Trans-Siberian Railroad HISTORY

On inaugurating the Trans-Siberian Railroad                   "It is time; high time!"                         Alexander III 1886

Here is a letter from Czar Alezander III to his son Nicholas II Your Imperial Highness! Having given the order to build a continuous line of railway across Siberia,  which is to unite the rich Siberian provinces with the railway system of the interior, I entrust you to declare My will, upon your  entering the Russian dominions after  your inspection of the foreign countries of the East. At the same time, I desire you to lay the first stone at Vladivostok for the construction of the Ussuri line,  forming  part of the Siberian Railway, which is to be carried out at the cost of the State and under the direction of the government.  Your  participation in the acheivement of this work will be testimony  to my ardent desire to facilitate the communication between Siberia  and the other countries of the Empire, and to manifest My extreme  anxiety to secure the  peaceful prosperity of this Country. I remain your sincerely loving Alexander

- Moscow has always been the origin and  hub of public and commercial Russia's rail lines. 

- First state railroads had lines to the Urals for raw materials and to the black earth region for agricultural products.
- A line was then erected to the Caspian sea in order to transport crude oil from Baku, Azerbaijan.

- In the 1840's Nicholas I drew a straight line between Moscow and St. Petersburg (bypassing all of the other towns) which is now referred to as the Nicholas Railroad or the Red Arrow.
-Siberia was the last region to be connected in the time of the Czars. 

Construction of Circumbaikal -  640 km long, 100 km wide and almost a mile deep, Lake Baikal presented a break in the linearity of the Trans-Siiberian. People were intially
ferried across (modelled after the similar cross of Lake Michigan betweenWisconsin and Michigan) while a rail line was diverted around the Baikal’s
southern shoreline.
Russian railroad expansion is indelibly linked with the history of Russian industrialization. Railroads offered the communicative capacities necessary for any modern empire. The vast lines were used to transport natural resources, supplies and goods for distribution throughout the empire and for export, and also served to solidify and maintain the majority of Russia's eastern
expansion. This is invariably true for the parts of Siberia we know today to be in Russia's sphere. However, building railway tracks across Manchuria  to Vladivostok (which shorted the rideby 600Km) and down to Port Arthur did not maintain a lasting hold on the region.

When the Japanese had attacked Russia's holds on Machuria in 1905, the Trans-Siberian railroad was the only means by land mean of transporting and supplying the troops. Unfortunately, it was still a one track rail with a break of unfinished tracks around Lake Baikal. Anyone can see from the crude drawings on the map that Russia was in a far worse position tactically. Needless to say, the Russians lost the war.

Copyright © 2002 russojapanesewar.com