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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Soviet Union
Index
Important new railroad construction was under way in the Arctic
regions, Siberia, the Far East, and the Caucasus. Thus, the
Urengoy-Yamburg rail line was being built to serve the Yamburg
natural gas deposits north of Urengoy. In the Pechora River area,
a line from the town of Synia, on the Moscow-Vorkuta road, was
being extended about 120 kilometers to the Usinsk oil fields. Plans
were made for a 540-kilometer spur from Labytnangi, southeast of
Vorkuta, to the gas fields at Bolvanskiy Nos on the Yamal
Peninsula. The project has been hampered by summer thaws. Engineers
laying the rail line resolved the problem by insulating the strips
of marsh along the track, thus keeping them in a continuous state
of permafrost. In the Caucasus area, a new electrified line, almost
200 kilometers long, was planned from Tbilisi through the Caucasus
Mountains to Ordzhonikidze. Plans called for the Caucasus Mountain
Pass Railroad to shorten by 960 kilometers the distance for trains
from Tbilisi to Ordzhonikidze via Armavir. Several tunnels,
totaling forty-two kilometers, and numerous bridges have been
planned. Originally scheduled for completion by the year 2000, the
project was being stalled in 1989 by environmental groups.
A 450-kilometer rail line from Makat, in the Kazakh Republic,
to Aleksandrov Gay, in Saratovskaya Oblast in the Russian Republic,
was started in 1984 and was nearing completion in 1989. It was
projected to cut over 1,000 kilometers from the route between
Central Asia and Moscow.
Data as of May 1989
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