Russia has revived plans to connect Sakhalin Island to the mainland

Sakhalin Island; source: wikipedia.org

Moscow - Russia has revived plans to connect Sakhalin Island in the Far East to the mainland. The Tatar Strait, which separates the island from the Khabarovsk region, is only seven kilometers wide in some places, which has attracted constructors to bold projects since the late 19th century. The idea of bridging the strait is now returning in the form of a railway bridge.
According to Russian media, the project has been included in long-term plans extending to 2025. Optimists do not rule out the possibility that, compared to the post-war era, the political conditions in the Far East have changed enough that Japan could join in the construction of the bridge.
According to the RIA Novosti agency, the cost of constructing the seventeen-kilometer bridge is estimated at 400 billion rubles (235 billion crowns). The Russian Ministry of Transport has already created a special working group to prepare the project documentation. The railway, which is to be connected to the long-distance Baikal-Amur Mainline, is intended to connect the village of Selichino in the Khabarovsk region with the Nysh railway station on Sakhalin. The project is also expected to include a terminal for the transfer of cars from the broad-gauge Russian railway to the narrower Japanese standard.
In the early 1950s, one of the projects to connect the mainland with Sakhalin was initiated by the Bolshevik dictator Joseph Stalin. The Soviet generalissimo wanted to link the island to the mainland with a ten-kilometer tunnel through which supplies of weapons and ammunition would flow to Sakhalin after World War II. About 27,000 prisoners from the Gulag camp system were called in to build it, who constructed the first kilometers of the broad-gauge railway on the western, mainland side of the strait under inhumane conditions and strict secrecy. After Stalin's death in 1953, construction work ceased, and since 1973, a ferry has connected Sakhalin with the mainland.