First weekend of ‘official’ winter in Yakutsk sees ice ...

Rushing Through

Emerald fields and glossy rivers sped by in seconds through the plexiglass window as the gentle rumble of steel against steel filled the atmosphere. Dmitri Ivanov might have been a former President of the Federation, but here he was just any other citizen, one amongst thousands trying to get from St. Petersburg to the capital. Except, of course, most normal citizens wouldn't have a security detail travelling with them, nor a private railcar all to themselves. Dmitri chuckled breathily. The two guards which sat next to him were stiff and far too uptight. He hardly thought any terrorist or assassin would get him here of all places.
Sipping from a cup of water, the ex-President elected to turn his attention to the daily paper instead. Flipping through pages about sport tournaments, celebrity gossip, and daily goings-ons of the Kremlin, he reached the opinion column - always an interesting read. He supposed it gave people a different perspective, though he thought them slightly too hackish and partisan for his palate, especially in foreign news.
Ah. At the top of the page, in bold capital letters, was printed the words "THE GOVERNMENT CONTINUES TO BACKPEDAL ON POINT ONE", prompting a heaving sigh to escape Ivanov's lips. Always back to the Samara Manifesto, and to the one thing he hadn't had time to do. He had seen such headlines pop up since the winding months to the end of his term, but even Novitolsky's new promises couldn't stop a flood of complaints, threats, and demands. The people most hopeful had their dreams dash; they were furious, and the results showed - the CPRF had made huge gains in the presidential election.
For its inflammatory title, the piece did make a good point. The infrastructure of Russia was still not up to what it could be, and after decades of crying out for change, perhaps they were right to be outraged. Still, they didn't understand the pains of governing and the labyrinthine puzzle of politics. Sacrifices had to be made, compromises agreed on, and attention placed elsewhere. At the very least, his cabinet had authorized extra funding to maintenance and upgrades for publicly owned infrastructure such as roads - it wasn't anything extraordinary, but it was a far cry from Putin's regime.
He tapped the shoulder of one of his guards. "Alexei, remind me to set up a meeting with the President when we return to Moscow, please." The guard nodded in a jerking motion. "Good." Ivanov made a mental note to remind Novitolsky of his campaign promises, and bring home for the electorate significant reforms. No doubt he was already planning it.

The Faults In Our Stars

Derelict tracks. Long-abandoned railways. Roads and paths in disrepair. These are all common sights in the Russian Federation, should one look closely. In truth, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, much of the country's infrastructure has been neglected and overlooked, the attention of its leaders diverted to other needs domestic and abroad. Some half-hearted attempts at modernization and expansion have taken place over the years, yet none have succeeded in fully tackling what is slowly moving to become a crisis. Even President Ivanov failed to address the state of Russia's highways, rails, and roads, something promised within the Samara Manifesto and the Russia 2040 program - will President Novitolsky deliver on what he too has pledged?
Vladimir Lenin once said that "communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country." Indeed, despite the Soviet Union's myriad flaws, the state planning of the USSR was able to transform Russia from a barren, disparate, and undeveloped land into a well-connected country with heavy industrial development, electricity in the majority of households, and a large infrastructure network. The total transformation of Russia brought us into the forefront of the world in terms of geopolitics, and enabled us to not only win the Great Patriotic War but also compete with the Yankees in the Cold War. Now, forty years after the fall of the Union, many of the railroads and factories created during its time have fallen silent, even as flashy new projects are shown to the world and wonders bedazzle foreign businessmen; the people of Russia yearn for simple
While Ivanov's pioneering policies in automation, promotion of domestic production, encouragement of development and entrepreneurship, and anti-corruption have spurred a period of economic growth and investment, it seems that this has largely benefitted the middle and upper classes, as well as urban areas, more than it has the rest of the country. This came to haunt Novitolsky as Ivanov's legacy caused a resurgence of the CPRF and LDPR in the presidential vote - an area in which they have never done well compared to their legislative vote. The President recognizes that, for the nation to move forward, all of its citizens must too move forward.

