The October Revolution of 1917 caught the Russian railway network at the height of its third major construction boom, sparked mainly by the strategic needs of the Russian Empire during World War I and serving as a sort of compensation for the slow railway development in the pre-war years. From 1915 to 1917, 12,300 kilometers of railway lines went into full operation, and by early 1918 Russia’s rail network spanned 83,500 kilometers (including the areas under Austro-German control).
After the October Revolution, railway management in the RSFSR was placed under the newly created People's Commissariat for Railway Affairs on October 26 (November 8), 1917, which soon became known as the People's Commissariat of Railways (NKPS). The Council of People's Commissars (SNK) signed decrees on June 28 and September 4, 1918, officially nationalizing all private railways.
The Civil War in Russia from 1918 to 1922 caused significant disruption to the functioning of the railway system. The war and foreign intervention disabled roughly 80% of the railway network and about 70% of the locomotives. More than 4,000 bridges, nearly 3,000 switches, over 400 locomotive depots and workshops, and more than 5,000 civil facilities were either destroyed or damaged.
To restore order in the transportation sector, emergency commissars were appointed to railways and stations in August 1918; martial law came into effect in November, and revolutionary military railway tribunals were founded in March 1920. Amazingly, railway construction did not stop — between 1918 and 1920, 13 new lines totaling 1,337 km were opened, along with another 750 km of service and fuel tracks.
Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council, People's Commissar for Military Affairs, Temporary People's Commissar of Railways (March-December 1920) Leon Trotsky on the platform of a train car (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)
As the Civil War began to subside, the Russian Railway Mission was set up in Berlin on November 5, 1920, to renew the country’s rolling stock. This mission coordinated orders for steam locomotives from abroad and was led by Professor Yu. V. Lomonosov (1876–1952), a renowned railway scientist and active participant in the February Revolution of 1917. A total of 1,200 locomotives were ordered—700 from Germany and 500 from Sweden—with deliveries completed between 1921 and 1924. These locomotives were built to Russian design specifications, modeled after the 1917 “military order” E series steam locomotive produced by the Lugansk plant.
At that time, plans to implement alternative propulsion methods—diesel and electric—were already emerging in the country. The driving force behind this was Yu. V. Lomonosov, who in June 1920 submitted a memorandum to V. I. Lenin and published an article in the “Economic Life” newspaper proposing the organization of diesel locomotive production in the RSFSR. On January 30, 1922, the NKPS board meeting approved the development and construction of three experimental diesel locomotives. The first, known as the Shchel1 with electric transmission, was constructed in Leningrad in 1924 following Professor Ya. M. Gakkel’s (1874–1945) design. The second, the EEl2, also featuring electric transmission, was built in Germany that same year according to Yu. V. Lomonosov's design. The third locomotive, the EMHt3 with mechanical transmission, was constructed in Germany according to a collaborative design by Lomonosov, Meinecke, Schwerdt, and Dobrovolsky, and it arrived in the country only in 1927.
The Shchel1, among the very first mainline diesel locomotives globally, seen here at the Lyublino locomotive depot in 1934. Today, it is housed in the Russian Railway Museum in Saint Petersburg. (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)
The 1920s saw growing interest in electrifying Russia’s railways. In fact, the first foray into electric traction on Russian rails came during the imperial era—back in 1901, the Lodz-Zgierz and Pabianice electric branch lines opened in the Kingdom of Poland, running on a 1,000-mm gauge. The rolling stock for these lines was produced by the Russo-Baltic Rail Car Factory in Riga. Before the revolution, foreign-made electric locomotives were also used on some industrial narrow-gauge railways. However, it wasn’t until the Soviet period that systematic electrification of the broad-gauge network truly got underway.
The first of these projects was the electrification of the Baku–Sabunchi–Surakhani line in 1926 for suburban service (operating at 1,200 volts), managed by the Baku City Council. It was at this time that the Russian word “elektrichka” (meaning electric commuter train) came into use. However, the NKPS railway network’s landmark project was the Moscow–Mytishchi line, electrified in 1929 at 1,500 volts. Trains operated in three-car sets consisting of a motor car and two trailers, one of which included a luggage compartment.
An S Series electric train at the Northern Railways station (currently Yaroslavsky Station), circa 1930–1931. (Source: pastvu.com)
In the 1920s, attention to new railways was mainly directed towards finishing the lines started before the revolution. Key projects completed included the Kazan (Derbyshki station) to Yekaterinburg mainline, stretching 855 km and completed in 1924; the Achinsk–Abakan line at 459 km, finished in 1926; and the Nizhny Novgorod (Volga station) to Kotelnich line, 364 km in length, opened in 1927, among others. Given the "New Economic Policy" (NEP) at the time, financing was not only state-funded but also utilized market mechanisms—for instance, a concession contract with the German company Mologoles was signed in 1923 to complete the Mga–Rybinsk railway.
