Southern Railway Half Ring of St. Petersburg

After a century and a half after Tsar Peter “stood up hard at sea”, overseas merchant ships gradually disappeared from the Neva panorama, and the warehouses on the Spit of Vasilyevsky Island turned into luxurious historical monuments. At the end of the Napoleonic wars, England and other world powers began to switch to steam engines and dramatically increase the tonnage of ships - for them the Gulf of Finland was too shallow, while continuing to increase the transshipment through Kronstadt would have undermined Russia's main naval base.

Only in the 1870-1880s, thanks to the Russian engineer and entrepreneur N. I. Putilov (1820–1880), St. Petersburg received the Sea Canal , and with it a full-fledged transport hub, in which the port power of the sea and river shipping company was connected to the core - Putilovskaya branches with branches to the main railway directions.

After Putilov’s death, the capacity of both the ports and the railway junction in St. Petersburg continued at a high rate, slowing down only during periods of economic crisis. The potential of the New Port was gradually exhausted. More and more, there was a lack of its location - at the farthest end of the Putilov branch, a dozen kilometers from the freight stations. It was also possible to expand the mounds of the already existing Putilov and Connecting branches for the second and third ways only up to a certain limit set by the carrying capacity of the roads and their sorting stations.

On the eve of the First World War, it seemed that it was still far from a critical point - all the more so since in 1913 the Finnish bridge finally entered service on the right bank of the Neva. But with the outbreak of hostilities, all the flaws began to manifest themselves, which not only the Petrograd junction potentially had, but also all the railways of Russia. By 1916, the transport crisis began to grow - along with the “shell hunger”, he eventually led the country to the February 1917 revolution .

At the end of 1915, a special commission of the Ministry of Railways (MPS) considered two options for the further development and reconstruction of the Petrograd railway junction: the ring scheme of S. N. Kulzhinsky and A. A. Glavatsky and the radial scheme of Yu. V. Lomonosov. In February 1916, the Engineering Council of the Ministry of Railways approved the ring scheme, and a mechanism was put into operation.

In the southern part of the Koltsevaya Line, a roadbed was poured in, earthwork began on the construction of the pre-port station, the erection of bridge supports and overpasses. But in the conditions of the ongoing war and the growing chaos, this was not easy. “Work was constantly delayed or stopped altogether due to the lack of working hands, materials, rails, etc. In 1916–1918. the initial plans were revised and reduced many times ... the construction of new sorting stations, pre-node and pre-port, was in its infancy ” ^[1] .

I must say that by 1916 the Ministry of Railways was no longer up to the construction of the Ring Railway in Petrograd. Speaking at the board of private railways, engineer S. V. Tyumenev said:

Here is the agony of road transport that has already arrived; a little more, and the railways, this nerve of the country, will become ... The Minister of Railways will have a circular dispatch on October 13 [1916] throughout the network recognizing the position of transport as critical ^[2]

- TsGIAL, f. 32, op. 1, d. 661, l. 6 about.

The manifestation of the general disruption in transport, which was growing throughout Russia, in Petrograd was specific. If there were congestion in the country, then in the capital, on the contrary, underload was stated. By 1917, the discharge capacity of the Petrograd hub (without the Finland Station) was increased to 3,000 wagons a day, with a possible increase to 3,765 wagons, subject to regular receipt, unloading and cleaning. However, in fact, in August 1917, the city daily received from the imperial network from 1,800 to 2,200 cars, i.e. underutilization averaged 27% ^[3] . In this context, it is not surprising that the motives for the allocation of labor and funds for the early construction of the Ring line in the eyes of the ministry looked unconvincing.

In 1918, economic collapse, hyperinflation and devastation left no choice but to freeze the construction site. The dumping of the mounds stopped. The transition to a “new economic policy” (NEP) also did not favor the implementation of large-scale construction projects: only small and medium capital in trade and manufacture grew rapidly, whereas for engineering and transport there were simply no funds in the budget.

To correct the imbalance in which current consumption increased due to under-investment in the development and modernization of the means of production, could only move to a fundamentally different development strategy - to industrialization . This happened when the first five-year plan was adopted in 1928. The development of the Leningrad port and the transport infrastructure serving it has become a top priority: the flow of both export and import cargoes has begun to grow.

