Railroad Troops - History
The Russian railways were a collection of mostly privately owned and operated companies during most of the 19th century, though many had been constructed with heavy government involvement and financing. The tsarist government began mobilizing and nationalizing the rail system as World War I approached, and the new communist government finished the nationalization process. With the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the Russian Federation was left with three-fifths of the railway track of the Union as well as nine-tenths of the highway mileage – though only two-fifths of the port capacity.
The Railroad Troops were first formed in 1851. The Russian military used railroads to deploy heavy weapons and armor to the battlefield. The acute military, strategic and tactical importance of the railroad system in Russia explains the existence of special Railroad Troops whose task is to keep the tracks in order during and in preparation for war and to organize makeshift armor battlefield disembarkment points.
The Russian railways are one of the economic wonders of the 19th, 20th, and 21st century world. In length of track they are second globally to the railways of the United States (though China is trying to catch them from below). In volume of freight hauled, they are third behind the United States and China, using the standard measure of ton-kilometers. And in overall density of operations – here the standard measure is (freight ton-kilometers + passenger-kilometers)/length of track – Russia is second only to China.
Russia is a much larger country than either the United States or China, so its rail density (rail track/country area) is lower than that of these other two – much lower in the case of the United States. Since Russia's population density is also much lower than that of these other two (excluding Alaska from the U.S. measure in this case), the Russian railways carry their freight and passengers over very long distances, often through vast, nearly empty spaces; their average length of haul is second in the world, behind only the United States and essentially tied with Canada.
Coal and coke make up almost one-third of the freight traffic and have average hauls of around 1500 kilometers, while ferrous metals make up another 10 percent of freight traffic and travel an average of over 1900 kilometers. Many remote shippers and customers have access either to only very poor alternative shipping options by road or water, and/or access to those alternative options for less than the entire year.
Though like most railways RZhD carries both freight and passengers, it is one of the most freight-dominant railways in the world, behind only Canada, the United States, and Estonia in the ratio of freight ton-kilometers to passenger-kilometers. Measured by the share of freight carried, RZhD is second to none among the world's largest railways in its importance to its country's economy.
The Russian railways were divided into seventeen regional railways as of 2011, from the October Railway serving the St. Petersburg region to the Far Eastern Railway serving Vladivostok, with the free-standing Kaliningrad and Sakhalin Railways on either end. However, the regional railways are closely coordinated by the central authority – the Ministry of the Means of Communication, MPS, until 2003, and the Joint Stock Company Russian Railways, Rossiiskie Zheleznyie Dorogi or RZhD, since then – including the pooling and redistribution of revenues. This has been crucial to two long-standing policies of cross-subsidization: to passenger operations from freight revenues, and to coal shipments from other freight. These cross subsidies have important implications for reform proposals.
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