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| Rossiyskie Zheleznye Dorogi (RZhD) ОАО «Российские железные дороги» |
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 Russian Railways EMU ED4MKM |
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| Locale | Russia |
| Dates of operation | 1837–current |
| Track gauge | 1,520 mm (4 ft 115⁄6 in) |
| Previous gauge | 1,524 mm (5 ft) |
| Length | 85,500 km (53,130 mi) |
| Headquarters | Moscow |
| Website | http://eng.rzd.ru |
Russian Railways (Russian: Российские железные дороги (РЖД), Rossiyskie Zheleznye Dorogi (RZhD)), is the state-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 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. [2] During the 1970's and 1980's, Soviet Railways (the predecessor of Russian Railways) hauled more railway freight traffic than the rest of the world combined. [3] and they did this on a rail system consisting of only 10% of the world's railway mileage.[4]
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Rail map of former Soviet Union Shows electrification status and also many Industrial railroads.
Russian Railways accounts for 2.5% [5] of Russia's GDP. The percentage of freight and passenger traffic that goes by rail is unknown, since no statistics are available for private transportation such as private automobiles or company-owned trucks. Almost 1.3 billion passengers and 1.3 billion tons of freight travel via Russian Railways annually. The company owns 19,700 goods and 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. See Start Page for Russian government transport statistics (in Russian).
Russia (in 2009) has 86,000 kilometers of common-carrier railroad line, of which about half is electrified and carries most of the traffic. Almost half of the total is double track or better [6] [7]
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.[8]
Besides the common-carrier railroads that are well covered by government statistics there are many Industrial railroads (Russian) (such as lumbering railroads, whose statistics are covered separately, and which in 1981 had a total length almost equal to the length of the common carrier railroads.[9] [10] Currently (2008) they are only about half the length of the common-carrier system. [11] In 1980, about two-thirds of their freight flowed to and from the common-carrier railroads while the remaining third was internal transport only on an industrial railroad. [12] (For example, a lumber company uses its private industrial railroad to transport logs from a forest to its sawmill.) In 1981, there was 33.4 thousand kilometers of narrow gauge. About 4% of the industrial railroad traffic was on track jointly "owned" by two companies.
Russian railways were modernized mostly during the Soviet period and achieved world class hardware status.
The SA3 coupler [13] they use is more advanced than the Janney coupler used in the United States. Advantages of the Russian SA3 include: 1. It is always ready to couple, unlike the Janney coupler which require that at least one of the couplers has its knuckle open. [14] 2. It has greater gathering range.
While the Russians may have had the best designed coupler in the world, there were problems with it breaking due to making it with lower quality steel and coupling cars at speeds higher than allowed by the rules. [15]
In 1916, just at the start of First World War (during which Germany invaded Russia) freight traffic on Russian Railway reached nearly 100 billion tonne-kilometers (traffic on United States railways was about 5 times higher). But due to the war, a few years later Russian traffic had crashed to about 20 billion ton-km. Then the civil war started with the reds fighting the whites. The reds (communists) won, resulting in the formation of the Soviet Union (USSR). But all this delayed recovery of rail traffic.
The USSR rebuilt its rail sytem and industrialized with 5-year plans. As a result, railroad freight grew about 20 times from 20 to 400 billion tonne-km by 1941. [16] But then disaster struck again:World War II in 1941 when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. In the first year or so of the war, traffic plummeted to about half its prewar value. But then the USSR started restoring and constructing railroads during wartime so that by the end of the war about half of the lost traffic had been recovered. After the war was over it took a few more years to restore the railroads and get back to the pre-war level of traffic.
