Автор включает материалы мониторингов разных областей работы железных дорог СССР, публикуемых на страницах газеты «Гудок», в круг исторических источников по истории железных дорог Западной Сибири и объясняет, почему это возможно. Анализируется и объясняется появление мониторингов работы железных дорог на страницах печати, проводится их классификация и указывается место в них железных дорог Западной Сибири. Автор показывает, как можно использовать материалы мониторингов при освещении истории железнодорожного транспорта региона.

Observation of any parameters and organizing a corresponding rating is a means of clarifying the level of implementation of measures taken. The article analyzes the materials of the monitoring of different areas of work of the USSR railways published in the newspaper Gudok, introduces the historical sources on the history of the railways of Western Siberia. It is determined that public monitoring was published in Gudok, a newspaper of the Ministry of Railways of the USSR and the Central Committee of the Trade Union of Railway Transport and Construction Workers of the USSR, in 1966-1984. In the latter case, the unit of time was usually a quarter. The article analyzes and explains the appearance of the monitorings of the operations of railways in the press, classifies them and explains the place of the railways of Western Siberia in this classification. The study of the monitoring showed the following. Firstly, during the 1960s-1980s nearly twenty monitorings on the railway network of the USSR were made. They were made in 1966-1986, during the heyday of the so-called "stagnation". The article shows the place the railways of Western Siberia occupied in the network of the USSR railways. Since the second half of the 1970s the number of monitorings decreased. Secondly, the subject of monitorings was technological issues, but not issues of the financial work of the country's roads, though the reform of 1965 and measures to develop it brought attention of workers to the financial questions. Thirdly, monitorings were generally short-run. The longest (over 10 years) were 2 monitorings, and 4 monitorings lasted for about 9 years each. Fourthly, rating reports generally showed the mediocre organization of work of the railroads of Western Siberia in the context of the USSR road network. This obviously did not correspond to the high load in the network and the growing volume of transportation work with the deterioration of the quality of the material and technical bases. Fifthly, the USSR roads had no stable leaders; there was an intense competition for leadership in the conditions of the growing volumes of transportation. It showed great opportunities for the system which it (the system or, more precisely, its adepts) was not able to develop. The representativeness feature of the given historical source is that it has no alternative source to verify it. The author shows how the content of monitorings can be used in covering the history of rail transport in the region.