Developing the Means

The programs implemented by Ivanov's government to promote innovation and technological advancement were successful in the development of breakthroughs in the fields of automation and machine learning, feeding into the creation of autonomous manufacturing complexes and the Industry 4.0 project. Will the same incentives, grants, and reward programs succeed in revolutionizing transport and transport infrastructure? Perhaps, perhaps not - but we must try to find out. The Center for Industrial Innovation (TPI) will be expanded significantly in size - with up to approximately 60% more employees hired - and have a proportionally upscaled budget to boot. The TPI will have new responsibilities to handle, namely a series of government programs to encourage innovation in making transport by any but especially roads and rail transport means more efficient, cost-effective, and rapid.
We will first aim to experiment on the theoretical most efficient conventional high speed railway, in terms of costs, power, and speed. Obviously, we will not directly apply these findings to real life - the volatility and fickleness of reality would certainly unwittingly doom one train full of passengers or precious goods to a catastrophic disaster of some sort. Instead, the TPI will hand out grants to companies, researchers, and research institutes to model and test various different settings to compile data, which will be sent back to the TPI and collected in a database. This information will be made accessible to all companies and researchers across the nation, and further reward and grant programs will be established to entities which produce a prototype system of high speed rail transport which performs well in the fields of safety, reliability, speed, cost, and energy efficiency, in both digital and theoretical models and real-world tests. Any improvements on the current inventions HSR system will be accepted, as long as they fulfill the requirements - whether that be by improving the train bodies themselves, changing the tracks or how they are placed, or otherwise other technologies as applied to this goal. $2 billion USD will be set aside for funding the TPI’s policies in incentivizing innovation in this field, to be distributed in grants and bounty programs for companies who make breakthroughs in this field.
Scientists and engineers alike at the various institutions of research and at the most prestigious universities will, in conjunction with the R&D departments of major rail companies and other businesses, also be incentivized to work towards a prototype of the famed vactrain or vacuum train. This long-fabled hypersonic railway, with its roots in concepts and blueprints dating back to 1799, would allow trains to travel at speeds up to 8,000 kilometers per hour - an astronomical speed compared to current standards, to say the very least. Such vacuum trains would rely on the usage of tubes, tunnels, and other self-contained passages which are vacuum sealed. This would reduce air resistance substantially, possibly to the point of being negligible. The trains themselves would use magnetic levitation rather than conventional locomotion, which would completely remove the factor of drag from friction between the train and the tracks - the tracks are nonexistent. This hypersonic type of travel has been on the minds of many for decades, from engineers ecstatic to overcome the hurdle of air resistance and revolutionize transportation to investors who see the massive potential for profits in the vactrain system. However, never until now has it seen such direct investment in and support from a governmental body like the TPI - it was seen as frivolous, farfetched, and economically unviable. We, however, see the possible futures that such a revolutionary development could create. The enormous distances between cities finally defeated; travel times cut from days to hours, and from hours to minutes. However, we do recognize the importance of economic viability - we will also encourage studies into the cost-effectiveness of such a project, and weigh the advantages with the disadvantages. All in all, we will invest USD$3 billion into research in vactrain technology and accompanying tech, in the same manner as detailed above.
Finally, we will apply that which we learned and innovated in the TPI's program to incentivize AI and deep learning research, as well as autonomous vehicles, to the field of transport. As detailed in the last post, our research into autonomous transport on the micro-scale in or between factory complexes will help us gain insight on developing safe and effective driverless cars, trucks, and even trains. The aim of this, of course, will be to begin the automation of transporting freight and goods across the country. However, we must also be aware of the disastrous effect this could have on those employed in the trucking and rail industries moving cargo, and thus pursue this goal in a cautious manner. We will approach it with the concerns of all in mind - the worker, the CEO, the engineer, and the economist. Our focus will be on developing AI algorithms to assist with but not overtake the jobs of train operators, train drivers, and truckers. After this is complete, we will focus our efforts and funding on prototyping a self-driving train with minimal external interference save for orders from a command center which will ensure the train operates normally and respond to any emergency situations. With the existence of autopilot programs, this should not be at all hard. We will invest USD$800 million into developing the infrastructure and algorithms needed to make this functional.

