The East Siberian Railway (Восточно-Сибирская железная дорога) is a railway in Russia (a branch of the Russian Railways and a part of the Trans-Siberian Railway), which runs across Irkutsk Oblast, Chita Oblast, Buryatia, and Yakutia. The railway administration is located in Irkutsk. The East Siberian Railway borders with the Krasnoyarsk Railway (railway station of Yurty), Trans-Baikal Railway (railway station of Petrovsky Zavod), and Baikal Amur Mainline (railway station of Lena-Vostochnaya). To the south, the East Siberian Railway runs close to the Russo-Mongolian border (railway station of Naushki). As of 2008, the total working length of the East Siberian Railway was 3,848.1 km (2,391.1 mi); number of employees – 46,233 (61,418 in 2005); net weight hauled – 76 mln tonnes (75.934 mln in 2005); long-distance passenger traffic – 3.6 mln people (4.838 mln in 2005); suburban traffic – 29 mln people (26.225 mln in 2005).[1] Annual cargo turnover is 278 mln tonnes.[2]
The East Siberian Railway consists of four divisions, namely the Irkutsk Railway Division, Severobaikalsk Railway Division, Taishet Railway Division, and Ulan-Ude Railway Division. The railway connects the regions of East Siberia, Transbaikal, and Russian Far East with the rest of the railroad network nationwide. The East Siberian Railway services major industrial areas of iron ore and coal mining, oil refining, logging and wood processing, companies and factories in energy, chemical, machine building and machine-tool industries, nonferrous metallurgy, etc. In addition, the railway services agricultural grain-producing and kettle-breeding regions. The biggest points of cargo departure and arrival are Cheremkhovo, Korshunikha, Kitoy-Kombinatskaya, Sukhovskaya, Irkutsk-Sortirovochniy, Ulan-Ude, Lena, and Bratsk.
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The idea of building a railway across scarsely populated and almost unexplored areas of East Siberia was first expressed in the 1870s-1880s. The need for constructing a railway line became particularly evident after the completion of the Ural Railway from Yekaterinburg to Tyumen in 1884. In 1887, they organized three expeditions to explore the route for the future Trans-Siberian Railway. In May 1893, a committee on the construction of the Siberian railway has been created. The construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway was launched simultaneously from two directions, namely Vladivostok and Chelyabinsk. By 1895, the construction of the railway section from Chelyabinsk to the railway station of Ob near a small settlement of Novonikolaevsky (today's Novosibirsk) had been over. On December 6, 1895, the first train arrived in Krasnoyarsk, which would become a starting point for the construction of the East Siberian Railway towards Irkutsk and through Nizhneudinsk (the first train arrived on December 9, 1897) towards Tulun. In 1897, the construction of the Irkutsk - Baikalsky and Mysovaya – Sretensk sections was underway. They built railway stations almost along the whole railway. In 1898, they finished the construction of the Tulun-Irkutsk section. In 1900, they completed the Transbaikal section from Mysovaya to Sretensk and from Irkutsk to the Baikal railway station. They had been building the Circum-Baikal section (between railway stations Mysovaya and Baikal) of the East Siberian Railway until 1905, opening non-stop train traffic along the whole railway when construction ended.
At first, the East Siberian Railway was a single-track railroad. In 1907, they began the construction of the second track, which would end in 1916. Administratively, the mainline was divided into four railways: the Siberian Railway (from Chelyabinsk to Innokentyevskaya railway station with a line towards Tomsk), Transbaikal Railway (from Innokentyevskaya railway station to Sretensk with a line towards Manchuria railway station), Ussuri Railway (from Vladivostok to Khabarovsk), and Amur Railway (from Kuyenga railway station to Khabarovsk). In 1915, the East Siberian Railway was divided into five railways: Omsk Railway, Tomsk Railway, Transbaikal Railway, Amur Railway, and Ussuri Railway. In 1934, the East Siberian Railway became an independent administrative and economic unit with its borders from Mariinsk railway station to Mysovaya railway station. In 1936, the Krasnoyarsk Railway was excluded from the East Siberian Railway. In 1920s-1930s, they carried out technical reconstruction of the railway and upgraded its locomotive and rolling stock. They also built several new lines over the ridges of Sayany, Alatau, taiga, and swamps towards coal and iron ore deposits, woodlands, and banks of large rivers. In 1922-1926, they constructed the Achinsk–Abakan line, which connected the southern areas of Krasnoyarsk Krai, Khakassia, and Tuva and with other economic regions of the country. In 1940, they opened train traffic from Ulan-Ude to Naushki, significantly improving economic relations with Mongolia and providing access to the Gusinoozyorsk coal deposits.
