Circum-Baikal Railway

The Circum-Baikal Railway was built in 1896–1905 and closed the Trans-Siberian mainline: 260 kilometres of track from Irkutsk to Mysovaya station along the edge of the Baikal shore. The stretch at the foot of the Olkhinskoye plateau ranks among the most demanding railway projects of its time; on 13 October 1905 the line officially opened. Its fate is paradoxical: in 1956 traffic on the first seventy-two kilometres from Irkutsk was stopped, and two years later the embankment was flooded by the Irkutsk hydro reservoir — the road became a dead end. But that is what saved it: the eighty-kilometre stretch from Baikal station to Kultuk was declared a state-protected historic and architectural monument. Today the Circum-Baikal is an open-air museum: tunnels bearing the dates and names of their builders, retaining walls, galleries, viaducts. On weekends a retro train runs here, but the best impressions come on foot or by bike, between portals, with the blue of Baikal beyond the embankment.