The Future of the Trans-Siberian

The Trans-Siberian Railway is the longest and one of the most famous railways in the world. Stretching more than 9,000 km from Moscow to Vladivostok, it has seen many expansions, improvements, and alterations over the ages from its first construction in 1891. It has seen the fall of the Tsarists, and has outlived the entirety of the Soviet Union. Both today and in the past, it acts as a vital instrument which connects Siberia with the west of Russia, comparable to the carotid arteries in the neck of the human body. Its dual use as both a freight transport link and a passenger rail line has made it doubly important as it controls the flow of both goods and people between the two edges of Russia. More than 30% of Russia's exports travel along the Trans-Siberian; even more importantly in this day and age, it has become a major route for transport of goods between the West and the East in general, not merely by Russian enterprise but by Japanese, Chinese, European, and other companies. It is truly the bridge that binds the continents.
Yet, this mighty railway, which has endured the tests of time and become a monument of Russia's power, has been dwarfed in recent years by more technologically advanced, more rapid, and newer systems of transport in publicity; the Trans-Siberian, while having its passenger form known throughout popular culture, is a silent titan in freight transport. We begin to wonder - should the Trans-Siberian not be in as advantageous a position as it is, if it was not as geopolitically and economically important due to its geography, would it have already been overtaken by other forms of transport? The world has already shifted towards a trend of cargo shipping and large tankers, as well as air travel, rather than conventional trains. We cannot remain complacent, despite the Trans-Siberian remaining very profitable and important. Is that not one of the great boons of capitalism - innovation arising from competition? Our monopoly over this route allows us the liberty to stagnate and to neglect advancement; there is no real competitor as of yet, so to speak. However, it is almost certain there will be soon a service capable of rivalling, nay, outperforming the Trans-Siberian. Before this can become reality, we will move to improve the railway through the implementation of new technologies.
Firstly, a project will be undertaken to fully modernize the Trans-Siberian Railway and accommodate faster speeds for its freight line. Currently, the highest speed cargo-carrying trains travel at on the railway is approximately 100 km/h, and even this is not universal across the entire railway. In ideal terms, this would mean that travel of goods between the western Russian border and the Far East would take approximately seven days - not bad, but not optimal, either. In 2009, we unveiled the "Trans-Siberian in Seven Days" plan. In 2033, perhaps we will unveil the "Trans-Siberian in Five Days" plan, and later even the "Trans-Siberian in Three Days" plan - but that is for the future. A new project will be initiated to allow for all parts of the track to accommodate for speeds up to 105 km/h, with 100 km/h being the target for actual train speed. Tracks will be refitted and rebuilt if needed for safety purposes. We will apply parts of what we learn in our research on the optimal design of a high speed rail system to improve upon the Trans-Siberian, taking into consideration any solutions which are not unique to HSRs but can be used in conventional railways. We expect this to be done by 2035 at the latest.
After this, we will begin the second part of our Trans-Siberian improvement plan. This will be upgrading the entire cargo service to a speed of around 130 km/h, with an average speed of approximately 1,690 km per day. This would make the full journey for freight around 5 and a half days in ideal circumstances, accounting for breaks in active travel for a variety of reasons - legally mandated rest for safety reasons, for instance. Like previously, all the knowledge we have pooled on optimizing rail travel will be applied if possible to make the journey faster, more energy-efficient, and less costly. However, here is where we will also apply another field where we have innovated - two fields, in fact: AI and autonomous transport. Transport times are currently constrained by human limits and concerns over worker safety - these could be removed entirely with the introduction of self-driving trains. As detailed above, we will move towards a system where on-the-ground drivers are replaced with self-driving programs and command center employees for the sake of efficiency - this will hopefully allow us to drive trains indefinitely (so long as we have power) and nearly double our total distance travelled per day. Once completed, this would cut the journey's length in half to three days - a revolutionary speed. We expect the speed improvement to be finished by 2038 and the introduction of self-driving trains to be done by 2040 at the very latest. All of the above improvements and upgrades will be conducted by the state-owned company which owns the railway: Russian Railways.

