I issued a translation of the work of Mertens, who has a number of works on the history of Russian railways, as an appendix to the Bulletin of Communications. The editors mean to give the readers of the Bulletin a complete and valuable study on the history of Russian transport in connection with the economic development of the country. There is undoubtedly a lack of this kind of consolidated work in Russian railway literature, which has been exciting in recent decades and brought to a relatively very recent date, and the Editors hope, by releasing this book, to fill this gap.