effort to restore the damaged areas. The construction of new sections, approaches and branches continued throughout the 20th century.

The electrification of the Transsib, which began in 1956, was divided into a large number of stages. This process was fully completed only in 2002.

Today the Transsib passes through the territory of 20 constituent entities of the Russian Federation and five federal districts, which provide more than 80 percent of the industrial potential of our country.

9288 km of legend

The Transsib can be called a kind of " circulatory system»Russia, without which the existence of the country is unthinkable.

The Great Siberian Route fascinates foreign tourists. Its 9288.2 km is the longest railway in the world. The branded train "Russia" covers the distance from Moscow to Vladivostok in a little over six days. In the recent past, the world's farthest train Kharkiv-Vladivostok traveled here, covering 9714 km of track in 7 days 6 hours 10 minutes, as well as the farthest car of direct communication Kiev-Vladivostok, traveling one way at a distance of 10 259 km.

Perhaps someday these achievements will also be closed, and trains will go from Lisbon to Hanoi or Tokyo. Let it seem fantastic to someone today. But a century and a half ago, the Great Siberian Route itself seemed such a fantasy.

Historically, the Transsib is the eastern part of the highway, from Miass ( Chelyabinsk region) to Vladivostok. Its length is about 7 thousand km. This site was built from 1891 to 1916.


On February 25 (March 9), 1891, Alexander III signed a personalized imperial decree, given to the Minister of Railways, on the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. According to preliminary calculations, the cost of building the railway was supposed to be 350 million rubles in gold (according to the Soviet encyclopedia, as a result, it was spent several times more). The total cost of the construction of the Transsib from 1891 to 1916 amounted to 1.5 billion rubles.
The movement of trains on the Transsib 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 (CER). Regular railway communication between the capital of the empire, St. Petersburg and the Pacific ports of Vladivostok and Port Arthur, was established on July 1 (14), 1903, although trains had to be ferried across Baikal on a special ferry.

The continuous track between St. Petersburg and Vladivostok appeared after the start of the working movement along the Circum-Baikal Railway on September 18 (October 1), 1904, and a year later, on October 16 (29), 1905, the Circum-Baikal Railway, as a segment of the Great Siberian Way, was adopted as a permanent one. operation, and for the first time in history, trains were able to follow only on rails, without using ferry crossings from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean to the shores of the Pacific Ocean.

The construction was carried out only at the expense of the state's own funds without attracting foreign capital. At the beginning of the construction, 9,600 people were involved, by 1896 there were already about 80,000 people. An average of 650 km of railway tracks were built annually, as of 1903 more than 12 million sleepers, 1 million tons of rails were laid, the total length of the constructed railway bridges and tunnels was more than 100 km.

Scheme of the modern Transsib: red - the historical route, blue - the northern route, green - the Baikal-Amur Mainline, black - the section of the southern route in Siberia

Map of the old Trans-Siberian Railway with the Chinese Eastern Railway (through Manchuria - modern China)

The construction was divided into "sections", stages of construction:

As you can see, the Transsib was not led from west to east (which is more logical from the point of view of logistics, rail supplies from the Ural factories), but was divided into sections and the work was carried out almost in parallel. Question: how were the rails transported to the eastern sections of the track? By sea to Vladivostok? And how were the rails delivered to the middle sections of the Transsib? Or did they equip the embankments, laid the sleepers, which then waited for the rails to be laid?

But this is only a part of the questions. The main question is the speed of construction. In fact, over 14 years, 7 thousand km of track were laid. This is not only the arrangement of embankments and canvases, but also countless culverts, bridges over large and small rivers.

I propose to compare this amount of work with an almost modern construction site of this scale:
Baikal-Amur Mainline(Bam)

The main route Taishet - Sovetskaya Gavan was built with long breaks from 1938 to 1984. The construction of the central part of the railway, which took place in difficult geological and climatic conditions, took more than 12 years, and one of the most difficult sections: the Severomuisky tunnel was put into permanent operation only in 2003.
BAM is almost 500 km shorter than the Transsib in the section from Taishet to the seaport of Vanino. The length of the main route Taishet - Sovetskaya Gavan is 4287 km. BAM runs north of the Trans-Siberian Railway.
In April 1974, BAM was declared an all-Union shock Komsomol construction site. In fact, this is the year of the beginning of large-scale construction.

