Demand and design In the late 19th century, the development of Siberia was hampered by poor transport links within the region and with the rest of the country. Aside from the
Great Siberian Route, roads suitable for wheeled transport were rare. For about five months of the year, rivers were the main means of transport. During winter, cargo and passengers traveled by horse-drawn sledges over the
winter roads, many of which were the same rivers but frozen. The first steamboat on the
River Ob, Nikita Myasnikov's
Osnova, was launched in 1844. However, early innovation had proven to be difficult, and it was not until 1857 that steamboat shipping had begun major development on the Ob system. Steamboats began operation on the
Yenisei in 1863, and on the
Lena and
Amur in the 1870s. While the comparative flatness of
Western Siberia was served by good river systems, the major river systems
Ob–
Irtysh–
Tobol–
Chulym of
Eastern Siberia had difficulties. The Yenisei, the upper course of the
Angara River below
Bratsk which was not easily navigable because of the rapids, and the Lena, were mostly navigable only in the north–south direction, making west–east transportation difficult. An attempt to partially remedy the situation by building the
Ob–Yenisei Canal had not yielded great success. These issues in the region created the need for a railway to be constructed. One of the first was the
Irkutsk–
Chita project, proposed by the American entrepreneur
Perry Collins and supported by Transport Minister
Constantine Possiet with a view toward connecting Moscow to the
Amur River, and consequently the Pacific Ocean. Siberia's governor,
Nikolay Muravyov-Amursky, was anxious to advance
Russian colonization of the now
Russian Far East, but his plans were unfeasible due to colonists importing grain and food from China and Korea. It was on Muravyov's initiative that surveys for a railway in the
Khabarovsk region were conducted. Before 1880, the central government had virtually ignored these projects, due to weaknesses in Siberian enterprises, an inefficient bureaucracy, and financial risk. By 1880, there was a large number of rejected and upcoming applications for permission to construct railways in order 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 actual route constructed, alternative projects were proposed: • Southern route: via
Kazakhstan,
Barnaul,
Abakan and Mongolia. • Northern route: via
Tyumen,
Tobolsk,
Tomsk,
Yeniseysk and the modern
Baikal Amur Mainline or even through
Yakutsk. The line was divided into seven sections, most or all of which was simultaneously worked on by 62,000 workers. With financial support provided by leading European financier,
Baron Henri Hottinguer of the Parisian bankers
Hottinger & Cie, the total cost estimated at £35 million was raised with the first section (Chelyabinsk to the River Ob) and finished at a cost £900,000 lower than anticipated. Railwaymen argued against suggestions to save funds, such as installing ferryboats instead of bridges over the rivers until traffic increased. Unlike the rejected private projects that intended to connect the existing cities that required 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. However, due to the swampy banks of the Ob River near
Tomsk (the largest settlement at the time), the idea to construct a bridge was rejected. The railway was laid to the south (instead crossing the Ob at Novonikolaevsk, later renamed
Novosibirsk); a dead-end branch line connected with Tomsk, depriving the city of the prospective transit railway traffic and trade. Tsarevich Nicholas (later Tsar Nicholas II) inaugurated the construction of the railway in Vladivostok on 19 May that year. Lake Baikal is more than long and more than deep. Until the
Circum–Baikal railway was built the line ended on either side of the lake. The
ice-breaking train ferry built in 1897 and smaller ferry
SS Angara built in about 1900 made the four-hour crossing to link the two railheads. The Russian admiral and explorer
Stepan Makarov (1849–1904) designed
Baikal and
Angara but they were built in
Newcastle upon Tyne, by
Armstrong Whitworth. They were "knock down" vessels; that is, each ship was bolted together in the United Kingdom, every part of the ship was marked with a number, the ship was disassembled into many hundreds of parts and transported in kit form to
Listvyanka where a shipyard was built especially to reassemble them. The entire length of the Trans-Siberian Railway was double tracked by 1939.
Effects Siberian agriculture began to send cheap grain westwards beginning around 1869. Agriculture in Central Russia was still under economic pressure after the end of
serfdom, which was
formally abolished in 1861. To defend the central territory and prevent possible social destabilization, the Tsarist government introduced the
Chelyabinsk tariff-break () in 1896, a tariff barrier for grain passing through Chelyabinsk, and a similar barrier in
Manchuria. This measure changed the nature of export: mills emerged to produce bread from grain in
Altai Krai,
Novosibirsk and
Tomsk, and many farms switched to
corn (maize) production. The railway immediately filled to capacity with local traffic, mostly wheat. From 1896 until 1913 Siberia exported on average (30,643,000
pood) of grain and flour annually. During the
Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, military traffic to the east disrupted the flow of civil freight. The Trans-Siberian Railway brought with it millions of peasant-migrants from the Western regions of Russia and Ukraine. Between 1906 and 1914, the peak migration years, about four million peasants arrived in Siberia. Historian
Christian Wolmar argues that the railroad was a failure, because it was built for narrow political reasons, with poor supervision and planning. The costs were vastly exaggerated to enrich greedy bureaucrats. The planners hoped it would stimulate settlement, but the Siberian lands were too infertile and cold and distant. There was little settlement beyond from the line. The fragile system could not handle the heavy traffic demanded in wartime, so the Japanese in 1904 knew they were safe in
their war with Russia. Wolmar concludes:
War and revolution In the
Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), the strategic importance and limitations of the Trans-Siberian Railway contributed to Russia's defeat in the war. As the line was single-track, transit was slower as trains had to wait in crossing sidings for opposing trains to cross. This limited the capacity of the line and increased transit times. A troop train or a train carrying injured personnel traveling from east to west would delay the arrival of troops or supplies and ammunition in a train traveling from west to east. The supply difficulties meant the Russian forces had limited troops and supplies while Japanese forces with shorter lines of communication were able to attack and advance. After the
Russian 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
Alexander 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 leader of legions politician
Milan Rastislav Stefanik traveled from Moscow to Vladivostok in March to August 1918, on his journey to Japan and the United States of America. The Trans-Siberian Railway also played a very direct role during parts of Russia's history, with the
Czechoslovak Legion using heavily armed and
armored 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 fighting forces left in the aftermath of the imperial collapse, and before the
Red Army took control, the
Czechs and
Slovaks were able to use their organization 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.
