286 THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY. 



waterways of Siberia, and when at last a man arose 

 to put fresh life-blood into the stagnant veins of Russian 

 activity in the East, it was in great measure due to the 

 defects inevitably attaching to the navigation of rivers 

 themselves frozen for half the year, flowing into a 

 remote and almost impracticable sea, that the project 

 of constructing railways, to at least assist existing 

 communications, took definite shape. 



The earliest definite suggestion seems to have come 

 from an English engineer, who proposed to build a 

 gigantic horse tramway, extending from Nijni-Novgorod 

 to the Pacific Ocean ; but, as Mr Henry Norman re- 

 marks, "it is not surprising that the Russian Govern- 

 ment passed over in silence so fantastic a scheme, 

 unsupported by any estimates." ^ Another proposal 

 made in the same year was that of Colonel Romanoff, 

 for a carriage-road, to be transformed later into a rail- 

 way, between Sophiisk on the Amur and De Castries 

 Bay. The idea of railway communication having once 

 taken root, a whole host of proposals of varying merit 

 immediately sprang up, including one by an American, 

 Collins, to unite Irkutsk and Chita ; a gigantic scheme 

 for traversing the whole region by three Englishmen, 

 Morrison, Horn, and Sleigh ; and the equally colossal 

 project of Sophronoff, to build a line from Saratof 

 across the Steppe via Semipalatinsk to the Amur and 

 Peking. 



After this many schemes of a less ambitious nature 

 were propounded, the first tangible result appearing 

 in the shape of a line built solely to satisfy the demands 

 of the Ural mining industry, a special commission, 



1 In his ' Peoples and Politics of the Far East.' The facts concerning the 

 proposals for and eventual construction of the trans-Siberian railway are 

 taken from the above book, Vladimix-'a 'Russia on the Pacific,' and the 

 ofl&cial ' Guide to the Great Siberian Railway.' 



