THE pioneering St Petersburg to Pavlovsk railway officially opened on October 30th, 1837. Timothy Hackworth’s steam locomotive whisked a train of eight carriages thirteen miles from St Petersburg to Tsarskoye Selo in just 35 minutes, where it was welcomed by the Tsar himself. Regular steam-hauled trains began the following May.
A second line connecting Warsaw in modern-day Poland to the Austrian border began service on April 1st, 1848, and once again British engineering was in demand: the first five steam locomotives were supplied by Lancashire-born engineer John Cockerill from his foundry in Belgium.
At last, a railway linking St Petersburg and Moscow 400 miles away opened on November 1st, 1851.* Unlike the railways in Britain, it was a Goverment initiative and built using forced labour, and travel passes were strictly reserved for the elite. Their 22-hour journey, however, looked quaintly rustic beside that of working-class Britons, who had been dashing between London and Glasgow in 12½ hours since the summer of 1848.*
Owing to political and financial intrigue, it took ten years to complete, and it was grievously negligent in terms of human life. Nikolai Nekrasov composed a poetical lament in 1864 taken today as ‘anti-capitalist’, even though the project was jealously state controlled. On a similar theme, see Samuel Smiles in A Monument to Liberty.
Direct trains between Euston and Glasgow began on March 1st, 1848, leaving at 9am and arriving at 10pm, a 13-hour trip for 405 miles. However, the time was cut to 12 hours 10 minutes that summer. From October 1849, the timing was eased back to 12½ hours, which remained the standard for some years. Today, the journey takes 4½ hours.