The History of the Trans-Siberian Railway

The Longest Railway on Earth

von Sunil Sajjan

128 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

Most people who have heard of the Trans-Siberian Railway know it as a bucket-list journey: seven days and six thousand miles of birch forest and steppe, vodka in the dining car, a genuine claim to being the longest single train ride on the planet. Few of these same people know that the railway they are romanticising was built by convicts shipped in from a penal colony, that its own engineers deliberately narrowed the foundations and used unseasoned timber specifically to finish the project faster and cheaper, or that the corners cut during its own construction would, within a decade, directly cost the Russian Empire a war.This is the real story. Of Sergei Witte, the finance minister who proposed connecting Moscow to Vladivostok across a third of the Earth's circumference, and never once visited the land he was so confident he could conquer. Of Anton Chekhov, who crossed all of Siberia to document a penal colony's suffering, and contracted the disease that would eventually kill him along the way. Of an entire British-built icebreaker, dismantled into seven thousand pieces and shipped halfway around the world to bridge a lake nothing else could cross. Of a single-track economy that left Russian soldiers waiting weeks for reinforcements that never came in time, and a war lost as much in a Saint Petersburg finance ministry as on any battlefield.It traces the railway's astonishing later chapters too - sixty thousand Czechoslovak soldiers who seized an entire transcontinental corridor for themselves during the Russian Revolution, a bridge delayed more than a year after German raiders sank its final steel spans in the Indian Ocean, and a modern railway now navigating sanctions and suspended tourism, its own popular romance sitting uneasily beside the difficult history this book finally tells in full.Part of The History of... series.

• Reihe: The History of the Trans-Siberian Railway
• ISBN: 9798174531758
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 15.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Independently published