The idea of an Arctic railway across Western Siberia is older than the current project. Between 1947 and 1953, the Soviet Union built the Salekhard-Igarka Railway, a gulag labor project that pushed rail across the tundra using forced labor. The line was never completed. Parts of it remained in use for years, including a ferry over the Ob River and, during winter, seasonal tracks laid directly on river ice. By the early 2000s, the western sections had become unusable. In 2003 the Yamal Railway Company was founded to plan a replacement. Two years later, industrial development in the region spurred the creation of the Ural Industrial-Ural Polar initiative, and the name Northern Latitudinal Railway appeared for the first time. The ghost of the Stalin-era line haunted the new project from the beginning, not least because both routes crossed the same unforgiving terrain.

The NLR's timeline reads like a catalog of deferred promises. Originally projected for completion by 2015, budget shortfalls pushed the date to 2018, then to 2022, then to 2023. The project cost was estimated at 239 billion rubles. It drew an unlikely cast of backers: Gazprom, Russian Railways, the regional government, and even Deutsche Bahn, which signed a cooperation agreement in 2011. That same year, the Russian Ministry of Finance ruled the broader Ural Industrial-Ural Polar project too expensive. Undeterred, the Czech company OHL ZS pledged 1.95 billion euros, backed by Czech bank financing of 1.5 billion euros. Design documents for the Salekhard-Nadym section were ready by 2014. The full project was approved in March 2015. A bridge over the Nadym River opened its automobile section that September. And then, in November 2022, the government suspended the entire project in favor of expanding rail eastward.

The railway's strategic logic is hard to argue with. More than 90 percent of Russia's natural gas comes from the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. The region also produces 12 percent of Russia's oil. The NLR would connect these resources to the Northern and Sverdlovsk Railways, linking the Yamal Peninsula to European Russia's industrial facilities and ports while freeing capacity on the overburdened Trans-Siberian Railway. The projected traffic volume at completion was 24 million tons annually, mostly gas condensate and petroleum cargo. An eastern extension to the port of Dudinka would interface with the Norilsk railway, one of the northernmost rail lines on Earth, and open access to 15 oil and gas fields in the Vankor cluster and the Vostok Oil project.

Engineering in the Arctic presents challenges that no amount of political will can override. The Salekhard-Nadym section, stretching 353 kilometers, was designed with reinforced concrete sleepers, which violated permafrost construction standards, a technical misstep that signaled how poorly the tundra's demands were understood. Temperatures in the region can plunge below minus 50 degrees Celsius. The ground is permanently frozen to great depth, but warming temperatures are making that permanence less reliable. Building rail infrastructure on permafrost that may not remain permanent is a problem without a clean engineering solution. Meanwhile, competing priorities kept diverting attention: in December 2015, the regional government opted to pursue the Bovanenkovo-Sabetta railway instead, linking gas fields directly to an Arctic port rather than to the broader network.

If completed, the Northern Latitudinal Railway would connect the two northernmost railways in the world: the Norilsk railway and the Obskaya-Bovanenkovo Line. It would link two of Siberia's great navigable rivers, the Ob and the Yenisei. It would tie the Arctic to the Northern Sea Route, whose ice-free summer seasons are growing longer. Proponents envision up to 3 million tons of coal and 5 million tons of oil exported annually from northern Krasnoyarsk Krai, creating 4,000 jobs. The railway's suspended status does not mean it is dead. Russian strategic planning documents continue to reference it, though often in scattered, contradictory terms. The Ministry of Finance, Russian Railways, and Arctic development programs each describe the corridor differently. For now, the Northern Latitudinal Railway exists most vividly on planning maps, a dotted line across the tundra connecting a vision of the future to the frozen reality of the present.