Rails are laid across the frozen surface of Lake Baikal

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With the Russo-Japanese War beginning and the icebreakers unable to keep the crossing open, some 45 km of track are laid directly onto the lake ice and wagons hauled over by horses. It is an improvisation, not a railway, and it is the sharpest single measure of what the Baikal gap cost the empire strategically: the war exposed both the missing shore line and the political risk of the Manchurian route in the same season.

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