Regional Connections

Aside from the Trans-Siberian, Russia boosts a robust network of smaller but equally important railways. These connect regional centers and cities, and are an essential enabler of the flow of people between the urban regions of Russia, whether for business, pleasure, or other purposes. However, due to the sheer vastness of Russia, these train journeys can often take upwards of three hours or more for average inter-city travel or more than an hour even for relatively close cities, which has always driven demand for faster yet still cheap rail transport to make our cities more interconnected and convenient for commuters. Our solution? High speed rail.
The various state-owned and private enterprises which own Russia's myriad of railways will be encouraged to slowly switch their conventional tracks with those capable of using high speed rail, and to replace their old railcars with vehicles suitable for HSR use. A government grant program will be established to help this transition, with minor tax subsidies as further incentive for private companies. The state-owned enterprises will simply be directed to begin the switch - one of the boons of having said companies directly controlled by the government. Important will be the designing of said vehicles, which must be far more aerodynamic in shape and have installed various parts such as regenerative brakes which allow for the recouping of energy when braking - though these are no new technologies to the train market.
Existing regional connections such as St. Petersburg to Moscow and Novosibirsk to Krasnoyarsk will be upgraded to HSR lines, significantly reducing travel times. "Clusters" of these high speed lines will be built connecting large cities to surrounding regions - for instance Moscow and cities such as Ryazan or Vladimir - as well as nearby areas outside of the main urban zone but close enough to have significant traffic from commuters going to the large cities for work and taking the trip home every day. Upgrading these railways to HSR will cut commute times and greatly convenience the people living in these areas. Demand for other direct connections between cities and large towns alike will be reviewed and taken into consideration, with the rights to construct and thus own these new lines being fairly auctioned off to private corporations or SOEs. Setting an ambitious goal of finishing these high-demand connections by 2040, projects not auctioned off will be given to local government companies or one of the major rail SOEs to complete. Progress on all of these projects will be tracked to ensure they are worked on at a steady and acceptable rate while also adhering to the standards set out by the administration.

Parts of A Whole

We will then move on to building and improving infrastructure on a smaller scale. These projects might seem less significant on their own, but added together, they will make a momentous difference in the big picture. Our focus will be on building and renovating roads and railways, although we will not be averse to also pursuing energy and electrical infrastructure projects. This, we hope, will bring all of Russia together into the bright future we seek, and regain the trust of the people amongst rural and suburban regions farther away from population centers who feel neglected.
The first project we will undertake is the Comprehensive Rail Development Plan. This plan will involve laying down thousands of miles of track to bring the joys and conveniences of rail transport to even smaller towns. USD$2 billion will be invested into subsidies and direct funding for railway construction, with the rights to construction being once again auctioned off to both private and state-owned corporations. The Department of Transport will draft a detailed plan of all the lines desired, and hopefully the companies will deliver given our incentives. These lines will be small in scale and mostly just connect several towns with a larger urban center, from which passengers can transfer lines to get to other regions. In some areas, freight lines will also be planned to improve towns' access to goods and economic connection with nearby cities, importing goods and exporting products their own industries may have manufactured.
Then, we will proceed to the National Road and Highway Improvement Scheme, which, as the name suggests, will focus on building new roads and highways, as well as repairing, upgrading, and otherwise just modernizing old ones. Unlike the previous project, we will not use any corporations in the process of completing it - not even state-owned enterprises. Work will be directly administered by the federal government, with all labor coming from the new public works department, the Federal Works and Development Program (FEPRA). Workers of FEPRA working on this scheme will be assigned to tasks in their own federal subject and local region as much as possible for the sake of logistics and morale - see “Per Aspera ad Astra” for more details on FEPRA, its operations, and its policies. Below, there will be further elaboration on the role of the FEPRA in other projects listed in this post.

