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General Kourapatkin had afterwards to set to work 

 to relay the railway line, making the curved places 

 straight, when the wa:r had actually started. This 

 would all have been done in the first place if war 

 with Japan had been thought^f. Although the line 

 is a single one there are, St each station, two and 

 sometimes four lines, the distances between stations 

 averaging about twenty miles. This makes it, for 

 all practical purposes, just as convenient as a double 

 line, as trains do not pass one another many times 

 during the week, and when they do, the returning 

 train can easily be timed to reach a siding so as to 

 let the full train pass without delay. This system has 

 worked very well, in fact so well, that since the war 

 commenced consignments of Siberian butter have 

 regularly arrived at Riga from Kourgan, a distance 

 of 2,500 miles, in the space of ten days. If Russia 

 had engineered the railway for the purposes of war 

 it is difficult to see why two lines were not constructed 

 throughout. The fact that Lake Baikal was not 

 girdled by a railway also tends to show that Russia 

 did not anticipate warfare. 



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