By 1927, railway transport indicators had surpassed those of 1913. A new chapter was unfolding — marked by the first Five-Year Plans and rapid socialist industrialization. Notably, the Asian part of the USSR saw intensive railway expansion to bring vast natural resources of Kazakhstan, Kuzbass, and the Southern Urals into economic circulation and to establish a strong metallurgical industry. Major railway lines were built, including Orsk–Kartaly–Zolotaya Sopka (398 km) with a branch line to Magnitogorsk (141 km) in 1930; Petropavlovsk–Borovoe Resort–Karaganda spanning 713 km, opened in stages between 1927 and 1931; a second access route to Kuzbass stretching 295 km from Novosibirsk (Ob station) to Leninsk-Kuznetsky (Proektnaya station) in 1934; among others.
The most significant milestone of the industrialization era was the construction of the Turkestan-Siberian Railway, known as Turksib, which stretched 1,444 km and was built between 1927 and 1931. The ceremony of driving the “golden spike” on this railway line on April 28, 1930, is vividly portrayed in the classic Russian
satirical novel The Golden Calf by I. Ilf and E. Petrov.
Promotional poster map of the Turkestan-Siberian Railway (Turksib) from 1930. Source: Russian State Library website.
Throughout the 2nd and 3rd Five-Year Plans, the locations of new railway construction projects became increasingly varied. Central Russia’s largest railway project was the 234-km Vyazma–Bryansk line, finished in 1934. In the Transcaucasus, a 409-km border railway from Alyat to Mindzhevan and Julfa was put into full operation between 1936 and 1941. Meanwhile, by 1940, a 353-km railway in the Far East connected the new industrial center Komsomolsk-on-Amur with the Trans-Siberian Railway.
A bas-relief honoring the builders of the Vyazma–Bryansk railway line, founders of the Ugra settlement in 1929. (Source: Wikimapia.org website)
Between 1929 and 1940, about 1,100 km of new railway lines were added annually on average, though construction progress was extremely uneven. The year 1937 was a total setback, with only a 7-km stretch from Bolshovo to Ivanteyevka opened for permanent service. The record-breaking year was 1940—the highest expansion not just during the first Five-Year Plans, but in the entire history of the Soviet Union—when the rail network grew by over 3,200 km (excluding lines in territories annexed that year, including Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, and the Karelian Isthmus). At the start of 1941, the Soviet railway network—including newly annexed territories—had grown to 106,100 km, including 1,900 km of electrified lines. Freight traffic stood at 415 billion ton-kilometers, with passenger traffic at 98 billion passenger-kilometers. To boost capacity, additional main tracks were added on crucial lines. In the pre-war period, the Trans-Siberian Railway was fully reconstructed, and after the addition of second tracks on the Transbaikal and Ussuri railways, the entire mainline became double-tracked.
Trans-Siberian Express dining car, 1941. Source: fotostrana.ru
The intensity of transport operations increased thanks to the introduction of new technical achievements, ensured by the preserved scientific school and design tradition. On April 18, 1918, by a resolution of the Board of the People's Commissariat of Railways, the Experimental Institute of Railway Transport (now VNIIZhT) was established, which laid the foundation for an entire network of research institutions in the railway industry. Pneumatic brakes of the F.P. Kazantsev (1925) and I.K. Matrosov (1931) systems began to be used on freight trains, significantly improving the control of rolling stock movement. From 1935 to 1957, the country's rolling stock switched to automatic coupling. The implementation of automatic blocking has also begun. The Moscow to Mytishchi stretch (1931) was the first glimmer of progress, featuring three-aspect signals that allowed suburban trains to run just four minutes apart—an impressive achievement even today.
As domestic transport manufacturing revived, new traction equipment began to be developed. In 1932, the first six-axle mainline electric locomotive of the VL series (“Vladimir Lenin”) was released. Yet, improving steam-powered traction remained the key strategic priority for transport development. During the 1930s, powerful freight steam locomotives of the FD ("Felix Dzerzhinsky") and SO ("Sergo Ordzhonikidze") series were put into production, along with passenger locomotives of the IS series ("Iosif Stalin"), which earned the Grand Prix at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris.
A painting by A.A. Rylov titled “Super-Powerful FD Steam Locomotive,” 1930s, Vologda Regional Art Gallery. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
During the World War II, the country’s railways faced an enormous load. In addition to serving as a critical means for preparation and support of more than 50 strategic defensive and offensive operations by the Red Army, during the early stages of the war, railway transport managed the mass evacuation of people and industry from the western regions. From 1941 to 1942, roughly 18 million people and 2,740 large factories were moved east. Occasionally, extraordinary challenges arose—for instance, a huge rolling mill for tank armor was swiftly transported out of Mariupol, requiring 16 trains and 800 cars.