Turn to the Far East

The Far East is Russia's least developed region. A harsh climate, frozen landscape, and infertile land have meant that this vast region, stretching from Lake Baikal to the Pacific Ocean, was historically always sparsely populated and undeveloped. Before the arrival of the Russian Empire, Siberian tribes and clans ruled over small areas of a few villages at most, never having the ability nor drive to unite. Various peoples filled these wastelands, many nomadic. Then, the Tsarist banner was planted on the Far East over a period of decades, and with it came Russian settlers, knowledge of the wider world, and contemporary technology. Yet, even as paved roads and later tracks replaced dirt paths and as forts and towns arose out of tribal settlements, the Far East continued to lag behind - only a few select towns and cities were truly developing to the standards of the West, and the Siberian tundra remained untamed. Even during the rule of the Soviet Union, while the Far East did experience a boom of industrial and infrastructural development, Eastern Siberia would remain a massive, sparsely populated land, with pockets of civilization, especially as urbanization meant that rural and remote areas would not grow.
We will never truly tame the cold of the Siberian winter - it is simply inhospitable to the human body and to the development of civilization. Yet, in this most desolate territory, we still find significant economic potential. Oil, natural gas, minerals, precious gemstones, and other natural resources hide in plain sight, buried just beneath the soil; the mighty ebb and flow of rivers already power hundreds of thousands of people's homes through dams and HEP stations. The Far East, almost paradoxically, is our most valuable geographical possession - it links us to the Pacific Ocean and to the economic opportunities that entails, and it is the land bordering China, another great player on the world stage and a trade partner. Great efforts must be made to invest in infrastructure in this crucial region to not only develop its economy and unleash its potential, but also to secure all of its locational benefits.
A new plan uncreatively dubbed the "Far Eastern Plan" will be drafted with the stated aim of building a robust network of pipelines, highways, and both passenger and freight rail, to bridge the huge gap that spans any two cities in the region. USD$4 billion will be invested into this plan, employing local labor through the FEPRA system for its workforce. As in the National Road and Highway Improvement Scheme, seemingly small but important roads, paths, and highways will be built in accordance with modern standards, and existing roads will be examined, with those not up to these standards renovated - for instance, some dirt paths might be paved if regular foot traffic is relatively heavy through that area compared to others. The track laying, meanwhile, will involve both smaller, localized building of tracks for use by rural and town populations, and large central projects themselves individually more significant. Rights to build these connections will be auctioned off fairly again, with some exceptions for particularly small but strategically important rail lines and the major projects, which will be brought into SOE folds. These projects will include a new Yakutsk-Magadan and Vladivostok-Khabarovsk-Magadan line, both with freight and passenger rail, as well as a high-speed connection between Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, and Vladivostok.
Simultaneously, the ports of Magadan and Vladivostok will be significantly expanded for the growth of Pacific trade. The ports’ capacity for freighters will increase as new and larger wharves are built, and facilities for the transport of cargo such as cranes installed. Existing equipment and machinery will be reviewed and replaced should they not meet standards. Our aim will be to use this increased capacity and better technology to move cargo on and off ships at record speeds for the maximization of efficiency. Companies exporting oil or natural gas to parts of Asia not directly connected with Russia will be encouraged to use tankers through these two ports rather than any intermediary infrastructure in other countries such as China. Speaking of energy exports, new pipelines will be laid to export our excess fossil fuels to neighboring countries, namely both Koreas, Japan, China, and Mongolia. We will propose to the DPRK and ROK the construction of another Trans-Korean Pipeline, providing even more gas for consumers and companies in both countries and lowering costs for both Korean and Russian gas corporations. We will ask that this be a joint venture between Gazprom, KOGAS, and North Korea’s state-owned gas companies.
Sakhalin has always been a point of contention between Russia and Japan, but perhaps we can bridge our differences with, well, a literal bridge. Connecting Hokkaido and the outermost parts of Outer Manchuria in Khabarovsk Krai, we will finish the Sakhalin Tunnel, a project which has laid dormant and incomplete since 2009, while asking the Japanese government to cooperate with us on the construction of a Sakhalin-Hokkaido bridge with highways and railway tracks. Accompanying this will be a new oil and gas pipeline, the Okhotsk-Hokkaido Pipeline, to make the transport of both resources easier and less costly across the two nations. The costs for these projects will be shared between Russia and Japan. Furthermore, we also wish to build a new pipeline, the Manchuria Stream, to connect with China and Mongolia, again cheapening energy transport. Gazprom will cooperate with Mongolian and Chinese companies, with jurisdiction over their respective countries’ parts of the pipeline.

