- The name Siberia is said to derive from the Mongolian word siber, meaning beautiful, wonderful and pure, and the Tartar word sibir, meaning “the sleeping land”.
- The Trans-Siberian Railway was the brainchild of Emperor Alexander III of Russia. Construction was officially begun on May 19th, 1891, near Vladivostok in the east, with the grand laying of the first stone. The ceremony was attended by the heir to the Russian throne, prince Nikolai, the future Emperor Nikolai II, who laid the stone and a silver plate into the ground. Alexander III died three years later leaving his son Nikolai II to continue the construction of the railway. Actual construction, however, began two months earlier at the beginning of March 1891, when work on the Miass – Chelyabinsk section was started
- The main St. Petersburg to Vladivostok route was completed in 1903 but there was much more construction that took place in the thirteen years that followed. It was during this time that many of the bridges, tunnels and stations were added.
- Full construction was officially completed on October 5th, 1916, when the bridge across Amur river started to operate.
- The route was opened by Tsarevich Nicholas Alexandrovitch of Russia after his journey east along the railway ended in Vladivostok.
- Before the Russian revolution in 1917, it was Saint Petersburg and not Moscow which was considered the starting point of the so-called Great Siberian Way. Nor was Vladivostok always the terminus of the railway. From the 1890’s until the main St. Petersburg-Vladivostok route was completed, the end of the “Great Road” was the naval fortress and town of Port Arthur, rented at that time by Russia from China.
- After the 1917 revolution, the railway served as the vital line of communication for the Czecho-Slovak Legion and the Allied armies that landed troops at Vladivostok during the Siberian Intervention of the Russian Civil War. These forces supported the White Russian government and its soldiers in fighting against the Bolsheviks on the Ural Front. The intervention, however, was weakened and ultimately defeated by partisan fighters who blew up bridges and sections of track, particularly in the volatile region between Krasnoyarsk and Chita.
- According to legend, the line originally had an unneeded 7 km loop which was constructed due to the fact that during planning, the Tsar accidentally had part of his finger in the way of plotting the route and construction workers were too afraid of mentioning the mistake to the Tsar.
- Russian soldiers, as well as convict labourers were pressed into building the railway. One of the largest challenges was the construction of the route around the southern edge of Lake Baikal. Originally, the line ended on each side of the lake and a special icebreaker ferryboat was purchased from England to connect the railway. In the winter, sleighs were used to move passengers and cargo from one side of the lake to the other until the Lake Baikal spur was completed.
- As well as the main Moscow-Vladivostok route, the Trans-Manchurian and Trans-Mongolian routes follow the Trans-Siberian Railway as far as Tarskaya and Ulan Ude respectively, before heading southeast towards China, the former heading via Harbin into China’s North-eastern Provinces, the latter heading via Ulan Bator in Mongolia to Beijing.
- In 1991, a fourth route running further to the north known as the Baikal Amur Mainline or BAM line, was finally completed after more than five decades of sporadic work. This recent extension departs from the Trans-Siberian line at Taishet several hundred miles west of Lake Baikal, crosses the Amur River at Komsomolsk-na-Amure north of Khabarovsk, and reaches the Pacific at Sovetskaya Gavan.
- Today the Trans-Siberian Railway carries about 20,000 containers per year to Europe, including 8,300 containers from Japan. This is a fairly small amount, considering that for all means of transport combined Japan sends 360,000 containers to Europe per year. There are thus intentions to upgrade the line in the future in order to reduce journey time for the full length of the route from seven to two to three days for freight. The idea is that an upgraded line will make transporting freight between North Asia and Europe much quicker than by ocean and more freight could thus be transported. Indeed, on January 11, 2008, China, Mongolia, Russia, Belarus, Poland and Germany agreed to collaborate on a cargo train service between Beijing and Hamburg. However, if the project does get the go-ahead, it will most likely be done in stages and will not be fully completed until after 2030. It is unclear whether or not an upgraded passenger line is being considered.
- The most famous station on route is probably that of Novosibirsk, which once was the biggest in the entire USSR. There is also a unique train station Slyudyanka near Lake Baikal, which was built entirely of marble in 1904 as a monument to the construction workers of the Railway.
- The cult film Horror Express starring Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Telly Savalas is set aboard the railway.
- In the film Fiddler On The Roof, Tevye’s daughter, Hodel, takes the Trans-Siberian Railway to Siberia after her fiancé is exiled there.
- The 2008 thriller Transsiberian takes place along the railway.
