Time machines

Pereslavl Railway Museum opens unique routes of communication with history

I remember in Soviet times, the dream of all the boys was to get and assemble in their apartment a toy East German (GDR) railway, which was sold piece by piece in the Detsky Mir store (which is now about to be dismantled). Using your imagination, you could create your own travel routes from complex combinations of rails and landscapes laid out on mock-ups. The special relish was that the dream could be seen in all the smallest details and controlled using the remote control. After all, the trailers, steam locomotives, electric locomotives, the houses with tiled roofs that came with the road maintenance kits, the stations were made exceptionally carefully, in all the smallest, living details... And I also remember what my joy was when such a childhood love with a train, a trailer , moving in a magical landscape, I really saw... My parents once brought me, a middle school student, to see the sights of the city of Pereslavl-Zalessky. From the high mountain where the boat of Peter I is kept, a wonderful view of Lake Pleshcheyevo opens up. I was admiring the view, when suddenly a diesel locomotive with two small trailers drove along the coastline, importantly blowing smoke from its chimney. Completely out of a fairy tale and yet completely real. On rails with a child's stride width (500 mm). During a visit to Pereslavl two years ago, even traces of that childhood happiness could not be found. There were no diesel locomotives, no carriages, not even rails the width of a child's step anymore.

Last year, hope for an almost unexpected meeting with the narrow-gauge Pereslavl miracle was given by one of the projects of the competition of the Vladimir Potanin Charitable Foundation “A Changing Museum in a Changing World.” The project was called “Rural Bus” and was presented by the only narrow-gauge railway museum in Russia, created in 1991 ten kilometers from Pereslavl in the building of the locomotive depot and Talitsa station. The project envisaged establishing a connection to the unique museum by improving a new road, along which a retro bus from the pre-war era, specially reconstructed for this purpose, would take the museum along a country highway. Last weekend, a project supported by the Potanin Foundation with a new road and rural bus opened for the public.

According to the rules of road development of the middle of the last century, road signs and indicators were installed on the new road. At the bus stop there is a guardhouse with a stove and a blazing samovar inside. In the guardhouse and inside the bus there are posters and tables from the 40s: “Off-road is the enemy of the national economy” and “How to care for the road.” You get on a retro bus and drive along the road to visit a whole fleet of “time machines.” The Pereslavl Railway Museum contains unique examples of not only railway equipment for narrow roads of the late 19th - mid-20th centuries, but also cars: Fords, ZiSs, Emkis...

Both cars and steam locomotives, motor locomotives, railcars, cars for narrow roads resting in the depot are masterpieces of material culture and design of the last century. The very image of Soviet railway transport correlates with the poetics of constructivism and art deco. And it is no coincidence that the history of the Pereslavl narrow-gauge railway began in the late 1920s, when local spinning and film factories began to need peat for fuel. Peat was mined in the vast swamps of the Berendey kingdom along the banks of the Veksa River, not far from Lake Pleshcheevo. Since the 1930s, peat has been transported along a specially built narrow track using a cuckoo steam locomotive. As if confirming the folklore story that miniature equipment from fairy tales about gnomes is associated with the extraction of the earth’s subsoil, the small railway faithfully served peat mining until the end of the 1990s. Then, due to economic inexpediency (the enterprises abandoned peat and switched to fuel oil), traffic (including passenger traffic) on the narrow gauge stopped, and the railways were dismantled by local residents.

Existing since 1991 (first with the help of the private enterprise "Decor"), the Pereslavl Railway Museum is the only custodian of rolling stock and a tiny operating narrow-gauge line. The guests invited to the celebration on the occasion of the launch of the retro bus were able to take a ride along it: from the locomotive depot to the dense, mysterious peat bogs of the Bludov Bog, which once supplied the film factory with peat, a veteran diesel locomotive TU4 with a single baby carriage slowly travels. For the most daring guests, for a very reasonable fee, you can go into the hazy Berendey distance on a handcar, which is rented to two visitors.

By the way, the cinematic theme is very relevant for the Pereslavl Museum today. After all, according to director Sergei Dorozhkov, the organization and maintenance of the collection is literally the work of several enthusiasts and subsidies. Not a single Russian government agency is providing assistance. But the museum must live. Incoming equipment (such as a class II passenger carriage from 1898 or a ZiM car converted into a railway vehicle running on rails) also needs to be restored and maintained in order. Renting out equipment to film groups is one of the options for survival. Of course, the main hope is the support of friends and visitors, for whom a special retro highway has now been made into the almost fairy-tale kingdom of “time machines.” You can find out how to get there from Pereslavl-Zalessky on the website www.kukushka.ru.

Sergei KHACHATUROV