Stretching over 9,200 kilometers across eight time zones, the Trans-Siberian Railway is the physical spine holding the largest country on earth together. In this episode we explore why a terrified 19th-century Russian Empire, cut off from its own Far East by frozen rivers and muddy footpaths, finally committed in 1891 to building a railway across the most unforgiving terrain on the planet, financed largely by French bankers.

We dig into the ruthless cost-cutting that bypassed the major city of Tomsk, the icebreaking train ferry SS Baikal that was built in England and reassembled on the shores of a landlocked lake, and the rotting wooden ties, soft pine bridges, and narrow embankments that historian Christian Wolmar describes as a corrupt and shoddy disaster. Then we follow the line through the wars it shaped: the single-track bottleneck that doomed Russia in the Russo-Japanese War, the Czechoslovak Legion’s hijacking of the telegraphs during the Civil War, the Nazi rubber supply line, the Holocaust refugees it carried to Vladivostok, and the double-tracked Lend-Lease lifeline of World War II.

• Why Siberia’s north-south rivers and five-month shipping window made the empire desperate for a permanent rail link to the Pacific
• How the SS Baikal was shipped in numbered pieces from Newcastle and how trains were dragged across the frozen lake by horses
• The four million peasant migrants and the wheat boom that forced the Chelyabinsk tariff break, despite the shoddy construction
• How the same track supplied 300 tons of rubber a day to Germany while carrying Jewish refugees away from the Nazis
• The 1993 jurisdictional loophole that created a 24-hour lawless zone on cross-border trains, and today’s 15-day Beijing-to-Hamburg freight route