World War II During World War II, the Trans-Siberian Railway played an important role in the supply of the powers fighting in Europe. In 1939–1941 it was a source of rubber for Germany thanks to the
USSR-Germany pact. While Germany's merchant shipping was shut down, the Trans-Siberian Railway (along with its
Trans-Manchurian branch) served as the essential link between Germany and Japan, especially for rubber. By March 1941, of this material would, on average, traverse the Trans-Siberian Railway every day on its way to Germany. At the same time, a number of Jews and anti-Nazis used the Trans-Siberian Railway to escape Europe, including the mathematician
Kurt Gödel and Betty Ehrlich Löwenstein, mother of British actor, director and producer
Heinz Bernard. Several thousand Jewish refugees were able to make this trip thanks to the Curaçao visas issued by the Dutch consul
Jan Zwartendijk and the Japanese visas issued by the Japanese consul,
Chiune Sugihara, in
Kaunas, Lithuania. Typically, they took the TSR to
Vladivostok, then by ship to US. Until June 1941, pro-Nazi ethnic Germans from the Americas used the TSR to go to Germany. The situation reversed after 22 June 1941. By
invading the Soviet Union, Germany cut off its only reliable trade route to Japan. Instead, it had to use fast merchant ships and later large oceanic submarines to evade the Allied blockade. On the other hand, the USSR received
Lend-Lease supplies from the US. Even after Japan went to war with the US, despite German complaints, Japan usually allowed Soviet ships to sail between the US and Vladivostok unmolested. As a result, the
Pacific Route – via northern Pacific Ocean and the TSR – became the safest connection between the US and the USSR. Accordingly, it accounted for as much freight as the
North Atlantic–Arctic and
Iranian routes combined, though cargoes were limited to raw materials and non-military goods. From 1941 to 1942 the TSR also played an important role in relocating Soviet industries from European Russia to Siberia in the face of the German invasion. The TSR also transported Soviet troops west from the Far East to take part in
the Soviet counter-offensive in December 1941. In 1944–45 the TSR was used to prepare for the
Soviet–Japanese War of August 1945; see
Pacific Route. When an Anglo-American delegation visited Moscow in October 1944 to discuss the Soviet Union joining the war against Japan,
Alanbrooke was told by General Antonov and Stalin himself that the line capacity was 36 pairs of trains per day, but only 26 could be counted on for military traffic; see
Pacific Route. The capacity of each train was from 600 to 700 tons. Although the Japanese estimated that an attack was not likely before Spring 1946,
Stavka had planned for a mid-August 1945 offensive, and had concealed the buildup of a force of 90 divisions; many had crossed Siberia in their vehicles to avoid straining the rail link.
Post World War II . A trainload of containers can be taken from Beijing to
Hamburg, via the Trans-Mongolian and Trans-Siberian lines in as little as 15 days, but typical cargo transit times are usually significantly longer and typical cargo transit time from Japan to major destinations in European Russia was reported as around 25 days. According to a 2009 report, the best travel times for cargo
block trains from Russia's Pacific ports to the western border (of Russia, or perhaps of
Belarus) were around 12 days, with trains making around per day, at a maximum operating speed of . In early 2009; however, Russian Railways announced an ambitious "Trans-Siberian in Seven Days" plan. According to this plan, $11 billion will be invested over the next five years to make it possible for goods traffic to cover the same distance in just seven days. The plan will involve increasing the cargo trains' speed to in 2010–2012, and, at least on some sections, to by 2015. At these speeds, goods trains will be able to cover per day.
Crime From February to May 1993, a number of
Beijing-based gangs routinely robbed, beat, and raped railway passengers. The criminals took advantage of the fact that Chinese police disembarked the train before the border crossing into Mongolia, but no Mongolian police ever boarded to replace them, and Russian authorities did not board until the train had been in Siberia for an entire day. During the interim, there was no effective security on the trains, and no practical resistance to criminals armed with knives, sticks, and cattle prods.
Developments in shipping On January 11, 2008, China, Mongolia, Russia, Belarus, Poland, and Germany agreed to collaborate on a cargo train service between Beijing and Hamburg. The railway can typically deliver containers in to of the time of a sea voyage, and in late 2009 announced a 20% reduction in its container shipping rates. With its 2009 rate schedule, the Trans-Siberian Railway will transport a forty-foot container to Poland from
Yokohama for $2,820, or from
Busan for $2,154. ==Gallery==