sentences:  The railway was built in the late 19th century, when Georgia and Armenia, as well as the recently conquered Kars Oblast, all were parts of the Russian Empire.By the late 1880s, the railway system of Russian Transcaucasia consisted of the mainline from Poti and Batumi on the Black Sea to Tiflis (now Tbilisi) to Baku on the Caspian Sea, ran by the Transcaucasian Railway.An on-site study of the future railway route from Tiflis to Alexandropol (now Gyumri) to Kars was initiated in the spring of 1894 by the Imperial Ministry of Communications and the management of the Transcaucasian Railway.