On The Role Of FEPRA

We will make an effort to mobilize the population in this grand infrastructure reform and make use of FEPRA to provide employment to the people. For publicly owned works such as roads and some railways, FEPRA labor and with few exceptions only FEPRA labor will be used to build, replace, and upgrade our transport systems, with our aim being to employ workers from a specific federal subject or area for projects in that area for logistical reasons. However, larger-scale projects which may require workers from outside the federal subject will have offers for workers to stay in temporary residences built on site to house them, in exchange for a minor pay cut (as stated in Per Aspera ad Astra). For projects involving corporations, private or state-owned, FEPRA will act essentially as any other construction company. Whichever corporation is in charge of the project or the part of the project will auction off a contract, in which private construction companies and FEPRA will all compete with each other.

Datamining & Speculations

yakutsk pictures winter video

Pictures: Yakutsk.rf The local icon of winter here is the magnificent blue-coated Chyskhaan, aka the King of the Cold. He was here at the ‘Winter starts in Yakutia’ festival to pass over a special ornament of cold to Grandfather Frost - the Russian Father Christmas. Yakutsk Winter Tour in Winter 2017-2018 Yakutsk Standard Winter City Tour, 1 day Recommended Period. Late November – Early April. Dates. Private City Tour. Any day on request. Special Group Tour Package: 31 Dec 2018 – 03 Jan 2019 – New Year Celebration in Yakutsk. For 4 – 12 people. Check the page w/ description and rates. With temperatures hovering around -40°F in the winter months, life in Yakutsk, Siberia, is dictated by the cold. Low winter sun over a road near Yakutsk, Siberia, former Soviet Union, circa 1970. Yakutsk is four degrees south of the Arctic Circle. Photo taken on November 28, 2018 shows an old traditional wooden house in front of a panel apartment building in the eastern Siberian city of Yakutsk. Search the world's information, including webpages, images, videos and more. Google has many special features to help you find exactly what you're looking for. Yakutsk, in eastern Siberia, is one of the world’s coldest cities, captured during winter by local photographer Alex Vasyliey. Skip to main content. ... the Siberian city of Yakutsk – in pictures Jan 4, 2013 - Explore Jennifer Hailes's board "Coldest place on Earth - Yakutsk, Russia" on Pinterest. See more ideas about Yakutsk, Coldest place on earth, Russia. Next time we’re having a brutal cold snap, think of the poor souls in the coldest city on Earth. Winter temperatures in Oymyakon, Russia, average minus 50 C ( minus 58 F). Scroll through to see amazing pictures of locals having fun, surviving and thriving in the incredibly harsh winter conditions ... A woman smiles in the regional capital of Yakutsk. Main image: Winter in Yakutsk, Russia Fri 18 Dec 2020 02.00 EST Yakutsk has the coldest winter temperatures of any major city, with an average monthly temperature in January of -38.6C

yakutsk pictures winter top

Yakutsk - Verkhoyansk in Winter - Pole of Cold –47°C ...

Walking along the streets of Yakutsk About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features Press Copyright Contact us Creators ... Check my facebook page for more info: https://www.facebook.com/sebastianbalderscoldchaser/I travelled to the coldest place on earth: Verkhoyansk in Yakutia, ... Today's cold winter images of Yakutsk, the capital of Yakutia, Siberia / Russia. November 30th, 2011. I took those pictures this morning and during the lunch... Video by Bert Jicktyhttp://doydu.sakhaopenworld.org/ If you are going to visit Yakutia in winter, be prepared! 🔴 Subscribe to "Life in Yakutia" channel now: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtQtf9JHV6SosfsoDIK... Walking through the city on a cold winter's day in -43C. Siberia winter is colder than cold. On my way to another branch of I Speak English (ISE), Yakutsk, ... Temperatures of minus 40 degrees Celsius mean only the horse farmers and their families stay to endure the winter in the village of Tumul in the Far Eastern ... Якутск. Зимний, ясный день.