Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume III

THE TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY. ENTRANCES TO TUNNELS IN THE TRANS-BAIKAL SECTION OF THE RAILWAY. The words “TO THE GREAT OCEAN” appear over the western portal, “TO THE ATLANTIC OCEAN” over the eastern portal. BY T. FLETCHER FULLARD, M.A. An Account of the Longest Railway in the World. A MONG the incidents in the Crimean War Z-X was the unsuccessful attack by a ■*“ British squadron upon the fort of Vladivostok. When, a few years later (1860), China ceded to Russia the Littoral Province Early Schemes. —the Ussuri and the valley of the Amur—the empire of the Czar was established still more firmly on the shores of the Pacific. From that time onwards various schemes for con- necting these Far Eastern dominions with European Russia by a railway were succes- sively brought forward, discussed, and allowed to lapse. Continental railway building was a (1,408) science comparatively in its infancy ; and for long the vast distances and the colossal ex- pense involved, added to the doubtful success ' of so enormous an undertaking, proved in- superable obstacles. The earliest project is credited to an English engineer named Dull, who suggested a horse- drawn railway from Nizhni Novgorod on the Volga to the Pacific—not such a wildly chimer- ical idea after all, considering the plenty and excellence of horse-flesh in Siberia. Then various private companies offered to lay steam tracks across the plains ; but they met with scant encouragement, the would-be promoters 6 VOL. in.