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Soviet Union [USSR] Passenger Operations
Since 1975 passenger transportation by train has been second to
bus in terms of total fares boarded. Nevertheless, in 1986 trains
carried more than 4.3 billion passengers, of which more than 3.9
billion were on suburban lines (see
table 42, Appendix A). Suburban
and short-haul passenger volume represented about 90 percent of the
passengers carried by train. In 1985 the railroads ran nearly
10,000 passenger train pairs, about 500 of which were long
distance, another 500 were local (trains not crossing the
boundaries of a given line), and nearly 9,000 were suburban or
other types. During the peak summer season, daily passenger train
traffic increased dramatically, to approximately 19,000 longdistance and 17,000 local trains. To resolve, or at least
alleviate, congestion in the summer, train lengths were increased.
Thus, eighteen-car trains were extended to twenty-four cars on
heavily used lines from Moscow, while in 1986 test trains of
thirty-two cars were run out of Moscow and Leningrad to Simferopol'
in Crimea.
The most important passenger railroads in the mid-1980s were
the Moscow, October, Gor'kiy, Southern, Donetsk, Dnepr, Sverdlovsk,
and Northern Caucasus. These served the Soviet Union's most densely
populated areas. The two most heavily traveled axes were the
Leningrad-Moscow-Donetsk to Crimea or the Caucasus area and the
Moscow to Khabarovsk (8,540 kilometers) and Vladivostok (9,300
kilometers) areas. On the latter axis, most passengers traveled
distances of only 500 to 700 kilometers, rather than the full
length. The seven major passenger rail centers in the European part
of the Soviet Union were in Moscow, Leningrad, Tbilisi, Khar'kov,
Kiev, Simferopol', and Adler; the major center in the Asian part of
the country was at Novosibirsk
(see
fig. 18).
Data as of May 1989
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