Part 1 of 2
IN 1836, sixteen-year-old John Wesley Hackworth arrived in the Russian capital, St Petersburg, bearing the heavy responsibility of delivering a steam locomotive, built by his father Timothy at Shildon in County Durham, to the Russian Empire’s first railway line.*
The locomotive’s destination was a 6ft-gauge, 17-mile demonstration track from St Petersburg to Pavlovsk, via Tsarskoye Selo and the famous Catherine Palace. The line’s purpose was to prove to Tsar Nicholas I, who personally attended the tests and who held the purse-strings, that Russia could build her own railways, and maintain them through a Russian winter.
Several of the line’s engineers brought experience from England, and a locomotive by the Cherepanov brothers was supplemented by the Shildon engine. The affable Tsar confided to young John his amazement at how far technology had come since 1816, when on a visit to England he had seen with his own eyes John Blenkinsopp’s rack-and-pinion locomotives at work on the Middleton Railway near Leeds.*
See our post Timothy Hackworth.
The Middleton Railway remains in operation today as a preserved industrial railway.
Précis
The first railway in Russia was an experimental line from St Petersburg to Pavlovsk, 17 miles away, designed to test whether railways were practicable in Russia. Both the engineering know-how and the first locomotive came from England, the latter brought over by the teenage son of Timothy Hackworth, a pioneer of steam power on the railways. (55 / 60 words)
Part Two
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.
Précis
Following the success of the St Petersburg to Pavlovsk line, the Russian Empire opened a railway from St Petersburg to Moscow in 1851. However, despite all the advantages of twenty years of technological progress, trains were much slower than those on the London to Glasgow route, and the king of social progress brought by Britain’s railways was strenuously resisted. (58 / 60 words)