Russia was and is the largest country in the world. Its geography of north–south rivers and east–west commerce, plus, importantly, the mostly flat terrain, made it very suited to develop railroads as the basic mode of transportation.

Today Russian Railways, a state-owned railway company, is one of the biggest railway companies in the world with 950,000 employees Gov't transport statistics and a monopoly within Russia. The total length of line used by the Russian Railways is, at ,Table 2.13. ПРОТЯЖЕННОСТЬ ЭКСПЛУАТАЦИОННЫХ ПУТЕЙ ЖЕЛЕЗНОДОРОЖНОГО ТРАНСПОРТА ОБЩЕГО ПОЛЬЗОВАНИЯ (Rail Line Statistics) one of the largest in the world, exceeded only by the United States.Railway line length of various countries

General history

Russian Empire (1837–1917)

In the early 1830s Russian inventors father and son Cherepanovs built the first Russian steam locomotive. The first railway line was built in Russia in 1837 between Saint-Petersburg and Tsarskoye Selo, and called the Tsarskoye Selo Railway. It was long and linked the Imperial Palaces at Tsarskoye Selo and Pavlovsk. Track gauge was 6 feet (1830 mm).Le Fleming, H.M. and Price, J.H. Russian Steam Locomotives, p 24, John Marshbank Ltd, London, 1960 This railway has been described as a "toy" railway, as it had no economic, political or social impact on the Russian Empire.Russia Enters the Railway Age (1842-1855 by Richard Haywood, 1998, p 1

The Warsaw–Vienna railway in Congress Poland started operating in 1845, and fully opened in 1848, with 327,6 km length of track. It ran from Warsaw to the border with the Austrian Empire and used the standard European gauge (), as opposed to all other railways in the Russian Empire which used the broad gauge (), hence it formed a system physically separated from other Russian railways.

The Department of Railways, later part of the Ministry of Communication Routes, was created in the Russian Empire in 1842 in order to oversee the construction of Russia's second major railway line, the Moscow–Saint Petersburg Railway. The railway linked the imperial capital Saint-Petersburg and Moscow and was built between 1842 and 1851.Henry Reichman, Railwaymen and revolution: Russia, 1905 page 16 Track gauge was and this became the Russian standard gauge. From 1853 to 1862, a line was built from Saint Petersburg to Warsaw, thus connecting with Western Europe.

Year Miles of track 1838 16 1855 570 1880 14,208 1890 19,011 1905 31,623 1917 50,403 Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: Russia in Disarray, page 19 On 15 June 1865, an edict of Alexander II established the Ministry of Communications, which absorbed the Department of Railways. In the 1860s and 1870s, 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, independent 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 Kazakhstan. 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 World War I 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).

Tsar Nicholas II clearly attached great importance to railways since he had his own railway line constructed from Vitebsky railway station to the Emperor railway station in Pushkin town in 1902. It ran parallel to the main line of the Tsarskoye Selo Railway and then branched south west at the village of Kouzmino. It was designated for members of the imperial family and representatives of foreign powers.

During World War I Russia used a mix of light and heavy armoured trains. The heavy trains mounted 4.2 inch or 6 inch guns while the light trains were equipped with 76.2mm guns.

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.Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865-1923, by Jeff Sahedeo, Indiana university Press, 2007, p. 190 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.The British Intervention in Transcaspia, 1918-1919 by C. H. Ellis, University of California Press, 1963 pp 26-27

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.

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 ..."Trotsky's Armoured Train by Tony Cliff accessed 26 September 2010 The Revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion, a rebellion by returning Czech and Slovak prisoners of war on the Trans-Siberian Railway from prisoner-of-war camps in Siberia, posed a major threat to the RSFSR. One of the Red Army's most successful strategies in the war was to use trains to transport small contingents of troops, which allowed the Russians to win the Soviet–Ukrainian War and defeat the Volunteer Army during its advance towards Moscow.

Railways in the Soviet Union (1922–1991)

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.

As a result of the World War II victory over Japan, the southern half of Sakhalin Island was returned to Russia in 1945. The 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 rail system within USSR (or today's Russia).

After the war the Soviet railway network was re-built and further expanded to more than of track by major additions such as Baikal Amur Mainline.

In the late 1960s the official gauge was redefined as (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.

Electrification

While the former Soviet Union got a late (and slow) start with rail electrification in the 1930s it eventually had success in electrification in terms of the volume of traffic under the wires.

Russian Federation (1991 to present day)

Following the Collapse of the Soviet Union its railway system broke up into national railway systems of various former Soviet republics. Due to the ensuing depression, Russian freight traffic fell by 60% and has (as of 2010) not yet fully recovered.

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 .

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.

In 2007, as part of a liberalisation process, Russian Railways established First Freight Company which holds a large number of freight wagons; in 2010, it was announced that Second Freight Company would be established, and remaining freight wagons transferred to that.ЕКАТЕРИНА ГОДЛЕВСКАЯ "Младшей «дочке» достанется больше: Вторая грузовая компания может стать самым крупным оператором на рынке" (Younger "daughter" is becoming larger: Second Freight Company may become the largest operator in the market) РБКdaily (a daily internet business gazette) 27 Feb. 2009

In July 2010, RZD signed an agreement for Siemens to provide rolling stock (240 EMUs) and upgrade 22 marshalling yards.

Economic history

Government ownership

The first initiative in developing railways came following a meeting called by Tsar Nicholas I held on 13 January 1842 where he announced that the state would build the St Petersburg-Moscow railway. This decision came about after seven years of consideration. With characteristic slowness in committing himself, Nicholas I nevertheless proceeded with determination, aiming to overcome problems relating to having his capital some distance from the centre of his empire. Built in addition to the roads and canals that previous generation had built to link the two cities, Nicholas I envisaged that the railway would provide a more reliable method of transport particularly during the climatic extremes of summer and winter. Although influenced by military considerations, the railway would help bring food grown in the South to the less fertile northern areas. The plan for this first railway also offered the possibility of creating a network which could extend to the Lower Volga and the Black Sea, developing Moscow as a railway hub similar to Chicago in the United States.

Due in part to the poor financial state of the Tsarist government and their inability to finance railroad construction, by the early 1880s all railroads were private companies.Boublikoff p. 310 But then as private railroads got into financial difficulty, the government took over some of them, resulting in mixed system of private and government railways. However, the government had guaranteed payment of interest and dividends on the securities of the private railroads resulting in a strong incentive for government takeover of failing railroads.