The Trans-Siberian Railway

The Trans-Siberian Railway, also called the Great Siberian Route or simply the Transsib, is a vast rail network linking European Russia with the country’s Far East. At over 9,289 kilometers, it holds the record as the world’s longest railway line, stretching from Moscow in the west to Vladivostok in the east.

Construction took place between 1891 and 1916 under the Russian Empire, overseen by government ministers personally chosen by Tsar Alexander III and his son Nicholas II. Even before the line was finished, travelers began documenting their journeys on it.

Since 1916, the railway has provided a direct connection between Moscow and Vladivostok. Today, expansion continues, with new links being built to Mongolia, China, and North Korea. There have also been discussions about extending the network to Tokyo, Japan, possibly via new bridges or tunnels connecting the mainland through Russia’s Sakhalin Island and Japan’s Hokkaido.

Route

The main route is often thought of as the transcontinental line crossing both European and Asian Russia, linking numerous cities large and small. The track from Moscow to Vladivostok measures 9,289 kilometers and crosses eight time zones. The journey takes about eight days, making it the third-longest continuous single service in the world, after the Moscow–Pyongyang service (10,267 km) and the former Kyiv–Vladivostok service (11,085 km), both of which follow much of the Trans-Siberian route.

The primary line starts at Moscow’s Yaroslavsky Vokzal and passes through Yaroslavl or Chelyabinsk, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Ulan-Ude, Chita, and Khabarovsk before reaching Vladivostok via southern Siberia. A second major route is the Trans-Manchurian, which follows the Trans-Siberian east of Chita to Tarskaya (a stop about 12 km east of Karymskoye in Chita Oblast, roughly 1,000 km east of Lake Baikal). From Tarskaya, it heads southeast through China’s northeastern provinces via the Harbin–Manzhouli and Harbin–Suifenhe railways (a connection to Beijing is used by one Moscow–Beijing train), rejoining the main line at Ussuriysk just north of Vladivostok.

The third main route is the Trans-Mongolian Railway, which follows the Trans-Siberian as far as Ulan-Ude on the eastern shore of Lake Baikal. From there, it goes south to Ulaanbaatar and then southeast to Beijing. In 1991, after more than fifty years of intermittent work, a fourth northern route was finally completed: the Baikal–Amur Mainline (BAM). It branches off the Trans-Siberian at Taishet, several hundred miles west of Lake Baikal, passes the lake at its northernmost point, crosses the Amur River at Komsomolsk-na-Amure (north of Khabarovsk), and ends at the Tatar Strait in Sovetskaya Gavan.

Demand and design

In the late 1800s, Siberia’s development was held back by poor transport. Aside from the Great Siberian Route, roads suitable for wheeled vehicles were scarce. Rivers served as the main transport for about five months each year; in winter, cargo and people moved by horse-drawn sledges over frozen rivers.

The first steamboat on the Ob River, Nikita Myasnikov’s Osnova, launched in 1844, but early progress was slow. Steamboat shipping on the Ob system only began to expand significantly in 1857, on the Yenisei in 1863, and on the Lena and Amur in the 1870s. While western Siberia had good river systems, eastern Siberia’s major rivers—the Ob–Irtysh–Tobol–Chulym—posed difficulties.

The Yenisei, the upper Angara below Bratsk (blocked by rapids), and the Lena were mostly navigable north–south, making east–west travel hard. An attempt to improve things with the Ob–Yenisei Canal was not very successful. These problems made a railway necessary.

The first railway plans for Siberia appeared after the Saint Petersburg–Moscow Railway was finished in 1851. One early proposal was the Irkutsk–Chita line, suggested by American entrepreneur Perry Collins and backed by Transport Minister Constantine Possiet, aiming to connect Moscow to the Amur River and the Pacific Ocean. Siberia’s governor, Nikolay Muravyov-Amursky, wanted to boost Russian settlement in the Far East, but his plans were impractical because colonists had to import grain and food from China and Korea.

On his initiative, surveys for a railway in the Khabarovsk area were carried out. Before 1880, the central government largely ignored these projects due to weak Siberian enterprises, inefficient bureaucracy, and financial risk. By 1880, many applications for railways to link Siberia with the Pacific had been rejected or were pending, which worried the government and made connecting Siberia to central Russia urgent.

The design process took ten years. Besides the route actually built, alternatives were considered: a southern route via Kazakhstan, Barnaul, Abakan, and Mongolia; and a northern route via Tyumen, Tobolsk, Tomsk, Yeniseysk, and the modern Baikal–Amur Mainline or even Yakutsk. The line was split into seven sections, most or all of which were worked on simultaneously by 62,000 laborers.