East Siberian Railway In 1887, three expeditions were organised to explore the route for the future Trans-Siberian Railway. In May 1893, the Committee for the Construction of the Siberian Railway was created. The construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway was launched simultaneously from its two extremities, namely Vladivostok and Chelyabinsk. By 1895, the construction of the section of railway from Chelyabinsk to the railway station of Ob near the small settlement of Novonikolaevsky (today's Novosibirsk) was complete. On December 6, 1895 the first train arrived at Krasnoyarsk, which would become a starting point for the construction of the East Siberian Railway towards Irkutsk and
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,