Once the decision was made to go ahead with the construction of the railway, pressure was on to build it as quickly as possible. There had already been too many delays, therefore it was agreed to split up the project into [N 001 / various sections] that would be constructed simultaneously. The operative word for the day was cheap.
The creation of the Trans-Siberian can be seen to have gone through two stages. The initial phase (1891-1901) consisted of the Ussuri Railway connecting Vladivostok with Khabarovsk, the West Siberian and Mid-Siberian Railways that covered the distance from the Ural Mountains to Lake Baikal, the Transbaikal Railway which joined the eastern shore of Lake Baikal to the Shilka River, and the East Chinese Railway that provided a shortcut to Vladivostok through China. Phase two (1898-1916) covers the period of reconstruction that was necessary for improving much of the shoddy workmanship of the first stage. Also included are the Circumbaikal Loop Line and the Amur Railway built as part of the policy of completing a Trans-Siberian Railway fully on territory under Russian control after the [G 05 / Boxer Rebellion] had shown the vulnerabilities of the existing line.
THE USSURI RAILWAY (1891-97):
Aside from the terrain and a [L3 301 / shortage of labor], nature was the most formidable foe the engineers faced. Winds and subzero weather limited earthwork to only a few months per year. However, deluges of rain that bogged down horses, carts and men in black mud also limited progress in the warm season.
A more serious menace was the spread of disease by the deadly humidity from week-long drizzles. Siberian [G 02 / anthrax] wiped out scores of horses and large numbers of workers were incapacitated from fever spread by clouds of mosquitoes.
In the forests lurked the formidable Amur tiger. The largest of the big cats (today there are less than 250 left), each weighed as much as 770lbs and could be up to 10ft in length. These intimidating animals would terrorize the Chinese workers whose camps were in their hunting territory.
Vladivostok to Khabarovsk was only 476 miles, but it took the chief engineer Vyazemski five years to complete. This was less than one-quarter the distance of the West and Mid-Siberian lines combined and the two were completed in just over six years.
The challenges presented by nature and the difficulty finding suitable labor was compounded by the need to source practically all construction material in Russia. Transportation from Europe required a minimum of 40 days from Odessa in the best of weather. This often resulted in delays of several months for materials. Even then, trains could only manage an unimpressive 10mph at the Ussuri's official opening in November 1897.
THE WEST SIBERIAN RAILWAY (1892-95):
Construction of the West Siberian was divided into two sections from Chelyabinsk to Omsk and from Omsk to the Ob River. On July 19, 1892, construction on the first section of the line began to a slow start.
A crippling shortage of wagons, carts, horses, barges and steamers limited the work to be done. These had to be bought and imported at heavy cost. Experienced laborers were hard to find, therefore the chief engineer, Mikhailovski, was obliged to recruit workers from Italy, Persia (Iran), Russia and Turkey. The countryside was bare of timber suitable for rail ties and bridges, therefore lumber had to be transported from distant points such as Ufa (300 miles west of Chelyabinsk). Stone for culverts and large bridges was absent except for quarries along the upper reaches of the Irtysh River (600 miles south of the railway) and in the Urals. Sand for track ballast, also not readily at hand, required teamsters to drive as much as 50 miles to and from the deposits.
Despite the lack of skilled workers, building materials and drinking water, two miles of track were laid daily during the summer. However, the normal working season was limited by frost to four months. Nevertheless, winter was given over to bridge and station construction, road clearance and accumulation of sledge-drawn supplies - horses could pull twice the amount over snow than what was possible by cart on dirt roads. In winter, workers bunked in portable log cabins, boxcars, or sod huts made with railway ties; in milder weather they camped out.
During the winter of 1894-5 a large company of masons, ironworkers and unskilled laborers were left to build a span across the Irtysh while work continued on the second section. The entire West Siberian was completed in October of 1895, however, the nearly half-mile-long bridge over the Irtysh to Omsk was not. Only in March 1896 could a train travel the whole route from Chelyabinsk to the Ob.
That same year a spur line was built from Chelyabinsk to Yekaterinburg, the present starting point of the Trans-Siberian. Within three years the construction of the West Siberian had already a tremendous effect on Omsk. By 1899 the value of the city's industrial output had increased by nearly 60 percent, and from 1897-9 its population grew from 37,000 to over 50,000.
THE MID-SIBERIAN RAILWAY (1893-99):
Stretching 1,130 miles from Novonikolayevsk to Irkutsk, this was the longest section of the Trans-Siberian. Like the West Siberian, it was built in two sections from the River Ob to Krasnoyarsk on the west bank of the River Yenisei and from Krasnoyarsk to the outskirts of Irkutsk.
