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Russian Railways (Russian: Российские железные дороги (РЖД), Rossiyskie Zheleznye Dorogi (RZhD)), is the government-owned[1] railway company of Russia. The company is one of the biggest railway companies in the world with 1.2 million employees and a monopoly within Russia. The total length of track used by the Russian Railways is, at 85,500 kilometres (53,130 mi), one of the largest in the world.
[edit] StatisticsRussian Railways accounts for over 3.6% of Russia's GDP and handles 39% of the total of Russia’s freight traffic (including pipelines) and more than 42% of passenger traffic. Almost 1.3 billion passengers and 1.3 billion tons of freight travel via Russian Railways annually. The company owns 19,700 goods and passenger locomotives, 24,100 long-distance passenger carriages, 15,600 short-range passenger carriages and 624,900 goods wagons. A further 270,000 freight cars in Russia are privately owned. Russian Railways operate commuter rail and/or regional rail services throughout the country, using mostly electric trains (known in Russian as elektrichka) as well as some diesel ones, on the non-electrified railway sections. As of 2007, 4085 commuter trains a day (in each direction) were running on the Russian Railways network; 1069 of them, in Moscow metropolitan area.[2] [edit] History[edit] Imperial period In the early 1830s Russian inventors father and son Cherepanov built the first Russian steam locomotives. The first railway track was built in Russia in 1837 between Saint-Petersburg and Tsarskoye Selo. The Department of Railways, later part of the Russian Ministry of Communications, was created in the Russian Empire in 1842 in order to oversee the construction of Russia's first major railway line. The railway linked the imperial capital Saint-Petersburg and Moscow and was built between 1842 and 1851. On 15 June 1865, an edict of Alexander II established the Ministry of Communications, which absorbed the Department of Railways. In the 1860s and 70s, Pavel Melnikov, Russia’s first Minister of Communications, played a key role in the expansion of the railway network throughout European Russia. In the 1880s and 1890s, the Trans-Caspian railway connected Russian Empire's Central Asian provinces (now, indepndent states of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) with the Caspian port of Krasnovodsk; by 1906, Central Asia was directly connected by the Trans-Aral Railway with European Russia via Kazahstan. The Trans-Siberian Railway connecting European Russia with the Russian Far East provinces on the Sea of Japan was built between 1891 and 1916. The Russian-built system included the Chinese Eastern Railway, short-cutting across China's Manchuria; later on, its southern branch was connected with other Chinese railways.   During the First World War and especially the Russian Civil War more than 60% of the Russian railway network and more than 80% of the carriages and locomotives were destroyed. With the German and Turkish blockade of the Russian Baltic and Black Sea ports, the Trans-Siberian Railway acquired a new significance as the lifeline connecting Russian Empire to its WWI allies. To provide a shorter connection to the Entente powers, a railway was constructed to the newly built Arctic ice-free port of Murmansk as well (1916). [edit] Soviet periodIn the Soviet period People's Commissariat of Communications expanded 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 Stalin. As a result of the WWII victory over Japan, the southern half of Sakhalin Island was returned to Russia in 1945. The 1067 mm 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, Сахалинская железная дорога), the only Cape gauge 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. [edit] Russian FederationFollowing the collapse of the Soviet Union its railway system broke up into national railway systems of various former Soviet republics. In 2003 a vast structural reform was implemented in order to preserve the unity of the railway network and separate the functions of state regulation from operational management: On 18 September, 2003, Decree No. 585 of the Russian Government established the Russian Railways Public Corporation with state holds 100% of the shares. The Cape gauge railway system of Sakhalin is being re-gauged to 1520 mm. The current CEO of the company is Vladimir Yakunin. There are plans for partial privatization of the company in the future in order to raise much needed capital from the sale of shares. In 2009, Russian Railways stated that it expected a loss of 49.7 billion rubles in the year, compared with a profit of 13.4 billion rubles in 2008, and that it planned to shed 53,700 jobs from its workforce of 1.2 million[3]. [edit] Foreign activitiesThe RZD will operate the Armenian Railway for 30 years starting in 2008. During this period, at least 570 million euro will be invested, 90% going into infrastructure.[4] In North Korea the RZD participates in the upgrading of the line from Tumangang to Rajin at the Sea of Japan and in the building of a container terminal in Rajin. [5] Trans-Eurasia Logistics is a joint venture with RZD that operates container freight trains between Germany and China via Russia. [edit] Rail links with adjacent countriesVoltage of electrification systems not necessarily compatible.
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