Presidential Library marking the Day of the Railway Worker

Traditionally, on the first Sunday of August, Russia celebrates the Day of the Railway Worker - a professional holiday when employees of the railway industry are honored. This year it falls on August 6. The history of the holiday is associated with Emperor Nicholas I, who is rightly called the founder of the railway business in Russia. It was during his reign in 1836 that the construction of railways began in our country, which became the most important event for the state.

It must be said that the first steam locomotive in Russia - the "steam cart" - was created back in 1833 at the Nizhny Tagil mining plant of the merchants Demidovs, serfs father and son Cherepanovs. This happened two years before steam locomotives appeared in Germany. For their work, the Cherepanovs received freedom, but their invention did not reach the capital. The Presidential Library features a postcard depicting a monument to the famous handyman mechanics Efim Alekseevich and Miron Efimovich Cherepanov on the Theater Square of Nizhny Tagil.

The need for a new mode of transport is evidenced by the materials and documents of that era, according to the book of I. B. Rosenfeld The First Railway in Russia.

In Russia, the experience of building railways in Europe and America was studied for a long time. Opponents of the construction wrote the following: “Russian blizzards will not tolerate foreign tricks, they will cover the tracks with snow, freeze the vapors. And where can one get such a mass of fuel so that the fire under the samovar-walkers does not go out forever?”

In 1839, by the highest order, railway engineers Pavel Melnikov and Nikolai Kraft were sent to the North American United States to study the construction and operation of American railways as the most appropriate for Russian ones in terms of climatic conditions.

From 1865 to 1875, the average annual growth of Russian railways amounted to one and a half thousand kilometers. In the collection "Index of Russian Railways", released in 1887, there are 61 railway directions - the railway connected Moscow and St. Petersburg not only with Russian, but also with foreign cities.

The construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the Great Siberian Route from the European part of Russia to the Pacific Ocean, began under Alexander III in 1891. Beginning with Nicholas I, almost all representatives of the imperial family actively supported the construction of the Russian railway network. The last Emperor Nicholas II, being heir to the throne, solemnly laid the first stone of a new road in Vladivostok. The Great Siberian Way was built in two branches: from Vladivostok and from Chelyabinsk (the longest railway in the world). It was the most difficult and unprecedentedly expensive project for that time, some sections of the road passed through completely deserted places, through mountains, rivers, lakes. The Presidential Library presents numerous archival cases related to reconnaissance work in areas where it was planned to lay branches of the highway, with hydraulic engineering surveys, with studies of the land arrangement among the Cossacks who lived along the Ussuri railway, with the attraction of foreign investment, etc. The Presidential Library’s portal provides the photo album The Great Way: Views of Siberia and the Great Siberian Railway (1899) and guides to the places where the construction of the Great Siberian Way took place.

On November 1, 1901, Russia celebrated half a century since the opening of the Nikolaev railway.

In 1918, an atlas of Russian railways was printed. It consisted of 24 pocket-size maps, on which all stations, platforms, and sidings were marked, indicating the distance in versts between the key points.

The importance of railways for the state was important not only from the point of view of the economy. In the essay The Work of Railways in Wartime (1931), L. N. Punin wrote in part prophetically: “The future war will require the maximum effort of any type of transport. In this work, I outlined the main points of the work of railways based on the experience of past wars (1914-1918 and 1918-1921)...".

During the Great Patriotic War, "the fraternal military commonwealth connected the railway troops with the Red Army". In the first period of the war, officers, sergeants and privates who participated in barrage operations repulsed the violent onslaught of the Nazi troops on the railway network, closing the road inland.

The Presidential Library’s portal features a large number of rare materials on the development of railways in Russia - electronic copies of rare publications, historical documents, atlases and photographs, video lectures and documentaries. The collection West Siberian Railway includes studies, essays, reviews, instructions, guides and maps - more than 300 different publications.