The engineer in charge, Mezheninov, hurriedly explored part of the terrain from 1887 to 1888. He was under instructions to complete the first section to Krasnoyarsk by 1896 and the second was to reach Irkutsk by 1900. But in the fall of 1893 a high-ranking engineer was sent to inspect the work begun in early summer. Returning from his tour in early November, he reported the Mid-Siberian could be completed two years earlier than planned. This prompted a meeting of the railway committee to work out a new timetable for construction. In May 1894 a new plan was approved at the urging of Witte for an accelerated program that would link Russia with Vladivostok by 1899.
Construction on the first stage was begun in 1893. As with the West Siberian, there was a dearth of indigenous building material. All supplies needed to be shipped from Russia and the Urals via the roundabout [L3 302 / river route] until a western rail connection could be made (the Yenisei bridge was built from cast steel transported from the Urals, cement from St Petersburg and steel bearings from Warsaw 3,500 miles away).
Carts and horses were in short supply and local labor was practically impossible to recruit in a land inhabited on average by one person per square mile. Still short on manpower a year later, Mezheninov enlisted 1,500 [L3 303 / convicts] from a prison near Irkutsk to fell trees, build earthworks and construct wooden bridges. Progress would have been quicker if the Post Road from the Ob River to Tomsk was followed, but it was decided to bypass Tomsk. This necessitated hacking a 250-foot path through the virgin forest of the [L3 304 / Siberian taiga] to reduce the potential of forest fires from locomotive sparks.
To meet the goals of the accelerated program, Mezheninov sent a crew ahead to start the second leg in the summer of 1894. To complete it as quickly as possible, the engineers risked train safety by reducing ballast, narrowing the base of embankments, and increasing the angle of curves and gradients. This construction was economical, but an unexpectedly large number of bridges had to be built - 82 in one section of 44 miles - dramatically increasing costs. In January of 1898 the Ob-Krasnoyarsk section opened to regular traffic. With the arrival of the first official train in Irkutsk on August 28 of that same year, the Mid-Siberian was nearly complete. Regular traffic commenced the following January. A [L3 305 / short distance remained to reach the shore of Lake Baikal].
THE TRANSBAIKAL RAILWAY (1895-1900):
This line was begun in 1895 on the eastern shore of Lake Baikal at Mysovaya also under the direction of Pushechnikov, the chief engineer responsible for the Port Baikal connection. Until the Amur line was built, travelers would take the train through Verkhneudinsk (Ulan Ude) and Chita to Sretensk, where they disembarked and boarded a ship for Khabarovsk via the Shilka and Amur rivers. At Khabarovsk the train journey was resumed, completing the remaining distance to Vladivostok.
Labor was provided by 1,700 convicts from the mines and 2,500 exiles with the typical scarcity of experienced contractors. The ridges of the Transbaikalia Range obliged the engineers to follow the winding, steep banks of the Ingoda and Shilka rivers and shelving often had to be blasted for the roadbed. Areas between Verkhneudinsk and Sretensk had deep [G 15 / permafrost] which was dynamited or thawed with wood fires.
The very dry winters in this area required the melting of river ice for drinking water. However, in July 1897 the direct opposite was the case. A spectacular catastrophe occurred in the Yablonovy Mountains on this section that added years to construction. After a torrential downpour, a colossal wall of water swept away part of the Transbaikal Line, including hundreds of [P 010 / villages] and tens of thousands of cattle. The whole river system from the eastern shores of Lake Baikal to Sretensk was flooded and many rivers changed their channels. Not only did villages have to be rebuilt, but the railway needed to be constructed in another location. The Transbaikal was finally completed in 1900, five years after it was begun.
THE EAST CHINESE RAILWAY (1897-1901):
The Russians built the East Chinese Railway as a shortcut to Vladivostok and as a means of exploiting the rich economic and strategic prize of Manchuria to the exclusion of Japan and the Western powers. They paid a [L3 306 / high price] for what turned out to be a negligible return - having to contend with deserts and mountain ranges, arctic cold, rampaging floods, pestilence, bandits and saboteurs almost simultaneously.
The chief engineer, Yugovich, arrived in Vladivostok in April 1897 lacking detailed knowledge of Manchuria's topograhical and climatic peculiarities. Surveying parties returned with discouraging reports. The few roads were fantastically rough during the rainy season and impassable quagmires until filled in with brush and logs. Supply carts could only cross unbridged rivers and streams at random fords or on pairs of boats lashed together. Fourteen major waterways required spans of 800-feet to a half-mile.
Parts of the eastern section had wood but no stone; the western had stone but no wood. Along the entire 927 miles of the route there were less than six towns with little utilizable labor. For these reasons a makeshift line was built to transport materials, Russian artisans, and legions of Chinese laborers to eventually construct a durable single-track railway of broad Russian gauge.
