Trans-Siberian Highway

The Trans-Siberian Highway is the unofficial name for a network of federal highways that span the width of Russia from the Baltic Sea of the Atlantic Ocean to the Japan Sea of the Pacific Ocean. In the Asian Highway Network, the route is known as AH6. It stretches over 11,000 kilometers from Saint Petersburg to Vladivostok. The road disputes the title of the longest national highway in the world with Trans-Canada Highway and Highway 1 (Australia).

Route

The route, in places coinciding with European route E30 and passing through the territory of Kazakhstan across a distance of about 190 kilometers, consists of seven federal highways:

* Rossiya Highway: Saint Petersburg-Moscow, 664 km
* Ural Highway: Moscow-Chelyabinsk, 1880 km
*Baikal Highway:
** M51: Chelyabinsk-Novosibirsk, 1528 km
** M53: Novosibirsk-Irkutsk, 1860 km
** M55: Irkutsk-Chita, 1113 km
* Amur Highway: Chita-Khabarovsk, 2100 km (under construction)
* Ussuri Highway: Khabarovsk-Vladivostok, 760 km

Amur Highway

The most problematic stretch of the highway lies between Chita and Khabarovsk. The first section of this route, linking Belogorsk to Blagoveshchensk (124 km in length), was constructed by gulag inmates as early as 1949. Extended and updated between 1998 and 2001, this road forms part of the Asian route AH31 connecting Belogorsk to Dalian in China.

The Chita-Khabarovsk road remained largely unfinished up until early 2004, when Russian President Vladimir Putin symbolically opened the Amur Highway, with great swaths of forest separating major portions from one another. Jim Oliver and Dennis ONeil rode motorcycles across Russia, along the Trans-Siberian Highway, during the last week of May and the first three weeks of June in 2004. As described in Jim Oliver's book, "Lucille and The XXX Road", the section between Chita and Khabarovsk was an extremely challenging undertaking. The Russians told Jim and Dennis they were the 1st two motorcyclists to cross the area, in the Amur, without using the Trans-Siberian Railway. Jim writes about the massive marsh, gravel, rock, mud, sand, washboard, pot-holes, stream fording, and detours of the elusive highway with a noticeable absence of pavement. Many motorcyclists have been injured or killed trying to "master" the Amur Highway. Even today, in some places, it is a modern paved highway with painted reflective lane-lines and in others, a single meandering, pockmarked, loose-gravel trail following the route of the early 20th-century Amur Cart Road. Completion of a 7-metre-wide highway between Chita and Khabarovsk is slated for 2010.

Old history

The road from Saint Peterburg to Irkutsk existed already before the railway era. It was featured in the novel by Jules Verne written in 1876.

Urban legends

Due to the megalithic nature of the project it has spawned several legends about itself. For example an inexplicable semicircle is said to exist somewhere that breaks the straight line of a segment. The explanation would be that when Stalin used a ruler to mark where the highway should pass the pencil jumped over his finger and the engineers that were under threat to make the segment exactly as commanded did not deviate from the drawing.

The same myth exists about the Moscow-Saint Petersburg Railway, which is very straight but has a strange curve nicknamed "The Tsar's finger". The myth about the road maybe comes from the railway myth.

ee also

*Circumbaikal Highway