Amur Railway
The 1,520 mm (4 ft 11 27⁄32 in) broad gauge Amur Railway (Russian: Амурская железная дорога, or Amurskaya zheleznaya doroga) is the last section of the Trans-Siberian Railway in Russia, built in 1907-1916. The construction of this railway favoured the development of the gold mining industry, logging, fisheries and the fur trade in Siberia and Russian Far East. It is over 2115 km in length, stretching across the Transbaikal Region and the Amur Oblast. The railway's main sections are: Kuenga-Uryum (204 km, 1907-1911); Uryum-Kerak (632 km, 1909-1913); Kerak-Deya with an offshoot to Blagoveshchensk (679 km, 1911-1915); Deya-Khabarovsk (481 km, 1915-1916). Ye.Yu.Podrutsky, Alexander Liverovsky, and V.V.Tregubov were the chief engineers, who oversaw the construction of the Amur Railway by approx. 54,000 workers (as of 1913), brought from Central Russia and Siberia (the Tsarist government specifically forbade the use of foreign workforce).
In 1905, the city duma of Blagoveshchensk, urged by local merchants and industrialists, turned to the Council of Ministers with a request to build the Amur section of the Transsib. The Council of Ministers approved the decision to construct the Amur Railway with the support of Pyotr Stolypin. On 3 April 1908, they issued a decree "On the Commencement of the Construction of the Amur Railway by the Order of and at the Expense of the State". The construction itself took place in scarcely populated permafrost areas under harsh climatic conditions. Construction sites were divided into the western, middle, and eastern sections. In 1907-1913, they built the western section of the railway from Kuenga to Uryum. First, the engineers had to connect the Shilka and the Amur with the railroad under construction in order to be able to deliver material and workforce. They had to build a temporary road in the swampy middle section of the future Amur Railway for the purpose of delivering the ballast for the line. Often, the whole finished parts of the road would disappear into the swamps. In 1912, a talented engineer Alexander Liverovsky was put in charge of the construction of the eastern section of the Amur Railway. For the first time in railroad construction, earth-moving works were mechanised. The workers used ten excavators and several machines for mortar mixing and rock grinding. Also, they built a number of repair shops and sawmills, therefore there was no need to transport railroad ties and squared timber to construction sites. In 1914, the western and eastern sections of the Amur Railway came together at the Obluchye railway station, making it possible for trains to go through.
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