During the war, around 9,000 kilometers of new railways were actively built. Here are the largest among them:
The western semicircle of the Greater Moscow Ring Railway (BMO), stretching about 290 km and helping to decongest the Moscow rail hub, was built between 1941 and 1942 and opened for permanent service in 1944.
A remaining stretch of the old BMO line between Detkovo and Povadino stations, constructed in 1942, still exists; since the 1960s, a new double-track BMO line has operated to the south. (Photo by Y.Yu. Chibryakov, 2019).
The “Volga Rokada” route (Ilovlya through Petrov Val, Saratov, Sennaya, Syzran, Ulyanovsk to Sviyazhsk), 992 km long and constructed in only six months in 1942, played a vital role in the Battle of Stalingrad. Interestingly, the construction of the “Volga Rokada” recycled track materials and equipment from pre-war BAM sections between Tynda and Izvestkovaya–Urgal, as well as rails pulled from several tram lines in Saratov. (The Saratov to Ulyanovsk segment reached permanent operational standards later, in 1943–1944.)
The largest railway line built during the war was the North Pechora route — a 1,463-km stretch running from Verkhnyaya Sinega to Vorkuta through Kotlas and Kozhva. Although construction began back in 1937, the Nazi invasion and the loss of the Donbass coal region pushed authorities to speed things up. To support this, they even transported dismantled parts of Moscow’s then-unfinished Palace of Soviets and a bridge from the Moscow–Volga Canal all the way to the Komi Republic. By 1942, the rail line from Verkhnyaya Sinega to Kozhva was fully operational, and the stretch from Kozhva to Vorkuta was opened temporarily, enabling large-scale shipments of coking coal to support Soviet metallurgy.
More than half of the nation’s railway lines and 13,000 bridges were destroyed during World War II, but by 1950 almost everything was back in working order. Restoring only a handful of main railway lines was deemed economically impractical, notably including the Novgorod – Staraya Russa and Polotsk – Pskov – Gdov routes.
Artist V.G. Tsarev’s 1951 poster, “Glory to Soviet Railway Workers!” (Source: Russian State Library website.)
By early 1951, the USSR’s railroads stretched nearly 117,000 km, and the 1950s kicked off a whirlwind era of breakthrough technological upgrades in rail transport. In 1956, the manufacture of mainline steam locomotives was suddenly stopped (the last broad-gauge shunting locomotive 9P was produced in 1957, while the narrow-gauge VP4 lasted until 1960).
On the eve of the 20th CPSU Congress, on February 3, 1956, the “General Electrification Plan” was approved, aiming to convert 40,000 km of railway tracks to electric traction within the next 15 years, from 1956 to 1970.
The VL22M-1454 electric locomotive with a passenger train on the Trans-Siberian route from Kaya to Goncharovo, 1962. (Source: railgallery.ru website. Scan taken from the album “Three Eras of Railways”.)
However, for a number of reasons, the country didn’t hit that important milestone until 1982, well behind schedule. Even now, the last route outlined in the General Plan — Konosha to Kotlas to Vorkuta — remains unelectrified. Nevertheless, as recalled by P.M. Shilkin, a distinguished railway expert and energy scientist who held senior roles in the Main Directorate of Electrification and Power Management of the USSR Ministry of Railways between 1956 and 1988, the General Plan was crucial for the technical modernization of the railways, and the pace of progress astonished the world. To put it in perspective, from 1956 to 1960 a little over 13,000 km of railway lines worldwide were electrified, nearly 8,500 km of which were in the USSR.
The same period, known as the “Khrushchev Thaw,” marked a new boom in railway construction domestically, averaging about 1,400 km of new lines per year between 1958 and 1962. Meanwhile, the forced labor practices of the Stalin era, when large-scale railway building was handles=d by People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD)/ Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) units, faded into the past. Between the mid-1950s and mid-1970s, the railway network grew primarily through building new lines in the Asian part of the USSR and the Volga region.
In 1967, the first train reached Elista, the capital of Kalmykia, which was previously the only administrative center in the Volga region without rail connections. (Source: Official website of the Head of the Republic of Kalmykia.)
A notable trend during this period was the large-scale construction of narrow-gauge public railway lines spanning more than 600 km in areas being developed for virgin and fallow lands. In time, they realized this was a mistake, and the majority of the narrow-gauge lines were gradually either switched over to standard gauge or replaced with paved roads
The busiest growth of the rail network happened in Western and Eastern Siberia, fueled by tapping into their resource wealth and creating new industrial regions, as well as by building alternative cross-country links. The Taishet–Lena trunk line was opened, the Abakan–Taishet stretch wrapped up the South Siberian Railway, and the Central Siberian Mainline was established. In 1975, the network’s total track length in operation hit 138,300 kilometers.
