Circum-Baikal Railway

node · earth · Southwestern shore of Lake Baikal, Irkutsk Oblast

The section that closed the last gap in the original Trans-Siberian, running around the southwestern shore of Lake Baikal between Port Baikal and Mysovaya through a near-continuous sequence of tunnels, galleries and retaining walls cut into cliffs that come straight down to the water. Until it opened, trains were carried across the lake on the icebreaking ferries Baikal and Angara, in service from 1900. In the winter of 1903–04, with the Russo-Japanese War beginning and the ferries beaten by the ice, some 45 km of track were laid directly on the frozen surface and wagons hauled across by horses. First trains ran on the shore line in September 1904 and it was brought into permanent operation in October 1905. A later dam and realignment left much of it as a branch, which is why a stretch of the most expensive railway engineering in the empire now carries tourist trains.