Kahetian Railway Co. 189 Roubles (Uncanceled) - Russian Railroad Bond

189 Roubles 4 1/2% Uncanceled Bond. Several coupons remain.

Rail transport in Russia runs on one of the biggest railway networks in the world. Russian railways are the third longest by length and third by volume of freight hauled, after the railways of the United States and China. In overall density of operations (freight ton-kilometers + passenger-kilometers)/length of track, Russia is second only to China. Rail transport in Russia has been described as one of the economic wonders of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.

JSC Russian Railways has a near-monopoly on long-distance train travel in Russia, with a 98.6% market share in 2017. Independent long-distance carriers include Grand Service Express TC, Tverskoy Express, TransClassService, Sakhalin Passenger Company, Kuzbass Suburb, and Yakutian Railway.

Russia is larger than both the United States and China in terms of total land area, therefore its rail density (rail tracking/country area) is lower compared to those two countries. Since Russia's population density is also much lower than that of China and the United States, the Russian railways carry freight and passengers over very long distances, often through vast, nearly empty spaces. Coal and coke make up almost one-third of the freight traffic and have average hauls of around 1,500 kilometers, while ferrous metals make up another 10 percent of freight traffic and travel an average of over 1,900 kilometers. Railroads are often key to getting supplies shipped to remote parts of the country as many people do not have access to other reliable means of shipping.

Like most railways, rail transport in Russia carries both freight and passengers. It is one of the most freight-dominant railways in the world, behind only Canada, the United States, and Estonia in the ratio of freight ton-kilometers to passenger-kilometers. However, per head of population intercity passenger travel is far greater than the United States (which has the lowest long-distance passenger train usages in the developed world).

Russia's railways are divided into seventeen regional railways, from the October Railway serving the St. Petersburg region to the Far Eastern Railway serving Vladivostok, with the free-standing Kaliningrad and Sakhalin Railways on either end. The regional railways were closely coordinated by the Ministry of the Means of Communication until 2003, and the Joint Stock Company Russian Railways since then – including the pooling and redistribution of revenues. This has been crucial to two long-standing policies of cross-subsidization: to passenger operations from freight revenues, and to coal shipments from other freight.

The Russian railways were a collection of mostly privately owned and operated companies during most of the 19th century, though many had been constructed with heavy government involvement and financing. The tsarist government began mobilizing and nationalizing the rail system as World War I approached, and the new communist government finished the nationalization process. With the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the Russian Federation was left with three-fifths of the railway track of the Union as well as nine-tenths of the highway mileage – though only two-fifths of the port capacity.

In the 21st century, substantial changes in the Russian railways have been discussed and implemented in the context of two government reform documents: Decree No. 384 of 18 May 2001 of the Government of the Russian Federation, "A Program for Structural Reform of Railway Transport", and Order No. 877 of 17 June 2008 of the Government of the Russian Federation, "The Strategy for Railway Development in the Russian Federation to 2030". The former focused on restructuring the railways from government-owned monopoly to private competitive sector; the latter focused on ambitious plans for equipment modernization and network expansion.

Timeline of railway implementation

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