Two British-built icebreakers once carried the Trans-Siberian across Lake Baikal
Before tracks wrapped around Lake Baikal, the railway simply stopped at each shore. An icebreaking train ferry, designed by a Russian admiral, built in Newcastle, taken apart into numbered pieces and reassembled at a lakeside shipyard, carried trains on a four-hour crossing of a lake more than 1,600 metres deep.
Running more than 9,289 kilometres from Moscow to Vladivostok, the Trans-Siberian is the world's longest railway line and crosses a record eight time zones. The full trip takes eight days. Ministers chosen by Alexander III and later Nicholas II oversaw construction from 1891 to 1916, when the direct Moscow to Vladivostok connection was completed. Branches split off: the Trans-Manchurian cuts through northeast China, the Trans-Mongolian heads via Ulaanbaatar to Beijing, and the Baikal–Amur Mainline, finished in 1991 after more than five decades of sporadic work, loops north of the lake to the Tatar Strait.
Siberia badly needed it. Wheeled roads were rare, rivers carried traffic for about five months a year, and in winter horse sledges ran along frozen rivers. The big rivers mostly flow north to south, which made east–west travel hard. Early schemes followed the Saint Petersburg to Moscow railway of 1851, including an Irkutsk to Chita line proposed by the American Perry Collins, but the government largely ignored them until about 1880.
An imperial rescript on 9 March 1891 announced the project, and Tsarevich Nicholas launched work in Vladivostok on 19 May. Up to 62,000 workers laboured on seven sections, with financing arranged through the Parisian banker Baron Henri Hottinguer against an estimated total of £35 million; the first section, from Chelyabinsk to the Ob, came in £900,000 under budget. To save money and avoid landowners, the line bypassed existing towns. Swampy riverbanks near Tomsk, then the biggest settlement, pushed the Ob crossing 70 kilometres south to what became Novosibirsk, leaving Tomsk on a dead-end branch.
Lake Baikal, over 640 kilometres long, was the great obstacle. Admiral Stepan Makarov designed the ferries Baikal, from 1897, and the smaller Angara, around 1900, which Armstrong Whitworth built as kits for reassembly at Listvyanka. Baikal was 64 metres long, with 15 boilers and four funnels.
Source: Trans-Siberian Railway