As S. V. Kritsky writes, “at the end of the 1920s, a whole new area was built in the southern part of the port, specially designed for the handling of export cargoes - Khlebno-Lesnoy. The capacity of art. The new Port (the main one serving the LTP) consistently increased from 200 to 360, 450, 620 over the decade of the 1920s, and finally to 850 wagons per day ” ^[1] . The need to lay a new railway line to the port area, which would pass around the main part of the Leningrad junction, reappeared ^[4] . Resuming the frozen construction in 1929, it was declared the “shock task of oncoming navigation” - that is, they set the task to complete it in a year. Indeed, having completed the necessary amount of work on the construction of stations for the shed as early as 1916–1918. the subgrade, the Second port branch, with connections of a total length of 33.5 km, was put into operation on July 30, 1929 ^[1] .

There were open stations Rybatskoe - Post No. 1 - Kupchinskaya - Predportovaya, Preportovaya - Avtovo, Preportovaya - Post No. 2 of the Marine Branch (later developed into a full-fledged Narva station ). At the future station Predportovaya travel development has not yet been. The call on the half-ring from the Main (Moscow) line of the Oktyabrskaya road was carried out through the Slavyanka-Rybatskoye branch, built before the revolution.

In 1930, the Predportovaya station was opened, the Rybatskoye-Kupchinskaya stretch with an overpass over the main line, and Shushary-Kupchinskaya (connecting branch with the Vitebsk line). At about the same time, the highway route appeared - Predportovaya (a connecting branch with the Warsaw line)

Somewhat later, the Srednerogatsky junction was built on the Southern half ring (1937) and the connecting lines Obukhovo - Kupchinskaya, Shushary - Srednerogatskaya, Srednerogatskaya - Highway and Predportovaya - Ligovo (1940–1941). semicircles with Pulkovo highway tram line was continued from the Middle Slingshot to the intersection with overpasses in front of the highway station.

In 1941, with the release of the Germans at Pulkovo Heights, the southern sections of the Semi-Ring Line, opposite Pulkovo, were turned into one of the defensive lines. Assumptions that at the same time the southern branch itself was dismantled to such an extent that the site had to be restored again, and thus “during the 20th century. the line was built three times ” ^[1] , do not rely on facts. On the contrary, the southern line actively participated in the defense of the city not only passively (like a mound for the erection of pillboxes), but also actively. In particular, armored trains were sent over it - railroad anti-aircraft artillery batteries ^[5] . Three firing positions g. The artillery was located in the port: on the 12th way of the entrance of the Pioneer plant, in the 4th deadlock of the 3rd park and in the deadlock next to the Refrigerator ^[5] .

At present, the line is completely electrified and has the route Rybatskoe - Kupchinskaya - Srednerogatskaya - Predportovaya - Avtovo ( Narvskaya ). The Kupchinskaya station passes the border of St. Petersburg and St. Petersburg - Vitebsk regions serving the Oktyabrskaya Railway .

The Rybatskoye station connects the branch with the Vologda and Murmansk directions , as well as with the Moscow branch through the nearby Obukhovo station . The Kupchinskaya and Srednerogatskaya stations are connected to the Vitebsk direction (heir to the first Tsarskoselsky country in the country) through the Shushary large sorting station . Srednerogatskaya and Predportovaya stations are connected to the highway station on the Luga direction. The Predportovaya station also has a connection with the Ligovo station , which belongs to the Baltic direction, and on which the directions towards Sosnovy Bor and the Ivangorod-Narva border station are divided. Both of these lines also have access to the new port of Ust-Luga and the Ust-Luga railway hub recently built with it ^[6] , intended for unloading and duplication of the St. Petersburg port and hub.

• The economic situation of Russia on the eve of the Great October Socialist Revolution. Part 2. / A.L. Sidorov (resp. Editor). - M. – L .: Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1957. - p. 224. - 656 p.
• Kritsky, S.V. The history of the construction of the southern half ring of the Petersburg railway junction (Neopr.) . Historical aspects of science and technology . News of PGUPS 2015/3 (2015). The appeal date is July 29, 2018. Archived July 29, 2018.

• North Port Branch
• St. Petersburg railway junction
• Railways of St. Petersburg
• Kiev Southern Railway Half Ring