By 1975, the nation’s railways were barely able to keep up with the increasing demands of the economy, mainly because of chronic underfunding. Consider these numbers: during the early Soviet five-year plans, over 10% of capital investments were allocated to railway development, but in the 1970s and 1980s that figure dropped to under 3%. This resulted in a persistent shortage of freight wagons and limited infrastructure capacity. The pace of commissioning new railway lines is also decreasing (about 0.7 thousand km per year).
Sadly, our country fell behind in introducing high-speed rail. The ER200 high-speed electric train project was greenlit in 1967, with the first prototype leaving the Riga railcar factory in December 1973. Yet, it didn’t enter regular service until March 1984, after countless design tweaks.
Electric train ER200-1 at the Moscow-Passazhirskaya station, 1981 (Source: railgallery.ru website. Photo by V. Shitov)
During the 1970s and 1980s, the development of the railway network in Siberia and the Far East remained a priority, driven by both the exploitation of the Asian part’s resource base and the building of parallel east-west and north-south mainline routes. The most intensive construction of freight lines was in Western Siberia, due to the necessity of accessing the region’s oil and gas fields, which had become a crucial resource base for the USSR.
Built step-by-step from 1972 to 1990, the Tyumen–Tobolsk–Surgut–Urengoy mainline—with a branch off to Nizhnevartovsk covering about 1,500 km—laid the groundwork for the transport system growing into the northern part of Western Siberia.
The first train arrives in Surgut on August 5, 1975, with the Ob River bridge visible in the background. (Source: Official VK page of the Tyumen Region Archives Office. Photographer: I. Sapozhkov.)
The Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM) was the largest project completed during the 1970s and 80s, and indeed throughout the Soviet era, carrying huge economic and strategic weight. Although the term dates back to 1930 and initial segments were laid before World War II, “BAM” is most commonly associated with the Komsomol youth construction campaigns in the USSR’s last twenty years.
It is noteworthy that although the official decree by the CPSU Central Committee and the USSR Council of Ministers No. 561 "On the construction of the Baikal-Amur Railway," marking the official start of the project, was issued on July 8, 1974, the first construction unit, the "BAMstroyput" management at Skovorodino station, was created back in November 1971, and the BAM’s construction actually began in 1972 with the restoration of the BAM–Tynda segment. The 3,145-km stretch from Ust-Kut (Lena station) to Komsomolsk-on-Amur was gradually put into operation, section by section. On September 29, 1984, at Balbukhta siding, Komsomol youth brigades led by A.V. Bondar and I.N. Varshavsky—who had spent a decade working toward meeting each other—finally did so, followed by a ceremonial laying of BAM’s “golden” links on October 1 at Kuanda station in the Chita region (now Zabaykalsky Krai).
Yaroslavsky Station. The Moscow Komsomol brigade sets out for BAM construction, September 25, 1974. (Source: Wikimedia Commons. Photographer: E. Kotlyakov.)
Work continued for another five years to complete the BAM infrastructure. In November 1989, six years later than planned, the last section of the railway was officially handed over for regular service, and continuous train operations began.
Still, it would be wrong to believe that the Soviet Union lacked other major railway projects during the BAM and Tyumen–Urengoy constructions. New freight-focused rail branches were developed in Russia’s European North, and the Agryz–Tikhonovo–Krugloe Pole (1979–1981), Muraptalovo–Sakmarskaya (1980), and Pugachevsk–Krasnogvardeyets (1981) lines capped off the railway network’s growth in the Volga and Southern Ural regions. The surge in train traffic necessitated construction of bypasses around key rail hubs like Kuibyshev, Sverdlovsk, Rostov, among others. A deep Moscow bypass (known as the 3rd ring) was planned, but only the 69-km Uzunovo–Rybnoe segment was completed and opened in 1989. It is notable that this was the last large railway line constructed in the Central European part of Russia up until today.
The highest levels of railway freight transport in the USSR were recorded in 1988, just before the economic crisis began. Freight shipments totaled 4.116 billion tons, freight turnover reached 3.925 trillion tariff ton-kilometers, and the average daily loading was 205,300 rail cars. During the same year, the railway network handled an unprecedented 4.396 million passengers. Regarding the operational length of the public railway network, the longest it ever was in our country’s history was achieved just before the Soviet Union dissolved, in 1990 — 147,500 km, with 37% of that electrified.
A joint project of 1520International and the Institute for Transport Economics and Development (IEDT)
(based on the materials of JSC "IEDT" and the research results of Ya.Chibryakov)
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