of Imperial Russia was the famous Amur rail bridge near Khabarovsk that was also designed by Professor Proskouriakov. The bridge was constructed as a long steel structure that carried a single railroad track. Opened for traffic on 5 October, 1916 the bridge marked the completion of Trans-Siberian Railroad. Similar to the Yenisei bridge, the piers of the Amur bridge had massive buttresses pointing upstream and designed as inclined planes toward the current for the purpose of preventing ice from piling up against the piers. The height of the bridge from the upper deck to the maximum water surface elevation reached . It allowed larger ships to pass underneathl even at the highest summer water level in the Amur. The bridge cost the Russian treasury more than 13 million roubles that was an awful lot of money in that time. Proskouriakov was a strong proponent of the graphical method (or the dummy load method) for truss analysis that was based on the theory of influence lines. In the period 1891-1892, Proskouriakov held practical classes on the application of graphical statics in civil engineering. It is particularly remarkable that two years later the course became a mandatory subject in the training programme for railway engineers. In 1896, when designing the bridge across the Kotorosl River, Proskouriakov first introduced special tables used for the calculation of bearing strength (load-carrying capacity) for bridge builders. Both the theory of influence lines and the tables introduced by Proskouriakov eased a procedure of truss analysis. Since then, they have eventually become ingrained in bridge engineering practises around the world. Education activities Proskouriakov was also a prominent educator and mentor of youth. He trained many talented scientists and engineers. His colleagues and apprentices, such as E.O.Paton, M.M.Filonenko-Borodich, I.P.Prokofiev, P.A.Velikhov, P.Y.Kamentsev subsequently became nationally famous scientists. The educational principles of the engineering mechanics program developed by Prof. Proskouriakov are now widely used by higher education. In 1902, Proskouriakov published his first volume of structural mechanics that was titled Strength of Materials. Later, in 1907, he also published the second volume, named Structural Statics, as well as his scientific work The Methods for the Analysis of Continuous Truss Bridges. Those works have been included into the golden fund of science. His two-volume handbook went through six editions during his lifetime. The seventh edition was published posthumously, and it has become a textbook for all technical institutes of the country. See