Trans-Siberian Railway (1891-1916): Crossing Russia by Rail

The Trans-Siberian Railway is the great rail line across Russia from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast, about 9,289 km (5,772 miles) long. Begun in May 1891 and completed in stages until 1916, it was one of the largest engineering projects of the nineteenth century and changed the economic and strategic map of northern Asia.

Background: an empire without roads

By the late nineteenth century the Russian Empire stretched from the Baltic to the Pacific, but Siberia was linked to the European part of the country only by rivers and the long, rutted Siberian post road. A journey from St Petersburg to the Pacific coast could take many months. The port of Vladivostok, founded in 1860, was in practice closer to Japan and China than to the Russian capital.

Proposals for a Siberian railway had circulated since the 1850s, including schemes by foreign promoters. Officials worried about the cost, the climate and the thin population. What changed minds in the 1880s was a mix of strategy and economics: the growth of British, Japanese and Chinese power in East Asia, the wish to settle Siberia with Russian farmers, and the example of North America, where the Canadian Pacific Railway had just linked the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

In March 1891 Tsar Alexander III issued an imperial rescript ordering construction of a continuous railway across Siberia. It continued a long Russian push eastward that had begun with the Cossack conquest of Siberia under Yermak in the sixteenth century.

Building the line

On 31 May 1891 (19 May in the Russian calendar of the time) the heir to the throne, Tsarevich Nicholas, the future Nicholas II, ceremonially began work at Vladivostok at the end of his tour of Asia. Construction from the western end, at Chelyabinsk on the eastern side of the Urals, started in July 1892.

The driving force was Sergei Witte, minister of communications and then, from 1892, minister of finance. Witte saw the railway as the key to Russian industrialisation and to economic influence in Asia, and he pushed for speed above quality. To save money and time the line was built as a single track with light rails, steep gradients, tight curves and many wooden bridges, to be improved later.

The route was divided into sections built at the same time: the West Siberian line from Chelyabinsk to the River Ob, the Central Siberian line on to Irkutsk, the Trans-Baikal line east of Lake Baikal, and the Ussuri line from Vladivostok north to Khabarovsk. The town that grew up at the Ob bridge became Novonikolayevsk, today’s Novosibirsk, now the largest city in Siberia.

Workers faced permafrost, swamps, harsh winters, short summers, outbreaks of disease and a shortage of local labour and materials. At its peak the workforce numbered tens of thousands. Many were peasants recruited from European Russia; others were soldiers, convicts and exiles, while Chinese, Korean and other foreign workers were important in the Far East. Almost everything, from rails to locomotives, had to be brought in from far away.

Lake Baikal and the Manchurian shortcut

The hardest obstacle was Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest lake, ringed by cliffs on its southern shore. At first trains crossed by ferry. The icebreaking train ferry Baikal, built in England by Armstrong Whitworth and reassembled on the lake, entered service in 1900. In the winter of 1904, during the war with Japan, rails were laid across the frozen lake to rush troops east.

The Circum-Baikal Railway along the southern shore, with dozens of tunnels and long stretches of retaining walls and galleries, was completed in 1904 and opened to regular traffic in 1905. It was among the most expensive parts of the whole project.

Further east, the planned route along the Amur River was long and difficult. In 1896 Russia obtained Chinese agreement to build the Chinese Eastern Railway straight across Manchuria to Vladivostok, cutting hundreds of kilometres from the route. A branch south to Port Arthur and Dalny (Dalian) followed after Russia leased the Liaodong Peninsula in 1898. The Manchurian lines were joined in 1901 and opened to regular traffic in 1903.

War and the Amur line

The railway soon faced its greatest test. When the Russo-Japanese War began in February 1904, the single-track line, still broken at Baikal, struggled to carry troops and supplies thousands of kilometres to Manchuria. Its limited capacity was one of the reasons for Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, and the Treaty of Portsmouth (1905) left southern Manchuria, including the Port Arthur branch, under Japanese influence.

The war convinced the government that a route entirely on Russian soil was essential. Work on the Amur Railway, from the Trans-Baikal region to Khabarovsk, began in the late 1900s, and double-tracking of the main line started. The last major link, the great bridge over the Amur at Khabarovsk, opened in October 1916, in the middle of the First World War. Only then could a train travel from European Russia to Vladivostok without leaving Russian territory.

Key people

• Alexander III (reigned 1881–1894) ordered the railway and treated it as a national priority.
• Nicholas II (reigned 1894–1917) inaugurated the works at Vladivostok in 1891 and chaired the Committee of the Siberian Railway.
• Sergei Witte, finance minister from 1892 to 1903, financed and promoted the line and the Manchurian shortcut, and later became Russia’s first prime minister.

Consequences

The railway opened Siberia to mass migration. Between the 1890s and the First World War several million peasants moved east, especially under the resettlement policies of Pyotr Stolypin after 1906. New towns grew along the line, and Siberian grain, butter and timber reached distant markets.

Strategically, the line made Russia a Pacific power in a new way, but its push into Manchuria alarmed Japan and helped cause the 1904–1905 war. In the Russian Civil War (1917–1922) the railway was fought over by Red and White armies and by the Czechoslovak Legion, whose long journey east along the line became one of the war’s best-known episodes.

In the Soviet era the line was double-tracked along its length and gradually electrified, a process completed in 2002. In the Second World War it carried factories, troops and supplies between the Far East and the European front.

Legacy

The Trans-Siberian remains the backbone of transport in Asian Russia, carrying large volumes of freight between Europe and the Pacific. Branches such as the Trans-Manchurian and Trans-Mongolian routes connect it to Beijing. For travellers in Europe and North America, a journey on the line has become a classic long-distance adventure, taking about six to seven days from Moscow to Vladivostok.

Timeline

• 1891, March: Alexander III orders the building of a railway across Siberia.
• 1891, 31 May: Tsarevich Nicholas begins construction at Vladivostok.
• 1892, July: Work starts from Chelyabinsk in the Urals.
• 1896: Russia and China agree on the Chinese Eastern Railway across Manchuria.
• 1897: The Ussuri line from Vladivostok to Khabarovsk is completed.
• 1898: The line from the west reaches Irkutsk.
• 1903: Regular traffic begins on the Manchurian route to Vladivostok.
• 1904–1905: The Circum-Baikal section is completed and opened; the Russo-Japanese War exposes the line’s limits.
• 1916, October: The Amur bridge at Khabarovsk opens, completing the all-Russian route.
• 2002: Electrification of the whole line is completed.

Why it matters

The Trans-Siberian Railway tied Siberia and the Russian Far East to the rest of the country for the first time. It shaped migration, trade and war in northern Asia for more than a century and remains one of the world’s most important transport links.