17 engineers, some of whom were previously involved in railway construction in England. About 1800 workers were involved first and were then reinforced by 1400 soldiers. Aiming to promote the railways, the train terminal of Pavlovsk was built as an entertainment center. It regularly hosted evening festivities with invited celebrities, such as concerts of Johann Strauss II in 1856. The line was straight, with a slight downhill slope toward St. Petersburg and had 42 bridges. The bridges were mostly wooden and long, with one stone bridge long. Apart from the wide rail spacing of , the structure was regular, with long wooden ties separated by , resting on a layer of stones and gravel. Rails had a length of , and a weight of , . While the line near Tsarskoye Selo was completed in 1836, the steam locomotives had not arrived yet, and the work near St. Petersburg was delayed by land purchasing problems. Therefore, in order to test the road, first two two-carriage trains were pulled by horses on the Sundays of 27 September and 4 and 11 October 1836. The journey of about 4 kilometers between Tsarskoye Selo and Pavlovsk was taking 15 minutes. Test trips with steam locomotives started in November 1836 on a long section between Pavlovsk and the village of Bolshoe Kuzmino. Gerstner conducted those tests himself, with more than a hundred trips in the first week, and was mostly preoccupied with not hitting the wondering crowds of people who arrived to watch the curiosity. Passengers on one of those trips were NicholasI and his family. These tests demonstrated that the line could be operated through the Russian winter, proving the skeptics wrong. Operation The first regular train left St. Petersburg on 30 October 1837 and in 35 minutes arrived in Tsarskoye Selo. This train of eight carriages was pulled by a steam locomotive, and its arrival was observed by numerous noble guests, including NicholasI. Regular service started in January 1838. Between January and April 1838, most trains were pulled by horses, and steam locomotives were used only on Sundays and public holidays. Beginning in April, horse power was eliminated, and almost 14,000 passengers were transported during the month. The trains ran without stops between St. Petersburg and Tsarskoye Selo, and beginning in May 1838 were reaching Pavlovsk. All communication was first done by voice and whistle. An optical telegraph was installed in 1838.