Russian Imperial Railways

In Russia, the largest country in the world, its geography of N.-S. rivers and E.-W. commerce made it very suited to develop railroads as its basic mode of transportation.

Today Russian Railways, a state-owned railway company, is one of the biggest railway companies in the world with 0.95 million employees and a monopoly within Russia. The total length of line used by the Russian Railways is, at 85,500 kilometres (53,130 mi), one of the largest in the world, exceeded only by the United States.

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 17 km long and linked the Imperial Palaces at Tsarskoye Selo and Pavlovsk. Track gauge was 6 feet (1830 mm). This railway has been described as a "toy" railway, as it had no economic, political or social impact on the Russian Empire.

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 Austria and used the standard European gauge (1,435 mm (4 ft 8 ¹⁄₂ in)), as opposed to all other railways in the Russian Empire which used the broad gauge (1,524 mm or 5 ft), hence it formed a system physically separated from other Russian railways.

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Wikipedia