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Article: An American railroad man east of the Urals, 1918-1922. (Ural Mountains, Russia)
- Article from:
- The Historian
- Article date:
- June 22, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Phi Alpha Theta, History Honor Society, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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On 11 November 1917, just four days after Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks seized control of the Russian capital, over 200 railroad men in St. Paul, Minnesota, said goodbye to their families and boarded a train for San Francisco. Unlike the many soldiers en route across the country following America's entry into the First World War, they were not headed for France. Instead, they were on their way to the Russian Far East as members of the newly formed Russian Railway Service Corps (RRSC), a unit of experienced railroad men formed to improve operations along the Trans-Siberian Railway, the longest continuous railway on earth. Although they were uniformed similarly to U.S. ...