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The beginning of the next year-round railroad...

    This breakthrough in railway transportation lead to the construction of many other railway lines. Construction on the St. Petersburg-Moscow Railway line began in 1843. The idea was for it to be an entirely Russian operation. This meant that the German bankers and von Gerstner, who were looking for money and a job in it, were denied. The capital and the engineering were to be Russian, but everything was not actually Russian. The factories were not large enough to produce all the parts in the allotted amount of time. Orders were sent to England for rails, while Russia produced just some rails and all the chairs and fishplates -- on American machines in Russia. In addition to this American influence, the adviser and staff of the locomotives were American. Despite this, the railway itself was entrusted to Russians. After the railroad was built, locomotives were needed to run the railroad. To ensure the supply of Russian locomotives, a Russian locomotive industry was started at the Alexandrovsk State Factory, built just outside of St. Petersburg.

     Purchasing of railroad parts was pricey and if business was kept in the country, it would be beneficial because it meant the money circulated in the country, rather than paying the cost for imports. A ruling was made that said if no offers were received within six months then orders could go abroad. Because of this, many more railroad parts (cars, rails, fishplates, chairs) were produced in Russia. In addition to this, state land was given to the railroad if it was determined to be of national significance. This gift of land was an attempt to help subdue the financial crisis that existed when a railroad was built. Most of the cost was in the building, so once it was built the railroad would re-pay itself back within a decade or so, depending on the popularity of the particular line.

Construction...

    More than 50,000 serfs, who were contracted by their original serf-owners for construction, did the actual earthwork construction of the railroad. Sometimes the serfs contracted themselves, but the pay was small and the work was hard. They would work from sunrise to sunset, every day including Sundays and holidays. Most times they would work in poor conditions; only when the rain was exceedingly heavy would they be given the day off. The terrain was very difficult to work with and so the serfs were constantly sick. Some usual sicknesses were scurvy and diarrhea and epidemics of typhoid were not uncommon. Malnutrition and bad housing conditions along with sickness tempted people to complain, but if they did then they would be flogged. Generous supplies of alcohol helped their ills and kept them quiet. So they worked and then died on the job along with several thousand others. These poor working and housing conditions did not go unnoticed by the officers. They wrote about it in their correspondence; it was just that they did not want the progress to be slow because they wanted to impress and please the tsar, so they kept the serfs working at a grueling pace in these horrible conditions.++(See Works Cited)

    Unfortunately, after all this stress and death the railroad was delayed by government difficulties, in the need to pay off military expenses. The St. Petersburg-Moscow Railroad fully opened in the fall of 1851, although the majority of it had been ready since 1847.

This is the Moscow Station in St. Petersburg today.

After Completion...

    The final price of the railroad ended up to be more than expected. But the railroad turned out to be very popular, especially from the St. Petersburg side, having more than 282,339 passengers in 1856. And with 197,572 passengers coming from Moscow, this was a huge flow of people, not to mention the use of the railroad as a means of agricultural products and goods transportation. By this time the new tsar had changed the name, to the Nikolaev Railway rather than St. Petersburg-Moscow Railway line. This success of the railroad returned the “confidence in the financial stability of the Russian Empire [] to the foreign markets, and the substitution of a few big foreign loans by this official body for the previous numerous private railway loans enabled better terms of issue to be obtained.”+++(See Works Cited)   The success of the first few railroads made it possible to continue the construction of railroads in general because the government was interested in investing in something that would be prosperous. The government would be willing to support railway construction and private owners started to invest in railroad construction because they saw the potential financial success in it.