Siberia to tranship from water to rail at Tiumen, and to go from there direct to European Russia. Early in the last half of the nineteenth century the great trans-continental line began to be talked about. The earlier projects aimed at the extension of the then existing line from Tiumen eastward across the continent. This route would have traversed mainly forested lands, and would have left the fertile black earth zone far to the south. It was then proposed to carry the line from Orenburg across the Kirghiz steppes and the Akmolinsk province to the Altai foothills, and thence across the southern part of the Yenisei Government near Minusinsk. Although this route would have tapped the most fertile tracks in the whole of Siberia, there would have been considerable difficulty in taking the line across certain outlying ridges of the Altai system. Nor would its strategical value have been as great as that of a direct line to the far eastern territories, where Russia's political prestige was known at the time to be in danger. The last project, which was ultimately adopted, proposed to take the railway from Ufa in European Russia across the Urals, through Chelyabinsk and Kurgan across the rich steppe of south-western Siberia into the pastoral zone of Omsk and the Baraba steppe. From the Irtish and Obi watershed it was proposed to carry the line north-westward, skirting the foothills of the Altai, and so make a direct course across the Yenisei Government eastward to Lake Baikal.
While this plan obviated construction through difficult country by keeping the line on level or undulating ground, it had no inconsiderable disadvantage in the fact that it left a large tract of fertile
