Japanese D51 steam locomotives were used by the Soviet Railways until 1979.
Besides the main network run by the Russian Railways, until December 2006 the local oil company (Sakhalinmorneftegaz) operated a corporate narrow-gauge (750 mm) line extending for 228 kilometers (142 mi) from Nogliki further north to Okha (???????????? ???????? ?????? ??? � ???????). During the last years of its service, it gradually deteriorated; the service was terminated in December 2006, and the line was dismantled in 2007�2008.
Air
A passenger train in Nogliki
Sakhalin is connected by regular flights to Moscow, Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, and other cities of Russia. Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk Airport has regularly scheduled international flights to Hakodate, Japan, and Seoul and Busan, Korea. There are also charter flights to the Japanese cities ofTokyo, Niigata, and Sapporo and to the Chinese cities of Shanghai, Dalian, and Harbin. The island was formerly served by Alaska Airlines from Anchorage, Petropavlovsk and Magadan.
Fixed Link Tunnel
The idea of building a fixed link between Sakhalin and the Russian mainland was first mooted in the 1930s. In the 1940s, an abortive attempt was made to link the island via a 10 km long undersea tunnel. The workers supposedly made it almost to the half-way point[citation needed]before the project was abandoned under Nikita Khrushchev. In 2000, the Russian government revived the idea, adding a suggestion that a 40-km-long bridge could be constructed between Sakhalin and the Japanese island of Hokkaid?, providing Japan with a direct connection to the Euro-Asian railway network. It was claimed that construction work could begin as early as 2001. The idea was received skeptically by the Japanese government and appears to have been shelved, probably permanently, after the cost was estimated at as much as US$50 billion.
In November 2008, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev announced government support for
