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 tha ...