Chinese Eastern Railway Liaodong from China in 1898. Officially, traffic on the line started in November 1901, but regular passenger traffic from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok across the Trans-Siberian railway did not commence until July 1903. In 1898, construction of a 550-mile (880 km) spur line, most of which later formed the South Manchuria Railway, began at Harbin, leading southwards through Eastern Manchuria, along the Liaodong Peninsula, to the ice-free deep-water port at Lüshun, which Russia was fortifying and developing into a first-class strategic naval base and marine coaling station for its Far East Fleet and Merchant Marine. This town was known in
Amur Railway and the Transbaikal section of the Transsib were merged to form the Transbaikal Railway. The construction of the Amur Railway was completed before the outbreak of World War I and cost over 250,000 million rubles. The eastern section of the railroad alone cost 73 million rubles. The famous Norwegian explorer and geographer Fridtjof Nansen referred to the Trans-Siberian Railway as a "technical wonder". Its construction favoured the rapid development of formerly backward regions of Siberia and Far East. Amur Railway The broad gauge Amur Railway (, or Amurskaya zheleznaya doroga) is the last section of the Trans-Siberian Railway in Russia,