The first wave of laborers began to work westward from the Ussuri River in August 1897. Others went by rail and water from Vladivostok to Khabarovsk then up the Amur and the Sungari rivers to Harbin. There, they tracked east to meet construction parties from the Ussuri and west toward Manchuria station. In 1898, with Dairen and Port Arthur leased to Russia, the South Manchurian extension was begun through the most densely populated section of the country, a tremendous market for Russian exporters.
On November 3, 1901, the entire Chinese Eastern opened to provisional traffic. Yugovich set about to make improvements and finish the assembly of more than 600 permanent bridges. However, the most arduous task was to bore a tunnel more than 10,000 feet long in the wind-swept Greater Khingan Range.
Beginning in the summer of 1902, construction suffered a severe setback. An epidemic of Asiatic cholera, which had enveloped a huge area from Shanghai to Tientsin, entered Manchuria with a sumultaneous outbreak of bubonic plague. Practically all of the best working season in the afflicted districts was lost so that completion of the permanent way that summer was impossible. Only in February 1903 -two years behind schedule - was the East Chinese ready for regular traffic. It cost more than the entire Trans-Siberian main line. However, the government was jockeying for Russian hegemony in China, a policy that soon resulted in war with Japan.
THE CIRCUMBAIKAL LOOP LINE (1901-1904):
At a meeting of the Trans-Siberian Committee in the spring of 1898, the Tsar declared that new surveys were to be undertaken without delay. Concluded in the following year, they confirmed that between Irkutsk and Kultuk was the most difficult terrain to be encountered.
East of Kultuk there were fewer obstacles, therefore an immediate start on this stretch of slightly more than 100 miles was authorized. Four possible routes through the formidable Irkutsk-to-Kultuk terrain were mapped out. It was left to the eminent Professor Ivan Mushketov from the University of St Petersburg to make the final decision. After more than a year of field work, he produced a stack of technical evidence that convinced the committee to follow the lake shore from Port Baikal to Kultuk.
Private Russian contractors, who readily agreed to take the job now that men and equipment could be transported by rail, began work on the Port Baikal-Kultuk section in 1901. Almost 10,000 Italian, Persian, Russian and Turkish workers were recruited together with a garrison of tough Circassian guards.
This segment "surpassed in difficulty and amount of work all those constructed in the Russian empire up to the present." Contractors were forced to dynamite cuttings through mountain folds that fell sheer into the water, to bore 33 tunnels, and build up embankments with an average of 101,720 cubic yards of soil and stone per mile. Inlets, gorges and Lake Baikal's tributaries required more than 200 bridges and trestles. Much of the route was inaccessible by road and could only be reached by water in those brief periods when the lake was relatively calm and free of fog.
After Japan's devastating torpedo-boat attack against the Russian naval squadron at Port Arthur, the contractors worked at a furious pace to complete the line. In mid-September of 1904, they turned it over to the Ministry of Ways of Communication with so many defects that the first test train derailed 10 times and failed to pass through one of the tunnels until the roof ventilators on the railcars were removed, taking three days to reach Port Baikal from Kultuk. Nevertheless, an inspection team officially opened the long-deferred Loop on September 25.
THE AMUR RAILWAY (1908-1916):
The Japanese astutely attacked the Russians in China before the Trans-Siberian could reliably transport overwhelming legions of troops from Russia. Although Russia lost the war, they still considered striking back. However, an attack on Japan might lead her to seize the rest of the East Chinese Railway, isolating Vladivostok and the Maritime Province. To avoid such an occurrence construction of a strategically safe railway north of the Amur sector (abandoned in 1896) was urged.
A formal proposal to build the 1200-mile Amur Line was approved in November 1907. The new route branched off from the Transbaikal Line at Kuenga, 30 miles west of Sretensk, and followed an irregular route to Khabarovosk beyond artillery range of the Amur's Manchurian bank.
One track was laid through a forbidding, unpopulated wilderness of moutains, forests, boglands and marshy plains, but tunnels and major bridges were wide enough for double-tracking in the future. Except for some convicts and a few thousand Koreans, laborers were brought from western Russia. They were considered potential colonists and would keep their earnings within the country to the benefit of the economy.
Construction began at Kuenga in the spring of 1908. Tunelling and bridge-foundation work was possible in winter, but other activites were limited from June to no later than the first week in October. Summers were hot, humid and often rainy. Swarms of gnats, flies and a breed of mosquito, peculiar for its painful sting, kept the men and horses under constant attack. Scurvy and other disorders apparently afflicted 75 percent of the workers, induced by drinking stagnant swamp water where there were no rivers or streams.
With completion in 1916 of the Khabarovsk Bridge (the longest in Russia or Siberia even today) the Amur Line and the Trans-Siberian - one of the world's most remarkable engineering feats - was complete.
