The Gorky Children's Railway named after Maxim Gorky, GDZH — a children's railway located in the Kanavinsky District of Nizhny Novgorod.
Opened on 8 November 1939.
The track gauge is narrow — 750 mm. The railway has 3 stations and a main-line length of 3.2 km, with a total length of 4.1 km. In plan it forms a triangle. The main station ("Rodina") is located in Park of 1 May. The season runs from 1 June to 1 September.
Background
Originally the railway also ran through the Leninsky District and Avtozavodsky District Districts, with its terminal stop at Schastlivaya. Today the station building is a listed architectural monument and houses the Avtozavodsky Wedding Palace.
The first and last train of the day run under steam locomotive KP-4 No. 430, which is one of the few surviving narrow-gauge steam locomotives still in operating condition in Russia. The locomotive fleet also includes two narrow-gauge diesel locomotives: a TU2 and a TU7. The rolling stock consists of two passenger trains of 6 cars each, and two open-sided "Diligence"-type cars.
Over the three summer months of 2007, approximately 7,000 passengers were carried on the Children's Railway in Nizhny Novgorod. The railway's revenue exceeded 209,000 rubles.
Construction
The decision to build the railway was made on 13 May 1939 at a bureau meeting of the Gorky Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). As early as 15 May a construction assistance committee was formed, chaired by the First Secretary of the Regional Committee, A. I. Shakhurin. A completion deadline of 1 October 1939 was set. Design and survey work began and was carried out in the shortest possible time by the design team of the track service of the Gorky Railway together with the architectural and planning department of the city council.
Actual construction began on 30 May 1939. Like all children's railways built before the war, the Gorky CRW was constructed through Komsomol volunteer Saturdays (subbotniki). In all, more than 36,000 people took part in its construction, with residents of surrounding villages participating alongside city dwellers.
At the terminal stations, Rodina and Schastlivaya, two magnificent palace-like station buildings were erected — designed by architects Yakovlev and Anisimov, respectively. The two-storey station building at Rodina, crowned with a round turret, is more than 40 metres long. The ground floor housed the stationmaster's office, the duty officer's room, a waiting hall, ticket windows, an information bureau, a buffet, a medical post, and bookstalls. The upper floor contained technical classrooms for club activities, the dispatcher's room, and a radio hub, while the turret housed a museum of railway transport history.
At the intermediate stations, Pushkinskaya and Mayakovskaya, less grand but equally attractive wooden station buildings were constructed to designs by architect Bazhan. Pushkinskaya station, for instance, was decorated with motifs from fairy tales, featuring ornately carved wooden teremki (fairy-tale towers). It was built by a team of the finest carpenters from the Borisoglebsky collective farm named after the Comintern.
On 8 November 1939 the first train ran along the Little Gorky Railway.
The railway was equipped with the most modern and advanced communications and signalling systems of the day. Telephone, telegraph, and teletype links were all available. Train movements were controlled using an electric token system.
The railway had a well-equipped locomotive and carriage depot with an inspection pit and repair workshops, which was named after Chkalov.
On special order, the Gorky Carriage Depot built 12 soft-seat cars for the CRW, fitted out in the style of Moscow Metro carriages. The Krasnoye Sormovo Plant specially prepared two bonneted locomotives of type 63/65. The streamlined bonnet gave these locomotives a resemblance to the IS — Iosif Stalin — locomotive, which was very popular in those years. On the CRW they were designated LK-01 and LK-02 (Lazar Kaganovich). It appears that the bonnets were later removed; at any rate, they are no longer visible in later photographs.
On 7 August 1941 the children's railway was closed and all its property was transferred to the personnel training department of the Gorky Railway administration. For nearly the entire duration of the war the railway was used to train railwaymen for the main lines.
