M58 highway (Russia)
R297 is the name of a Russian Amur highway in Siberia and the Russian Far East. It leads to a total length of 2165 km from Chita to Khabarovsk mostly along the eponymous river Amur.
The Amur Mainline is the last stretch of the transcontinental Russian road connection from Moscow to Vladivostok. Until the release of the street the Russian territories on the Pacific coast only by airlines and the Trans-Siberian Railway and the Baikal - Amur Mainline were connected to the rest of the country.
Together with the A370 Ussuri (formerly M60) forms the Amur Mainline AH 30 (Chita - Vladivostok ) in Asian Highways Project. The branch line to Blagoveshchensk is part of the AH 31, which continues on the Yellow Sea on Chinese territory (such as G202 ) via Harbin and Shenyang to Dalian.
History
The Council of Ministers of the USSR decided in 1966 to build the road. In the following ten years, the route has been designed and made other preparations. Construction was finally 1978. Until 1995 created 605 of the more than 2,000 kilometers of track. This corresponds to a building speed of 35 kilometers per year. The construction was difficult not only because of financial difficulties, but also by the peculiarities of the terrain. So a large part of the route runs through hitherto completely unexplored areas of the taiga. A total of 26 bridges had to be built. In 2001, the construction was accelerated. A quarter of the budget for road construction funds of the Russian state budget now flowed into the project. The official opening of the road by the Russian President Vladimir Putin took place on 26 February 2004. At this time, the route was passable, but not yet fixed throughout. The asphalting of the entire route was completed on 24 September 2010, with old areas of the route must be again resurfaced due to heavy wear.
The road was renumbered R297 in 2010. Previously, she was at first only the name of the Amur, and later the number M58, which can be used until 31 December 2017 as an alternative.