Summing up the figures, it turns out: Transsib, 7 thousand km long, using only manual labor, carts and trolleys, was built for 14 years. And the BAM, a little over 4 thousand km long, after almost 100 years, with all the mechanization in the form of excavators, dump trucks, mining equipment - 11 years!
Say, the difference in economic systems, approach to construction, the difference in the number of people involved in construction? The Transsib was built by convicts, and BAM - by enthusiastic Komsomol members. And the BAM passes through more inaccessible mountain areas. Perhaps, but such a difference in terms, with a difference in the length of the tracks by two times and with a technological gap, is difficult to explain.

With these lines, I do not want to question the feat of the people of those years, our ancestors. In any case, it remains the great construction site of Russia at that time. But more and more versions appear that the Transsib was not so much built as it was restored. Only bridges over rivers and some sections of the road were equipped. In the bulk - it was put in order, or simply dug up. And there is reason to think so.

Look at these photos of the construction of the Transsib (1910-1914. Album of views of the construction of the middle part of the Amur railway):


197 miles. Career development by teams of exiled convicts


197 miles. Development of seizure by teams of exiled convicts

The impression is that the road is being dug up. But judging from the official point of view about this photo, it is possible that a railway track was laid at the edge of a sheer wall made of soil. When the workers threw the soil with shovels, it spilled out onto the canvas and filled up the sleepers. The result is a visible effect that the road is being dug up.

Another interesting fact:

An old railway track was found in Krasnoyarsk


Archaeologists from Krasnoyarsk and Novosibirsk during excavations at the construction site of a bridge across the Yenisei discovered a section of the railway laid in the 1890s. The find came as a surprise, and for several reasons at once. Firstly, because of its scale: scientists often find small fragments of old railway tracks - rails, sleepers, crutches, but this is the first time that a 100-meter road has been discovered.
Secondly, the railway line was hidden deep underground - under a one and a half meter layer of soil.


The length of the section of the railway line, located next to the Transsib, is about 100 meters. Note that archaeologists found it under a rather thick layer of soil - more than 1.5 meters deep.

Why haven't you reused railroad tracks? At the time of iron deficiency, they were worth their weight in gold. I do not believe that they just took it and buried it. If we compare it with the theme of the buildings brought in, the picture is catastrophic. Or all this soil, clay, fell from above (a dusty cosmic cloud, a giant comet?) Or exits of water and mud masses from the depths. With earthquakes (I had a note on this mechanism) or with a larger cataclysm.

Another observation:

In 1822 Krasnoyarsk received the status of a city and became the capital of the Yenisei Province


And before Transib is more than a decade. There are no prerequisites to move the capital. Or was he already? In the 1840s, a cataclysm occurred and it was restored at the end of the 19th century. in just 10 years!

The trade and transport route before the construction of the Transsib went through Yeniseisk:
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Another fact in favor of the antiquity of the railway. The Trans-Siberian was brought to Baikal, a huge ferry was launched, brought somehow from England, and carrying trains, only then the Circum-Baikal Railway was built. Was it impossible to build it right away? Most likely, the ancient railway went along the place where the fault was formed and filled with water, which became Baikal (it is not in this size on the old maps).

Watch about the oddities of the railway from the 35th minute
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Be sure to watch these videos below! Non-existent railways are shown on maps of the 18th century:

https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/workspace/handleMediaPlayer?lunaMediaId=RUMSEY~8~1~37173~1210150

https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/workspace/handleMediaPlayer?lunaMediaId=RUMSEY~8~1~31410~1150366

Skeptics say these cards were issued in the late 19th century. and it depicts the roads of that time, although the dates of the maps are 1772. Usually, the maps depict the state of the territories of that period, to which the information on routes, cities, countries belongs. Do not overlay on ancient cards with the same borders modern ways... Even taking into account the fact that the map of 1883 shows railway roads that have not even been built yet.


References to "railroad" (rail - rail)) in sources can be traced back centuries to 1600.

Readers told me the version that most of the old churches are, perhaps, ancient railway stations. See for yourself, many railway stations, both earlier and now, are very similar in their architecture to churches. Dome structures of central buildings, arches, spiers, etc.

I had an article:. It contains videos from Shukach with the version that Serpent Shafts are the remains of ancient railway embankments.

And in I showed that the Transsib, at least near Krasnoyarsk, was a two-track. One of the old embankments is now used for modern railway tracks.
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Most likely, there was a period when all technically (not technologically) advanced civilization perished in some event. That level is roughly described in some of the works of J. Verne. The level of engineering + the use of simple technology. Medieval robots, barrel organs, organs, etc. speak about the level of specialists. And without roads and logistics, it was impossible to build such a civilization.