Managing Bottlenecks: The Trans-Siberian Railway Principle

Managing Bottlenecks: The Trans-Siberian Railway Principle

How you handle a bottleneck affects the rest of the system. Clearing the most visible constraint at any cost can move the problem elsewhere. Some constraints are easier to plan around than others.

The construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway (TSR) illustrates how an expedient response to a shortage can create later costs. Part of managing a bottleneck is anticipating those consequences.

The TSR was a massive undertaking. Not only is it the longest railway in the world, but the challenges in building over that distance were unmatched at the time. The railway spans the entirety of Russia from Saint Petersburg in the west, close to Finland, to Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan just east of North Korea.

As W. Bruce Lincoln describes in The Conquest of a Continent, there were multiple challenges to building the TSR:

Construction crews would have to work thousands of miles away from their bases of supply. Rails and bridge iron would have to be brought to Siberia from foundries as far away as St. Petersburg and Warsaw, ties would have to be cut in European Russia and shipped across the Urals because almost no hardwoods grew in the steppe or the taiga, and stone for bridge piers and abutments would have to be transported from quarries on the western frontier of Mongolia. Then, as the tracklayers moved deeper into Siberia, terrain and climate would magnify the obstacles. Then endless forest, the gorges cut from solid rock, the mountains of the Transbaikal, the treacherous permafrost, the short winter days, and the deep, deep Siberian cold all presented obstacles on a scale that the world’s builders had yet to face.

Given the scope of the undertaking—9,458 kilometers, two to three times longer than the transcontinental railways that had been built in North America at the time—it’s not surprising that addressing a bottleneck could have far-reaching consequences.

One critical point about bottlenecks is they can move around systems. You fix one only to introduce another. In The Chip, T. R. Reid gives an example of shifting a bottleneck that threatened an entire system. He describes a textile factory that started falling far behind its normal production rate. To figure out what was going on, the factory manager followed the output process on the production floor. They found the employees constantly had to rethread their sewing machines because a cheaper thread they’d bought kept breaking. To save fifteen cents per spool, they were losing $150 per hour in production output.

The TSR was a complex undertaking, so attempts to alleviate a bottleneck could easily cause unanticipated consequences. Problems beset the project. There was a continual shortage of local supplies. There were limits to construction schedules caused by the seasonal weather. The fact that all decisions about the railway had to go through a central committee in Saint Petersburg with a weeks-long communication delay created uncoordinated short-term solutions to problems.

In addition, the deepest lake in the world sits in the middle of the route. Originally the main line stopped on one side of the lake and goods were ferried across to the rail continuation on the other shore. This created a huge physical bottleneck in terms of the movement of goods and people until a track was completed around the lake’s southern shore.

Finally, and perhaps most critically for the actual construction, an extreme shortage of labor created a bottleneck that had significant impacts on the functioning of the other parts of the system.

The railway was built as five separate projects that were worked on simultaneously. One of the consequences of deciding to work this way was that the railroad wasn’t treated as one project when it came to labor. Each of the five projects competed with the others for the same pool of resources.

The desire to shorten the total building time resulted in a trade-off that augmented the labor bottleneck. As Christian Wolmar explains in To the Edge of the World, this construction approach created a competition for resources that, combined with a low local population density, meant there weren’t enough locally available workers. They had to be imported. In order to ease the pressure on the labor bottleneck, skilled workers were imported from all over Europe to work along the length of the TSR. For the eastern section, thousands of workers were brought in from China, Japan, and Korea. And on all parts except the middle section that ran through the Siberian prison camp area, convicts were used in the construction of the track.

The enormous time pressures placed on the men charged with building the railway meant that the labor bottlenecks were often addressed with excessive sums paid to contractors. Thus labor absorbed most of the money available for the project. As Wolmar describes, local peasant contractors were unsupervised, and there was no competitive tendering process. Contractors “often asked for extra payment, once work had begun, as they knew that there was no alternative supplier because the imperative was to get the job done quickly.”

The problem with easing the pressure on the labor bottleneck by subcontracting the work to those without sufficient experience manifested on the train track itself. The incentive for the contractors was to pocket money in the short term. The labor shortage could be solved with money, yet there was only so much funding available. Something had to give. What got sacrificed was safety. “With very little supervision of the work, contractors boosted their profits by skimping on material or building below the required standard, resulting in embankments that were too narrow, insufficient ballast, inadequate drainage and a host of other failings.” To save money on building materials because the labor was so expensive (and the cut directly pocketed by the subcontractor so high), the inclines in many places were too steep and the curves too tight. It was a dangerous railway.

For the TSR, solving the labor shortage created a materials bottleneck because the money used to solve the labor problem meant there wasn’t enough left over to purchase quality materials. The central committee thousands of miles away could not keep up with the demands to solve workmanship and safety issues. They were unable to react fast enough, so the integrity of the track was compromised.

Despite the remarkable achievement of building the TSR, the cost-cutting on materials and the shortening of the route through unsuitable terrain with steep grades and tight corners meant it had problems from the start. Wolmar explains, “Almost as soon as each section of the line was completed, improvements had to be made to ensure it was functioning properly.” Even with the sustained effort, the locomotives wore out quickly, goods were shipped painfully slowly, and accidents and deaths occurred all the time.

Spending money without quality assurance only moves problems into the future. Russia effectively had to build the same railroad multiple times because the first track was almost unusable.

On a project with the scope of the TSR, bottlenecks are inevitable. Identifying them and planning how to manage them is part of the process of construction. The lesson here is to be careful how we address bottlenecks so that we don’t create huge problems for ourselves later on.

Often when we encounter a bottleneck, we patch it over, and it bounces back to being a bottleneck again. On the TSR, the money used to solve the labor shortage also created incentives to keep that shortage going. Throwing money at the problem without understanding the system is unlikely to yield the intended benefits.

Alongside immediate fixes, investigate why a constraint keeps recurring. Simulating likely conditions can reveal shortages before they become urgent. A redesign may remove a recurring problem, but another constraint can still limit the system, so monitoring remains part of the work.