Transbaikal Railroad

a railroad formed in July 1959, with its administration in Chita.

The railroad runs through the Chita and Amur oblasts. In the west it connects with the East Siberian Railroad (Petrovskii Zavod station) and in the east with the Far Eastern Railroad (Arkhara station); it also joins railroads of the Mongolian People’s Republic and the People’s Republic of China. At present 3,417 km are in operation. The first railroad line in Transbaikalia (Petrovskii Zavod-Chita-Kuenga) was put into operation in 1900. With the completion of the Kuenga-Bureia line (1914) and the Bureia-Arkhara-Khabarovsk line (1915) a direct rail connection with the Far East was established. During the Soviet period the Chernyshevsk-Zabaikal’skiiBukachacha, Zavitaia-Poiarkovo, Bureia-Raichikha, and Borzia-Solov’evsk sections have been built.

The Transbaikal Railroad serves coal mining regions (Chernovskie Kopi, Bukachacha, and the Arbagar and Kharanor deposits), enterprises of the nonferrous metallurgical, machine-building, lumber, light, and food industries, and regions of developed agriculture. The major freight dispatching and destination points are Raichikha, Zabaikal’sk, Chita, and Poiarkovo. Freight turnover on the railroad is about 4 percent of the,national total; about 30 million tons are shipped annually. The principal types of freight are coal, lumber, and mineral building materials; the principal import and transit cargoes are petroleum products, coal, timber, machinery, equipment, grain, and light-industry freight. Local traffic is 27 percent of the total volume, export 20 percent, import 15 percent, and transit freight 38 percent. The volume of passenger traffic is slight, about 1.5 percent of the national total, and more than half of this is passenger traffic connecting the Far East with other regions of the country. More than 94 percent of the freight and passenger turnover is done by diesel traction (1970).