Russia' First Iron Road

Service begins October 30, 1837

In 1829, Alexander Pushkin, who had done a great deal of traveling across the Russian Empire, wrote a half-jocular, half-somber poem titled “Laments of the Road,” which began:

How long shall I ply the highways,
In a carriage, on a steed,
In a wagon tour the byways,
In a cart, or on my feet?

Far from the ancestral dwelling,
Far from my forefathers’ graves
On the open road, I’m sensing, 
God intends I’ll end my days.

Crushed by hoof upon the rubble,
In the mountains ‘neath a wheel,
Or a ditch will end my trouble,
There I’ll meet my last ordeal.

Долго ль мне гулять на свете
То в коляске, то верхом,
То в кибитке, то в карете,
То в телеге, то пешком?

Не в наследственной берлоге,
Не средь отческих могил,
На большой мне, знать, дороге
Умереть господь судил,

На каменьях под копытом,
На горе под колесом,
Иль во рву, водой размытом,
Под разобранным мостом.

In this poem, Pushkin lists all the means of transportation available to him. As we see, trains were not among them. Railroads were just beginning to appear in England and Germany, and it appeared doubtful that this conveyance would ever make it to Russia, with its vast expanses. Pushkin’s “Laments of the Road” was published in 1832. Anyone who had ever tried to get anywhere on Russia’s dreadful roads and suffered the dismal experience of sitting in a post station awaiting fresh horses would surely have sighed in appreciation of Pushkin’s poem.

The subject of Russia’s bad roads has always held a place of honor within Russian culture, and in the early nineteenth century anyone with the slightest inclination for conversation regularly complained about potholes, the uncouth behavior of station masters, the lack of horses just when you need them, and the generally plodding pace of travel.

Little did they suspect that their plaints would soon be answered. Just three years after Pushkin’s poem came out, Franz Anton Ritter von Gerstner, an engineer from Prague who had already built railroads in the Austrian Empire, wrote the following words to Russia’s Tsar Nicholas: “There is no country in the world that would derive greater benefit from railroads or where railroads are more necessary than in Russia, since they provide the possibility of shortening large distances by increasing the speed of travel.”

Tsar Nicholas I had the highest regard for engineers, builders, or indeed anyone engaged in comprehensible, practical pursuits. This attitude was in sharp contrast to how the emperor felt about “chatterboxes” – philosophers, writers, and journalists – who were generally viewed by His Majesty as purveyors of sedition and dealt with accordingly. The sort of advice offered by engineers, on the other hand, was something to which Nicholas was always receptive.

Gerstner was granted an audience with the emperor, who listened to his proposals attentively. Before long, construction began on a short trial rail line, which extended from St. Petersburg to its most renowned suburb: Tsarskoye Selo, “Tsar’s Village.” (Although the line was named for this town, the rails were quickly extended to the next suburb, Pavlovsk.)

Construction proceeded rapidly. The royal decree to begin building the line was made public in April 1936, and six months later 27 kilometers of track were largely completed. One night in November, in the presence of the tsar, who adored such experiments, members of the royal family, and a huge crowd of curiosity-seekers from every conceivable segment of society, a locomotive made its way down Russia’s first train tracks. It would be another year before the line was fully operational. On October 30, 1937, it opened for service.

In Russia, unlike in England (where it was rumored emissions from the “iron horse” would reduce milk output by cows), there were no public expressions of “environmental” concerns. The Russian name for the railroad – «железная дорога» – translates literally as “iron road,” but the train immediately was nicknamed with a more derogatory word, «чугун» (chugun or cast iron).

At first, the chugunka was more a tool of recreation than an instrument of commerce and travel. The upper classes used it as a means to escape the city to relax in a suburban setting. Gerstner, who acted as an enthusiastic propagandist for train travel, proposed building a sort of amusement park in Pavlovsk, the end of the rail line and a favorite vacation spot for St. Petersburgers. He rightly assumed that people drawn to this destination would take the train and help spread the word of the joys and convenience of travel by rail. “At the end of the line a new Tivoli is being built, a beautiful Vauxhall: in summer and winter it will serve as a place of congregation for residents of the capital; games, dances, and refreshment in the open air and the elegant dining room will attract everyone,” he wrote.

And so it was. A pavilion where concerts were held was built next to the railroad in Pavlovsk. This pavilion was dubbed the Vauxhall, after London’s Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, which marks the origin of the Russian word воксал (voksal), used initially only for major urban train stations, but now, increasingly, even for smaller ones.

Gerstner and his team of engineers were already developing plans for a line to connect St. Petersburg and Moscow, plans that soon came to fruition. A chugunka between St. Petersburg and Warsaw followed shortly thereafter. Before long, the network began spreading in all directions. In his 1860s novel The Idiot, in a long digression on the Apocalypse, one of Dostoyevsky’s characters, Lebedev, bemoans the railway system crisscrossing the country as the Book of Revelation’s “Star of Wormwood.”

Passengers, however, were not discouraged by either Lebedev’s grim pronouncements or by Nikolai Nekrasov’s poem “The Railroad,” which describes the high mortality rate among the men who laid the track. Train travel quickly gained popularity, and from its very inception at Tsarskoye Selo, there were multiple classes of tickets sold for cars with varying degrees of comfort to accommodate the pocketbooks and expectations of Russia’s distinct classes.

The affordability this system offered the lower classes was exactly what alarmed English aristocrats when railroads first came to their country: greater mobility now gave the serving classes new freedom. While for the upper classes trains allowed for easy trips to Pavlovsk to stroll the greens as the band played in the pavilion, for peasants who lived far from St. Petersburg or Moscow it opened up the possibility of seeking work in the city without being completely cut off from their home village.

Not everyone in Russia immediately appreciated the implications of this new mobility. Not far from Moscow, the residents of Kaluga paid bribes to keep the railroad from passing through their town. The local merchants were more concerned about maintaining the old ways than developing business opportunities. By the time they realized that neighboring towns were prospering as commercial hubs, it was too late. Kaluga’s industries were dealt a heavy blow.

By the end of the nineteenth century, train travel was a part of everyday life accessible to most Russians. Of course, the network of tracks did not cover the entire country. Even today, much of Siberia is not served by the train system. The Trans-Siberian Railway, which was not completed until 1916, remains a testament to human perseverance and perhaps even foolhardiness. But in European Russia, anyone anywhere near a city could buy a train ticket: first-class for the nobleman, second for those of more modest means, and third for the peasant. But the basic experience was the same: when the conductor blew the whistle, everyone knew that the locomotive would start to puff, and the train would soon be running down the tracks.

Not only did train travel give Russia convenience, comfort, and mobility on a reliable schedule, but train stations became important nexuses in the “social network” of the day, serving as gathering spots, with restaurants and stores sprouting up in and around them. In small towns, the arrival of the train was a major event, a herald bearing news of the world at large.

Despite Pushkin’s foreboding, he did, in fact, die at home. Alas, he breathed his last a few months before the opening of the Tsarskoye Selo line.

* (There are over 86,000 km (53,000 miles) of common railway tracks in Russia.)