Then the USSR embarked on a series of more 5-year plans and rail traffic rapidly increased. By 1954 their rail freight traffic (about 850 billion tonne-km) surpassed that of the United States and the USSR now hauled more rail freight than any other country in the world. [17] Rail freight continued to rapidly increase in the USSR so that by 1960 the USSR was hauling about half of all railroad freight in the world (in tonne-km). [18] This high status of hauling half the world's rail freight continued for almost 30 years but in 1988 rail freight traffic peaked at 3852 Billion tonne-km (nearly 4 trillion). And then disaster struck again, the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991 and was succeeded by its largest republic, the Russian Federation which then hauled about 2/3 of the traffic of the former USSR. [19]
For the USSR in 1989 (shortly before the collapse), the railroads hauled nearly 8 times as much ton-km of freight by rail as they did by highway truck. [20] For the US, it was only 1.5 times as much by rail. [21] Thus trucks in the USSR played a far lessor role in hauling freight than they did in the US leaving the railroad as the basic means of freight transportation. In 1991 a law was passed which declared that railroads were the basic transportation system of the USSR.[22]
Railroad traffic was initially almost 2/3 of what was hauled by the Soviet's (USSR), since all the other former republics of the USSR were now independent countries and had previously hauled about 1/3 of the rail freight of the USSR. But the Russian Federation still hauled more rail freight than any other country in the world. However the severe depression in Russia in the 1990's [23] [24] after the collapse of the Soviet Uniion, resulted in rail freight falling to about 40% of its 1988 value to its low point in 1997 (1020 billion ton-km). [25]. This was only 1/4 of what was once hauled by USSR rail at the peak in 1988.
Russia was no longer number one for rail freight. In 1993 Russia was overtaken by the United States and the next year, 1994, it was overtaken by China [26] So for rail freight, Russia had fallen from a strong first place to third and remains so to this day [27] [28] even though there was partial recovery to 2116 ton-km by 2008 [29] which is still well below the peak of 2606 ton-km in 1998. [30]
By 2010 there was reported to be a growing share of railroad freight being divereted to highway trucks. [31]
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).
In 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), 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.
The efficiency of the Soviet Railways improved over time and by the 1980's had many performance indicators superior to the United States. [32] Railroads built in the USSR were planned, and in contrast to the US, only a single railroad line would be constructed between major cities. This avoided the situation in the US where two (or sometimes more) railroad companies would construct lines that more or less paralleled each other resulting in wasteful duplication of effort. But most of the rail lines in the USSR were inherited from the Russian Empire which had also avoided such duplication.
As a result of having a shorter rail system plus more freight traffic, the USSR had a freight traffic density (in ton-km per km of line) 6-7 times higher than the US. In the US, the mean daily freight car mileage was only 95 km. vs. 227 km. for the USSR. The percent of freight car miles that ran empty was 41% for the US vs. 29% for the USSR. It was claimed that labor productivity rose 4.3 fold between 1955 and 1980, resulting in the USSR being roughly the same as the US (after taking into account that the USSR hauled a greater proportion of non-bulk commodities which were more labor intensive to haul --more switching of cars, etc.).
However, the reliability of locomotives in the USSR was much worse than for the US. [15] Their high traffic density often resulted in traffic congestion and delays, especially after an accident blocked the line.[15][33]
As compared to the U.S., the Soviet Union (USSR) got off to a very slow start in electrification but later greatly surpassed the US. Electrification in the US reached its maximum in the late 1930s which is just when electrification was getting its start in the USSR.
In 1932 the USSR opened their first short 3000 volt DC electrified segment in Georgia (birthplace of the Soviet ruler Stalin) on the Suramsk Pass grade located between the capital, Tbilisi, and the Black Sea. [34] The grade (slope) was steep: 2.9%. The original fleet of 8 locomotives was imported from the United States and were made by General Electric (GE). The Soviets also got GE to give them construction drawings so as to enable the Soviets to construct similar locomotives. Strange as it may seem, the first Soviet locomotive to be made was not a copy, but one of Soviet design which was completed in Nov. 1932 with great fanfare. Later in the same month, the 2nd locomotive to be made in the USSR, a copy of the GE locomotive, was completed. At first, many more copies of U.S. design were made than for ones of Soviet design, since no more locomotives of Soviet design were made until 2 years later.
In 1941, prior to World War II, the USSR had electrified only 1865 route-kilometers. [35] This was well behind the US which had electrified nearly 5000 kilometers.[36] However, since the USSR rail network was much shorter than the US, the percentage of the USSR's kilometers electrified was greater than the US..
