Nikolai Osipovich Kraft

Nikolai Kraft

Nikolai Osipovich force ( Russian Николай Осипович Крафт * 1798 in St. Petersburg , † 1857 ) was a Russian railway - engineer and university professor .

Life

Power studied at the Institute of Transport Engineering Corps (later the St. Petersburg traffic engineer University ) with end 1820. He belonged to the Military Engineering Corps and rose to the Major General .

For a transport link between the Volga and Don , Kraft developed a project to build a canal with locks between the Ilowlja and Kamyshinka rivers .

In 1836 Kraft became a lecturer at the St. Petersburg University of Transportation Engineering. 1839-1840 he was sent together with Pavel Petrowitsch Melnikow to the USA to study the local railway system. In 1841 Melnikow and Kraft submitted their 664-page report Technical Description of the Railways of the North American States , which was then published in sections by the traffic magazine. Kraft and Melnikow participated in the elaboration of the technical project St. Petersburg – Moscow railway (1842–1851) and created a cost plan. Melnikov convinced Tsar Nicholas I to start building this railway line, the Nikolaibahn , which was then carried out by Kraft, the engineer Dmitri Ivanovich Schurawski and Melnikow. This railway was the first long-distance railway in Russia, the construction of which Kraft directed from 1852 to 1855.

Together with Melnikow, Kraft developed methods for the construction of railway embankments in swampy terrain and technical regulations for their project planning, the superstructure , the artificial systems and the train stations . He justified the expediency of the applied gauge of five feet, which now became standard in the Russian Empire.

literature

• WS Wirginski: The development of the railway in Russia since the beginning of the 1940s of the 19th century . Moscow 1940 (Russian).
• SM Schitkow: Biographies of the traffic engineers . St. Petersburg 1889 (Russian).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Franz Anton Ritter von Gerstner : Early American Railroads (Franz Anton Ritter von Gerstner's Die inner Communicationen ) (1842–1843). Stanford University Press , 1997, pp. 18, 30.
2. ^ John Decker: Russia and Our Early Railroads (accessed April 5, 2016).
3. ^ William Benton Whisenhunt, Norman E. Saul (Ed.): New Perspectives on Russian-American Relations . Routledge , New York City 2016, ISBN 978-1-138-91623-4 , ISBN 978-1-315-68977-7 , p. 36.
4. ^ History of Transsib (accessed April 5, 2016).
5. ↑ Sergei Nikitin: A Cathedral of the Modern Age ( Memento of the original from April 6, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . The Moscow Times August 10, 2001 (accessed April 5, 2016).