MOSCOW — A white elephant railway line running more than 2,000 miles through the Siberian wastes was given a final touch Friday as engineers finished boring a tunnel they began some 25 years ago.
The Severomuisky tunnel is part of the 2,100-mile Baikal-Amur railway, one of the former Soviet Union's most grandiose building projects. It was built on and off from the 1930s to 1984 but lost money and was widely seen as a waste of time.
President Vladimir Putin sent a message of congratulations to the builders after they had finished boring from each side of the tunnel and met in the middle. The nine-mile tunnel straightens a kink in the line, avoiding a 120-mile diversion.
"The difficulties which were encountered during the laying of the tunnel could sometimes not be solved even by the most modern technology. But people continued working and brought the project to a close," the president said in a statement.
The tunnel took so long due to bad planning as workers blasted their way through rock only to find themselves being flooded by water, which was in some areas freezing cold and in others scalding hot from geothermal activity.
BAM runs from the town of Taishet, east of the northern tip of Lake Baikal, the world's deepest fresh water lake, to the Pacific port of Sovietskaya Gavan.
It was seen as a more secure alternative to the Trans-Siberian, completed in 1916, which runs from Moscow to Vladivostok. BAM is more northerly and further from the Chinese border.
Building began in the 1930s and was carried on using labor from the notorious Gulag camps. Construction ended during World War II but began again when Soviet chief Leonid Brezhnev made it a top priority in 1974.
This led thousands of young people to leave for Siberia to conquer the wilderness.
BAM made losses from the day it was finished. The planned mines and towns which were to develop the natural resources under the Siberian permafrost were never built, so there was little or no freight for trains to carry.
Russia's Railway Ministry said it was pleased the tunnel was completed and hoped freight would rise to 20 million tonnes a year in about five years or more.
"This will gradually lower and eventually eliminate BAM's losses and bring jobs to the region," it said in a statement.