Electrification was put on hold during World War II as the western part-= of the Soviet Union (including Russia) was invaded by Nazi Germany. After the war, the highest priority was to rebuild the physical destruction caused by the War, so railroad electrification was further postponed for about 10 years.
In 1946, just one year after the end of World War II, the USSR ordered 20 electric locomotives from General Electric, [37] the same U.S. corporation that supplied locomotives for the first USSR electrification. But due to the cold war, they couldn't be delivered to the USSR so they were sold elsewhere. The Milwaukee Road in the U.S. obtained 12 of them where America nicknamed them "Little Joes", "Joe" referring to Joseph Stalin, the then Soviet ruler.
In the mid-1950s, the USSR decided to launch a two pronged approach to replace their obsolete fleet of steam locomotives. They would electrify the lines with high density traffic and slowly convert the rest of the lines to diesel. The result was a slow but steady introduction of both electric and diesel traction which lasted until about 1980 when their last steam locomotives were retired. [38]In the US, steam went out about 1960 [39], 20 years earlier than for the USSR.
But once dieselization and electrification had fully replaced steam (around 1980) they began to convert some diesel lines to electric, but the pace of electrification slowed. The result was that by 1990, over 60% of the railway freight was being hauled by electric traction.[40] [7] This amounted to about 30% of the freight hauled by all railroads in the world [41] and about 80% of rail freight in the US (where rail freight held almost a 40% modal share). [42] The USSR was hauling more rail freight than any other country in the world, and most of this was going by electric railways.
After the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, railroad traffic in Russia, sharply declined [43] and new major electrification projects were not undertaken except for the line to Murmansk which was completed in 2005. [44] Work continued on completing the electrification of the Trans-Siberian Railway, but at a slower pace, finishing in 2002. [45] However, the percent of tonne-kilometers hauled today by electric trains has increased to about 85%.[7]
Following 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[46].
In 2010 the remaining freight cars of the Russian Railways were transferred to a private company, that for the time being is fully owned by the Russian Railways. Thus Russian Railways became the only railroad system in the world to have no freight cars for use by shippers. If a shipper wants to ship by rail but doesn't have their own cars, then they must obtain service from one of the highly profitable and unregulated operators to provide them with cars and service. Not having all the cars in a central pool is inefficient since empty car mileage is higher. This, plus the high profits made by the operators results in higher freight rates (30% in some cases) which results in loss of traffic from rail to other modes of transportation such as trucks.[47] [48] [31]
Since 2010 the company had started an overhaul of its computers systems. The overhaul will centralize the management of data into new computing hubs, restructure the collection of information on the railroad's field operations, and integrate new automation software to help the railway strategize how to deploy its assets. The geriatric machines that the new mainframes will replace include Soviet-built clones of IBM's Cold War–era computers, called ES EVMs (the transliterated Russian acronym for "unified system of electronic computing machines").[49]
The RZD operates the Armenian Railway until 2038. During this period, at least 570 million euro will be invested, 90% going into infrastructure.[50]
In North Korea the RZD participates in the upgrade of the Tumangang—Rajin line near the Sea of Japan and in the building of a container terminal in Rajin. [51]
Trans-Eurasia Logistics is a joint venture with RZD that operates container freight trains between Germany and China via Russia.
Voltage of electrification systems not necessarily compatible.
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The full text of many books in Russian on railroads may be downloaded free from certain websites in Russia. These books are mostly technical and often one needs to know some elementary physics, engineering and calculus (in addition to Russian) to fully understand them. They are often in an RAR archive for which you may need special software to unpack (free GPLed software is available). But there is a warning on Russian railway books for download that it's illegal to use these books without permission of the copyright holders. Many of these books are out of print and can't be readily found in bookstores in Russia.
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   | Russian Railways Official Site - Home | Russian Railways |
| | Eurailpress: Saudi-Arabien: RZD baut Strecke - Eurailpress - Error 404 - Seite nicht gefunden |
| | Eurailpress: RZD gewinnt Ausschreibung in Armenien - Eurailpress - Error 404 - Seite nicht gefunden |
| | Russian Railways wins $800 million Saudi project tender - Russian Railways wins $800 million Saudi project tender | Top Russian news and analysis online | 'RIA Novosti' newswire |
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