Construction In 1851, the
Imperial Russian Government made the decision to build a railway line between Saint Petersburg, then capital of the
Russian Empire, and Warsaw, then the administrative centre of
Russian Poland. On 15 February 1851, the
Russian Emperor Nicholas I signed a decree on conducting surveys for the construction of the railway line, and on 23 November 1851, the Emperor signed the order for the construction of the railway as a strategically important line, which was to be built using state funds from the russian government. in
Saint Petersburg on a pre-1917 photo. Construction began in 1852 under the supervision of the Russian
engineer with the Polish
railway engineer Stanisław Kierbedź as deputy chief of construction. In 1853, the first section of the railway with a length of 41 versts () was completed between Saint Petersburg and the residential city of
Gatchina. Daily scheduled train service on the section started on 31 October 1853. This was a
double-track section, the only one on the otherwise
single-track railway until the 1870s, when other sections were expanded to double track. However, with the outbreak of the
Crimean War in 1853, the work on other sections, where only earthworks had begun, was interrupted, as the war exhausted state funds. After the disastrous outcome of the Crimean War in 1856, which was considered as an effect of the backwardness of the Russian transport system, the Russian government decided in October 1856 to abandon its protectionist policy and try to attract foreign capital for the further expansion of the railway network. On 26 January 1857, the (), of which the main capital was French, was founded. The construction work was transferred to the newly formed society. , 1900. in
Warsaw in 1908. After the railway was transferred to the Main Society of Russian Railways, the construction was resumed under the supervision of the French engineer
Édouard Collignon. The rest of the railway was subsequently opened in sections. Already in December 1857 the section from Gatchina to
Luga was opened. On 19 July 1858, a first special train with members of the company's board of directors arrived in
Pskov, On 22 September, the Emperor "deigned to arrive from Pskov to Tsarskoye Selo", although it took until February 1859 before daily train service on the route from Luga to Pskov was opened. In May 1858, construction started near Vilnius on the first section of 19 kilometers. On 1 May 1859 the ground works started along the entire route
Daugavpils–
Vilnius–
Lentvaris–
Kaunas–
Kybartai. The end of summer of 1860 marked the end of the construction of the Ostrov-Daugavpils–Vilnius railway. The first train from Daugavpils arrived in Vilnius on 1860. The construction of the section from
Lentvaris to
Warsaw was completed on 15 December 1862. Already the year before, in 1861, the branch line was completed from Vilnius to the Prussian border, and between Verzhbolovo Station in
Kybartai and Eydtkuhnen in Prussia (now
Chernyshevskoye in Russian
Kaliningrad Oblast) the first junction between Russian gauge and standard gauge railway systems was built, with rails in both gauges between the border stations. The first locomotives for the St. Petersburg–Warsaw railway were bought in England, France, and Belgium. They were “G” class 0-6-0s with two cylinders. They were produced in Manchester in 1857, in Paris in 1860, and in Belgium in 1862. Their weight was 30–32 tons.
Later development In 1895, the Saint Petersburg–Warsaw Railway Company was nationalized. On 1 January 1907, the Saint Petersburg–Warsaw Railway, along with the
Baltic and
Pskov–Riga Railway companies, became part of the
North-Western Railways. The portion between Vilnius and Warsaw was rebuilt in the
standard gauge in the 1920s when that area belonged to Poland. The railway was partly destroyed during both world wars. == Present==