The first railway track was built in Russia in 1837 between Saint-Petersburg and Tsarskoye Selo. The Trans-Siberian Railway connecting Moscow and European Russia with the Russian Far East provinces, Mongolia, China's Manchuria and the Sea of Japan was built between 1891 and 1916. Both infrastructure and rolling stock suffered extreme loss during WWI. In the Soviet period People's Commissariat of Communications expanded railway network to a total length of 106,100 km by 1940. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union its railway system broke up into national railway systems of various former Soviet republics. In 2003 a vast structural reform was implemented in order to preserve the unity of the railway network and separate the functions of state regulation from operational management.