Construction of Baikal-Amur Mainline begins
The main drivers behind the actual construction were volunteers from the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, usually known as Komsomol for short, and military construction workers.
Komsomol detachments from the various Soviet republics competed with each other and had “their own” projects and objects. The huge Urgal station was built by people from the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Belarussians put up Muyakan station, Lithuania erected Uoyan, Estonians Kichera, Armenians Tayura, Azerbaijan Ulkan, Tajikistan Soloni, and Moldovans Alonku.
Tynda, the “capital” of BAM, was built by Muscovites and in 1980 became the headquarters for the railway administration of the Baikal-Amur Railway. The administration included 3 departments: Urgal, Tyndinsky, Severobaikalsky.
The stretches and sections at BAM are:
- Bamovskaya – Tynda – Berkakit;
- Izvestkovaya – Urgal – Chegdomyn;
- the Berezovka (Duki) – Komsomolsk-on-Amur section, which, however, was only in temporary operation;
- Ust-Kut (Lena) – Severobaikalsk;
- Urgal – Berezovka (Duki).
On 29 September 1984, the “golden” connection or final link-up took place at the Balbukhta junction in the Kalarsky district in the Chita region. The two teams of construction workers who had started at the eastern and western ends of the BAM finally met up after converging on each other for 10 years. On 1 October, the “golden” links of the BAM were laid at Kuanda station, again in Kalarsky district in Chita.
In 1989, the State Commission signed a formal act on the acceptance into permanent operation of the last stages of the BAM. From that moment on, the entire Baikal-Amur Main Line was given over for railways to manage it in the shape of the USSR’s Ministry of Railways.
In July 1996, the Board of the Ministry of Railways made a decision to divide the Baikal-Amur Railway into two. As a result, the eastern part was transferred to Far Eastern Railways, the western part to East Siberian Railways. The boundary between them lies slightly west of Khani station.
The final completion of the construction of the Baikal-Amur Main Line can be considered 5 December 2003, when traffic began running through the Severo-Muysky tunnel. Its length of 15,343 m makes it the longest tunnel in Russia and the fifth-longest in the world. In terms of the conditions encountered during its construction, the tunnel has no analogues – the builders had to contend with permafrost, an abundance of groundwater, landslides, cave-ins and tectonic faults.
Since 2013, Russian Railways has been carrying out a large-scale modernisation of the railway network from the Kuzbass, the Kuznetsk Basin, to the Pacific coast. The project is called the Eastern Rail Region and takes in Krasnoyarsk, East Siberian, Trans-Baikal and Far Eastern Railways. Every year, the Company commissions dozens of new facilities, including second tracks and double-track inserts, bridges and tunnels, traction substations and electrification facilities. The result of the project will be an increase in the capacity of the BAM and Trans-Siberian Railway in the eastern direction by one and a half times by 2025, raising the annual freight volume to 180 million tons.