Athol Yates and Nicholas Zvegintzov · 2001 · overland

A guide to the Baikal-Amur Mainline, the second Trans-Siberian: four thousand three hundred kilometres from Tayshet to the Pacific, begun with camp labour in the thirties, abandoned, restarted as a Komsomol project in 1974, and finished in 1991 into a country that no longer existed.

1. 1
   Tayshet

   The western end, where the BAM leaves the Trans-Siberian - and where the first surveys were run in the thirties, using labour from the camps that gave the line its original workforce.

2. 2
   Bratsk

   The dam and the reservoir, and a town built for the hydroelectric scheme - the BAM crosses the Angara here on a bridge carrying the railway above the road.

3. 3
   Ust-Kut

   Lena station, and the river port that supplies everything north - the point at which the line stops following anything already there and starts crossing country with no roads in it.

4. 4
   Severobaykalsk

   The northern tip of Baikal, and the town Leningrad architects built for the construction crews - and then the Severomuysky tunnel east of it, fifteen kilometres long and twenty-six years in the digging.

5. 5
   Novy Uoyan

   Permafrost country, where the ground thaws under the ballast every summer and the track has to be relaid - the reason the BAM cost what it did and still does.

6. 6
   Taksimo

   The Vitim valley and the end of the electrified section - diesel from here east, and the settlements getting smaller and further apart.

7. 7
   Tynda

   The capital of the BAM, built by Muscovites in the seventies and laid out like a piece of the capital dropped in the taiga - and the junction with the line south to the Trans-Siberian.

8. 8
   Fevralsk

   The Selemdzha crossing, and the long empty middle of the eastern section - Komsomol volunteer brigades were assigned whole towns to build out here, and some of the towns are still half-finished.

9. 9
   Komsomolsk-na-Amure

   The city on the Amur founded in 1932 by young volunteers and, less publicly, by prisoners - shipyards, aircraft plants, and the BAM's largest settlement by a wide margin.

10. 10
    Sovetskaya Gavan

    The Pacific, and the end of the line - four thousand three hundred kilometres from Tayshet, and the reason the whole thing was built: a route to the ocean that runs nowhere near the Chinese border.