Kuybyshev Railway

The Syzran-Zlatoust Railway. A photograph by Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, ca. 1910.

The Kuybyshevskaya Railway (Ку́йбышевская желе́зная доро́га) is a subsidiary of the Russian Railways operating in Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Mordovia, Ryazan Oblast, Penza, Tambov, Ulyanovsk, Samara, Orenburg, and Chelyabinsk Oblasts of Russia. Its headquarters are in Samara. The railway route length totals 11 502 km.

The oldest railway in the network is that linking Morshansk and Syzran; it was built between 1872 and 1875. In 1880, engineers Nikolai Belelyubsky and Konstantin Mikhailovsky designed the Syzran Bridge across the Volga, then the longest in Europe. The railway reached Zlatoust in 1890 and Chelyabinsk 2 years later. The main office of the Samara-Zlatoust Railway was located in Ufa.

After the Russian Revolution, several lines of the Moscow-Kazan and Syzran-Vyazma railways were added to the Syzran-Zlatoust Railway. The railway network was renamed after Valerian Kuybyshev in 1936 (as was the city of Samara). In 1989, the railway was the site of the worst train disaster in the history of the Soviet Union resulting in 575 deaths (see Ufa train disaster).

External links

• Official website