During the Great Patriotic War, the authorities of the East Siberian Railway provided volunteer units to be dispatched to the front (20 railmen would be awarded the title of the Hero of the Soviet Union), found resources for repairing military equipment, prepared rolling stock, and gradually increased the amount of freight from Siberia to the European part of the country.
In the postwar years, the transportation rate continued its increase along with the reconstruction of transportation facilities and introduction of new technology. In 1948, the East Siberian Railway reached its pre-war loading and cargo-turnover level. In 1958, they commissioned the new Taishet-Bratsk-Lena railway, which connected the basins of the Angara and Lena Rivers with the rest of the Siberian railroad network, providing immediate access to mineral deposits in the Angara basin (e.g., Korshunovskoye iron ore deposit) and abundant logging regions and uninterrupted supply of cargo to the northern areas of Irkutsk Oblast and Yakutia. In the end of 1965, they commissioned a 647 km (402 mi) long Abakan-Taishet section of the East Siberian Railway, an electrified high-class railroad with modern means of communication, electric interlocking of railroad switches, and remote dispatching system. This section of the railway provided a new access to Kuzbass, Kazakhstan, and Central Asia from the regions of the Russian Far East and Siberia. In the early 1970s, they finished the construction of the northbound line from the Khrebtovaya railway station to Ust-Ilimsk Hydroelectric Powerplant (214 km/133 mi).
As far as transit cargo is concerned, the largest share falls on ferrous metals, petroleum products, grain shipments, products of light, food, chemical, and machine-building industries. Imported goods usually consist of metals, construction materials, petroleum products, products of machine building, light and food industry, partially grain shipments. Export consists of timber, oil, iron ore, aluminum, and coal. Locally, the railway mostly transports construction goods, coal, timber, petroleum, and agricultural produce. The East Siberian Railway was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor in 1976.
During the construction of several sections of the East Siberian Railway, they widely used various scientific and technical achievements. The railway essentially became a test site for alternating current electrification. They tested and perfected the design of alternating current locomotives, overhead catenary system, means of communication, signaling, centralized traffic control, and automatic block system, all of which would later be introduced on other railways in one way or another. 97% of traffic along the East Siberian Railway is done by means of electric traction.
The East Siberan Railway consists of several sections, one of which is the Circum-Baikal Railway – a monument of the industrial architecture of federal importance. It stretches for over 85 km (53 mi) from the Baikal railway station to the Kultuka railway station. The uniqueness of this wonder of engineering is that no other railway in the world has as many man-made objects, namely 40 tunnels, 16 avalanche galleries, 470 overpasses, bridges, and pipe culverts, some 280 protecting walls, let alone various buildings at different railway stations. The Circum-Baikal Railway is also known as the "golden buckle of the steel belt" (Trans-Siberian Railway being the "steel belt") because the construction of the greatest Russian railway was finished on the shores of the Lake Baikal.
In December 2003, they commissioned the Severomuysky Tunnel on the Baikal Amur Mainline (a section of the East Siberian Railway), the biggest tunnel in Russia and the fifth longest in the world (15,343 m/9.534 mi).
The station building at the Slyudyanka railway station of the East Siberian Railway is the only railway station in the world made completely of marble.
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