New High-Speed Rail to Connect Russian Cities

Russia has approved the construction of the country’s first high-speed passenger railway that will more than halve traveling time between its two largest cities—Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Construction of the 679-kilometer (421-mile) railroad is expected to be completed by March 2028, and will be funded with billions of dollars from the state budget. It will be built by Russian company VSM Two Capitals. The cost of the high-speed rail line is estimated at 2.3 trillion rubles ($25.97 billion), according to Reuters.

The new high-speed train will run every 10 to 15 minutes and will be able to carry up to 460 passengers. The route will cut travel time between the two cities from 5 hours 35 minutes, to 2 hours 15 minutes, according to Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister for Transport Vitaly Savelyev.

Talks to construct a high-speed passenger railway between Moscow and St. Petersburg began decades ago, before the collapse of the Soviet Union and during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency. In 1991, the former leader issued a decree on the railway line’s creation, but this was canceled in 1998 and the project was frozen.

Savelyev has hailed the railway as “the project of the century for Russia,” which will ensure the country makes “a big leap toward technological sovereignty,” Russian newspaper Kommersant reported.

Russia will acquire “new competence in railway construction and mechanical engineering, to ensure a qualitatively new level of mobility and life for the citizens of our country,” Savelyev said.

State-owned Russian Railways said that it projects passenger flow on the Moscow-St. Petersburg high-speed line will be about 23 million people per year by 2030.

“The Moscow-St. Petersburg high-speed railway will become the first high-speed railway in Russia and is the first stage in creating a high-speed network railway communication,” Russian Railways said. The company added that about 30 million people, or 20 percent of the Russian population, live in the zone of the Moscow-St. Petersburg high-speed rail.

“The construction of high-speed rail will have a long-term positive effect on GDP growth, will save time, will provide comfort and safety of movement tens of millions of passengers annually, [and] will create more than 250,000 jobs,” the railway company said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin in February said that the project “should become the first, starting stage in the development of high-speed rail traffic in Russia.”

According to Kommersant, there are future plans to expand the high-speed railway to include destinations such as Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Ekaterinburg, Voronezh, Rostov-on-Don, Smolensk, Ryazan, and even Minsk, the capital of neighboring Belarus.

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