vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #163 / Business / Reading article...

The world's longest railroad extends its conspicuously wide gauge from Nakhodka to Brest, into and out of all the former republics of the Soviet Union. It threads its northern extremity into Finland and it winds its way down into the Asian steppes of Mongolia, right up to the Chinese border.

Its tracks run right off the dock at the eastern ocean port of Vanino and onto the Sakhalin ferry, whose decks carry container flats and hopper cars to the isolated island across the Tatarsky Strait. But there, a matter of a few meters into the Sakhalin port of Kholmsk, the world's longest railroad runs into a big, bleak building and comes to a mysterious halt, stopping just a few hundred-odd kilometers short of its logical objective, the industrial and commercial center of Sakhalin, the island's capital city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. But why?

There are at least three separate, unrelated railroads on the island of Sakhalin, none of them compatible with the rest of the Soviet railroad. There is a dilapidated railroad in the northern third of the island, built long ago to service the logging industry, left to decay into useless oblivion. Then there is a delightful little children's railroad running the perimeter of the city park in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, carrying its contented passengers on a happy tour through the trees.

The main railroad, though, was built by the Japanese during their occupation of the lower half of Sakhalin Island for the 40 years from the Russo-Japanese War to the end of World War II. Faced with the prospect of having to widen hundreds of kilometers of perfectly usable -- if narrow -- track, the powerful Ministry of Railroads decided to do the only logical thing: It built a rail wheel changing facility at the port of Kholmsk. Now, railcars arrive on the ferry and roll right into the mysterious dark building on the dock, where they are lifted off the track and affixed with sets of Japanese-gauge wheels.

Though its gauge may be different, Sakhalin's railroad remains as vital to the island's welfare as the Trans-Siberian Railroad is to the rest of Russia. And so, in case you might wonder why the cost of railroad transportation is so high on the island of Sakhalin, remember that in addition to the cost of maintaining a specialized rail ferry system from the mainland, the Sakhalin Railroad authority has to contend with the upkeep of this costly wheel-change operation, along with the maintenance of miles of endemic track and a fleet of specially designed narrow-gauge locomotives.

Andrew Wilson is the general director of Links Sakhalin, Ltd., and the president of Global Inroads, Inc. He has been living and working in the Russian Far East for six years.