The Trans-Siberian Railway: Nine Thousand Kilometers by Hand

Russia built a railway nine thousand kilometres long across Siberia before it had roads, or bridges, or enough people to fill the country it crossed. It was begun from both ends at once, dug by hand with picks and wheelbarrows, and finished in nineteen sixteen, in the middle of a world war. This is the story of the Trans-Siberian: how the empire paid for it, what the workers were paid and what they were charged for their own dug-out housing, why the line was first routed through Manchuria and then pulled back inside Russia, and how trains crossed a lake more than a mile deep before there was any track around it. CHAPTERS 0:00 THE WAGER 0:55 SIBERIA BEFORE THE RAILS 2:00 THE RESCRIPT 3:13 AN ARMY OF PICKAXES 5:14 THE BRIDGES 6:24 THE SHORTCUT 7:13 THE LAKE 8:26 THE WAR THAT TESTED IT 9:08 THE AMUR MIRACLE 10:02 WHAT IT MADE SOURCES AND CREDITS Sources are recorded per claim in the research dossier behind this film, which is available on request. Disputed figures are spoken as ranges on purpose: the workforce 85,000-100,000; the Circum-Baikal tunnel count 33-38; and the 1904 completion date is given by month only, because the sources disagree about the day. Deliberately NOT in the narration, because they are unsupported or false: "600 km of track laid every day" (the sourced rates are 400-740 km per YEAR); "Chelyabinsk to Vladivostok opened in 1897" (only Vladivostok-Khabarovsk opened that November); "one rouble per verst" fares and the "round the world for a rouble" story (no source found, and the only sourced fare points the opposite way); "the bulk of the workforce were convicts"; and any total construction death toll. Narration is a synthetic voice generated on my own machine. Footage is from Pexels. Archival photographs, prints and photographs of drawings: Wikimedia Commons, the Library of Congress, the National Library of Norway, the Internet Archive and other public-domain collections. CC BY images credited on screen. Runtime: 11:23. Music: Music For Unknown Documentary Films by Ambient Samurai - Ichiro NAKAGAWA (by). Produced by Oliver Djoric. Research, script, voice and edit are assembled with a self-hosted pipeline: local models, my own hardware, no subscriptions. If you need video like this made for your channel or your product: https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/~0...