Kuibyshev Railroad

formed in 1959 by the merger of the Kuibyshev and Ufa railways. Its headquarters is in Kuibyshev. As of Jan. 1, 1971, the railroad was 4,529.8 km long (3.3 percent of the total length of the USSR’s railroad network). The Kuibyshev Railroad runs through Kuibyshev and Penza oblasts, the Mordovian ASSR, the Tatar ASSR, and the Bashkir ASSR, as well as through parts of Riazan’, Tambov, and Cheliabinsk oblasts. It is connected with the Gorky Railroad (Tsil’na and Krasnyi Uzel stations), the Moscow Railroad (Kustarevka, Riazhsk, and Zemetchino stations), the Southern Urals Railroad (Kropachevo and KineP stations), and the Volga Railroad (Penza, Sennaia, and Chagra stations). Sections of the Riazhsk-Syzran’-Samara (present-day Kuibyshev)-Ufa-Kropachevo trunk line were put into operation between 1867 and 1890. The Penza-Ruzaevka line opened in 1895, the Kustarevka-Ruzaevka-Krasnyi Uzel in 1893, the Ruzaevka-Batraki in 1898, the Inza-Kindiakovka-Verkhniaia Terrasa in 1898, and the Chishma-Bugul’ma-Melekess between 1911 and 1916.

Under Soviet power many new railroads were built in the Volga Region. A number of lines were opened in the region of the Kuibyshev Railroad, including the Dema-Ishimbai-Tiul’gan, the Akbash-Naberezhnye Chelny, the Bezymianka-Zhigulevsk--Syzran’, the Tsil’na-UPianovsk-Syzran’-Sennaia, and the Zvezda-Pugachevsk. The construction of new lines and the complete modernization and reequipping of all the trunk lines created favorable conditions for the development of the petroleum, chemicals, coal, and machine-building industries, as well as other branches of industry, and made it possible to handle transshipments. Railroads link the regions of Central Asia, Kazakh-stan, the Urals, Siberia, and the Far East with the European USSR. The Kuibyshev Railroad serves major industrial regions engaged primarily in the extraction and refining of petroleum, as well as energy, chemicals, machine-tool, and other enterprises.

In terms of freight turnover, in 1971 the Kuibyshev Railroad held fifth place among Soviet railroads, with a turnover of about 141 billion km (5.1 percent of the turnover of the nation’s entire railroad network). Electric and diesel engines are used to pull trains.

The freight load of the Kuibyshev Railroad is 1.7 times that of the average load for the entire network of Soviet railroads. In addition, the Kuibyshev line is one of the highest-ranking rail-roads in the USSR in terms of the number of passengers carried in both local and transit service. The total passenger flow in 1972 was 13.2 billion passenger-km, or 4.6 percent of the flow of the Soviet railroad network. In 1971 the Kuibyshev Railroad was awarded the Order of Lenin.