Trans-Siberian Railway

The world's longest single-service railway, connecting the cities of European Russia with Omsk, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, and Khabarovsk, and terminating at Nakhodka on the Pacific coast east of Vladivostok. The line was built between 1891 and 1915, and has a total length of 9,289 km/5,772 mi, from Moscow to Vladivostok.

The greater part of the Trans-Siberian Railway was completed in record time in the period 1891–99. The line opened up the regions of Siberia and the Far East to extensive Russian colonization. It also enabled large-scale geological prospecting of the Kuznetsk, Karaganda, Ekibastuz and Cheremkhovo coal basins and of the Amur and Kolyma gold deposits to be carried out, which laid the basis for the economic development of Siberia. The Trans-Mongolian Railway branches off at Lake Baikal and travels via the Mongolian capital Ulan-Bator to Beijing. At Tarskaya, almost 3,000 km west of Vladivostok, the Trans-Siberian meets the Trans-Manchurian Railway, which reaches Beijing via Harbin. A new northern rail route across Siberia, the Baikal–Amur Mainline (BAM), stretching 3,102 km/1,928 mi from Ust-Kut to the Pacific, was officially opened in 1991 after seventeen years' work.