Done: sem-2 Adxamov Ulug’bek Tashkent-2022

Subsidy to passengers

Passenger travel on Soviet ^[21] and Russian railways has long been subsidized by profits from freight transportation. In 2000 (post-Soviet), long distance passengers only paid 55% of the cost while commuter train passengers paid only 15% of costs.^[22] But 6 years later (2006) these figures were about 80% and 50% due mainly to increased fares. Current policy (2010) is to eliminate such subsidy and thus commuter fares have drastically increased.^[23] As a result of this plus the economic crisis, commuter passengers have decreased and many trains have been removed from service. Another problem is that it's estimated that over 1/3 of passengers cheat and pay no fare at all (including bribing the ticket inspector).

Freight traffic: growth and decline

Imperial period: ton-km

In 1916, just at the start of First World War (during which Germany invaded Russia) freight traffic on Russian Railway reached nearly 100 billion tonne-kilometers (traffic on United States railways was about five times higher). But due to the war, a few years later Russian traffic had crashed to about 20 billion ton-km. Then the civil war started with the reds fighting the whites, which delayed the recovery of rail traffic. The reds (communists) won, resulting in the formation of the Soviet Union (USSR) and a new chapter in railway development.

Soviet period: ton-km[edit]

A life size diorama of Russian track workers repairing railway tracks at the Museum of the Moscow Railway
The USSR rebuilt its rail system and industrialized with five-year plans. As a result, railroad freight grew about 20 times from 20 to 400 billion tonne-km by 1941.^[24] But then disaster struck again: World War II in 1941 when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. In the first year or so of the war, traffic plummeted to about half its prewar value. But then the USSR started restoring and constructing railroads during wartime so that by the end of the war about half of the lost traffic had been recovered. After the war was over it took a few more years to restore the railroads and get back to the pre-war level of traffic.
Then the USSR embarked on a series of more five-year plans and rail traffic rapidly increased. By 1954 their rail freight traffic (about 850 billion tonne-km) surpassed that of the United States and the USSR then hauled more rail freight than any other country in the world.^[25] Rail freight continued to rapidly increase in the USSR so that by 1960 the USSR was hauling about half of all railroad freight in the world (in tonne-km)^[26] and they did this on a rail system consisting of only 10% of the world's railway kilometrage.^[27] The status of hauling half the world's rail freight continued for almost 30 years but in 1988 rail freight traffic peaked at 3852 billion tonne-km (nearly 4 trillion). And then, a few years later in 1991, the Soviet Union fell apart and its largest republic, the Russian Federation, which then hauled about 2/3 of the traffic of the former USSR, became an independent country.^[28]
For the USSR in 1989 (shortly before the collapse), the railroads hauled nearly eight times as much ton-km of freight by rail as they did by highway truck.^[29] For the US, it was only 1.5 times as much by rail.^[30] Thus trucks in the USSR played a far lesser role in hauling freight than they did in the US, leaving the railroad as the basic means of freight transportation. In 1991 a law was passed which declared that railroads were the basic transportation system of the USSR.^[31]