Soviet Russia (1917–1922)
The railways and railway workers played a major role during the Russian Revolution. For example, the Tashkent Soviet was founded on 2 March 1917 by thirty five railway workers.[9] The Transcaspian Government was founded by Menshevik and Social revolutionary railway workers in revolt against the Bolsheviks who ran the Tashkent Soviet and existed from July 1918 to July 1919.[10]
0-8-0 Armoured Russian locomotive class O Ov 5067 at the Central Armed Forces Museum, Moscow
Tsektran (Central Administrative Body of Railways) was established in September 1920 as a fusion of the Commissariat of Transport, the Railway unions and the relevant political departments of the Bolshevik Party. Trotsky was put in charge.[11]
Leon Trotsky spent much of the Russian Civil War on board his armoured train:
"During the most strenuous years of the revolution, my own personal life was bound up inseparably with the life of that train. The train, on the other hand, was inseparably bound up with the life of the Red Army. The train linked the front with the base, solved urgent problems on the spot, educated, appealed, supplied, rewarded, and punished ..."[12]
Railways in the Soviet Union (1922–1991)
Russian locomotive class U - U-127 Lenin's 4-6-0 oil burning compound locomotive, currently preserved at the Museum of the Moscow Railway at Paveletsky Rail Terminal
Further information: Rail transport in the Soviet Union
After the foundation of the Soviet Union the People's Commissariat of Railways (after 1946 named the Ministry of Railways ) expanded the railway network to a total length of 106,100 km by 1940. A notable project of the late 1920s and one of the centerpieces of the first five-year plan was the Turkestan–Siberia Railway, linking Western Siberia via Eastern Kazakhstan with Uzbekistan.
During the Great Patriotic War (World War II) the railway system played a vital role in the war effort transporting military personnel, equipment and freight to the frontlines and often evacuating entire factories and towns from European Russia to the Ural region and Siberia. The loss of mining and industrial centers of the western Soviet Union necessitated speedy construction of new railways during the wartime. Particularly notable among them was the railway to the Arctic coal mines of Vorkuta, extended after the war to Labytnangi on the Ob River; construction work to extend it all the way to the Yenisey continued into the 1950s, aborted with the death of Joseph Stalin.
Japanese D51 steam locomotive outside the Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk Railway Station Sakhalin Island, Russia (2007)
As a result of the World War II victory over Japan, the southern half of Sakhalin Island was returned to Russia in 1945. The 1,067 mm (3 ft 6 in) railway network built by the Japanese during their forty years of control of Southern Sakhalin now became part of Soviet Railways as well (as a separate Sakhalin Railway), the only 3 ft 6 in (1,067 mm) rail system within USSR (or today's Russia).
After the war the Soviet railway network was re-built and further expanded to more than 145,000 km of track by major additions such as Baikal Amur Mainline.
In the late 1960s the official gauge was redefined as 1,520 mm (4 ft 11 27⁄32 in) (i.e. 4 mm smaller) to allow better running without regauging rolling stock. The difference is within the normal tolerance so little immediate effect was shown and conversion took place progressively over 30 years as lines were maintained and upgraded. See 1520 mm railways redefinitions.
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