Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume III

THE TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY. 85 severance which ultimately won success at the moment of the nation’s sorest need. Though the trains for the long eastward journey are made up at Moscow, the actual starting-point of the Siberian Railway is, as has been said, Tchelyabinsk, 1,372 Sections of mßeg from Moscow, and about the Railway. 200 miles beyond the frontier. The trunk line, as originally planned and laid down, runs from Tchelyabinsk to Stretensk on the Amur, a total distance, including the width of Lake Baikal, of 3,244 miles, and as has been said, to railway enterprise, and the wonder is that the work had not been undertaken long before. There are but few cuttings, and the direction taken was the easiest that could be found. At first the track stood only a foot above the 150 feet of clearing on either side, and on the imperfect ballast the sleepers were laid, and the light rails spiked to them. From this brief descrip- t ,, x Rivers, tion it is easy to realize that no great speed was possible—15 miles an hour the maximum—and that the rapidly growing MAP OF THE TRANS-SIBERIAN AND MANCHURIAN RAILWAYS. traffic soon began to reveal the shortcomings of the line. The real difficulties were presented by the great streams, the Obi, the Irtysh, and the Yenisei, which, with their numerous tributaries, carry off the rainfall of the mighty mountain system of Central Asia to the Arctic Ocean, affording magnificent waterways as they cross the wide plains, and serving as in- valuable feeders to the com- merce of the railway. No less than 30 miles of bridges had to be constructed on this system, some of them of great length. The largest is that across the Yenisei, an iron six-span bridge was divided into the following sections, from west to east: The West Siberian, to the river Obi, 886 miles; the Mid-Siberian, from the Obi to Irkutsk, 1,144 miles ; the Irkutsk, to Baikal, 43 miles. From Stretensk the journey was at first continued by steamer down the Amur to Khabarovsk, and com- pleted by the Ussuri Railway to Vladivostok, 481 miles. From the western starting-point right away to the Baikal the engineering aspect of the route is practically uniform, and presented a minimum of difficulty. The gently rolling steppes and the great plain lend themselves, of 2,520 feet, including one span of 420 feet. Work of this nature was well within the scope of Prince Khilkoff, Minister of Ways of Com- munication, a practical engineer trained in the workshops of England and America, with con- siderable experience of railway construction in the United States. Neither he nor his staff, however, had had much to do with tunnelling, so it was a particularly fortunate circumstance that no work whatever of this kind was needed at any point between Europe and the Baikal. After the Obi is passed, the country becomes hilly and wooded ; but gra- dients and curves are always moderate, and