History of rail transport in Myanmar History of rail transport in Myanmar Rail transport in Myanmar (then Burma) began in 1877. Three private rail companies were nationalised nineteen years later. During the Japanese occupation of Burma, Allied prisoners of war were forced to build the Burma Railway. Myanmar Railways has expanded its network somewhat since 1988. Rail transport was introduced in Burma in May 1877 (when Lower Burma was a colony of the United Kingdom and part of British India) with the opening of the Rangoon-to-Prome line by the Irrawaddy Valley State Railway. The line, following the Irrawaddy River, was built over a three-year period with
Capital punishment in the Soviet Union Capital punishment in the Soviet Union Capital punishment was a legal penalty in the Soviet Union for most of the country's existence. The legal justification of capital punishment was found in Article 22 of the Fundamental Principles of Criminal Legislation, which stated that the death penalty was permitted "as an exceptional measure of punishment, until its complete abolition". According to Western estimates, in the early 1980s Soviet courts passed around 2,000 death sentences every year, of which two-thirds were commuted to prison terms. The death penalty was not applied to minors or pregnant women. The first person to be sentenced