On 25 August 1944 the head of the Gorky Railway issued Order No. 523/43 for the restoration of the children's railway, but the restoration proceeded very slowly. Only two years later, on 25 July 1946, a second order (No. 285/43) was issued transferring the railway's own property back to it. The deadline for executing this order was set as 10 August 1946, but the exact date on which the railway reopened is unfortunately not known to us.
Economics
The children's railway, 9.1 km long, connected the Railway District of the city of Gorky (present-day Kanavino) with the Avtozavodsky District. The tram line running in the same direction was severely overcrowded in those years, and city residents began using the CRW as an additional form of urban transport.
In its first year of operation alone the railway carried more than 100,000 passengers. It was precisely for this reason that the Gorky CRW repeatedly came under criticism for excessive commercialization and the exploitation of child labour at the expense of the ideological and political education of young people.
In those days such accusations were extremely serious, and to avoid the consequences the railway's management gradually began to reduce the range of duties assigned to the young railwaymen.
In 1947–48 only 45 young railwaymen were active on the Gorky Children's Railway (compare with the 1,200 trainees at the Tbilisi CRW), and passenger operations were handled exclusively by instructors.
This led to the Gorky CRW gradually falling into decline, transforming from the best children's railway in the country — with the highest level of technical equipment — into a rather unremarkable narrow-gauge branch line.
Self-governance
When new management took over in the late 1940s, the Gorky CRW once again became a genuine children's railway in which the young railwaymen played the leading role.
The museum at Rodina station was no longer a museum of railway transport in general, but one dedicated to the history of the Gorky Children's Railway specifically.
In 1958 the railway began to be re-equipped. A TU2-155 diesel locomotive appeared, along with a TD-5u motorized trolley, new carriages, and radio communication installed at stations and on locomotives. Shortly afterwards the railway received a second diesel locomotive — a TU2-233.
The electric token system, which had by then become obsolete, was replaced on the Rodina–Mayakovskaya section by automatic block signalling, and on the Mayakovskaya–Pushkinskaya section by semi-automatic block signalling.
The young railwaymen themselves designed and built devices for automatically opening the doors of the station buildings.
The ban
The railway continued to develop and was gradually reclaiming its title of best in the country. But in the middle of summer 1965 the railway's fate took yet another sharp turn. The event that caused it could serve as a monument to Soviet bungling.
On a Sunday morning a train running its first service of the day passed a curve at the first kilometre of the line and stopped — the track ahead had been completely torn up by workers from the Stroygas construction trust. Their actions were directed by none other than the trust's chief engineer, N. Kolganov, who was acting on instructions from the chairman of the city executive committee, A. D. Proskurin.
It emerged that as far back as February 1965, owing to the start of residential construction in the area, the question of relocating the CRW had arisen. The city executive committee had approved a route-alteration plan. As it later turned out, implementing it would have required the demolition of forty-eight residential buildings.
Who was responsible for drawing it up and what reasoning guided them remains a mystery, but naturally the plan was never carried out.
Work began on a new plan. Without waiting for it to be completed, A. D. Proskurin unilaterally decided to lift the track of the children's railway — and this was done with a promptness worthy of a better cause.
These officials faced no punishment whatsoever for the destruction of the CRW. And to rehabilitate themselves completely, on 6 August 1966 — a full year later — the city executive committee retroactively ratified Proskurin's decision.
Of the nine-plus kilometres, barely one and a half remained, along with a single station — Rodina. The station building at Schastlivaya was handed over for use as a wedding palace.
What had once been the finest children's railway in the country had virtually ceased to exist.
A new era
After the events of 1965 the railway continued to operate for many years in its truncated form, and it was not until 1991 that reconstruction work began. In 1994 — by now in Nizhny Novgorod — a new section of the line opened together with a new station, named Schastlivaya in memory of the old railway.
Stories about the Gorky Children's Railway
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THE "GROWN-UP" LIFE OF NIZHNY NOVGOROD'S CHILDREN'S RAILWAY
I remember the Children's Railway in Nizhny Novgorod (locally known simply as the DZhD) from my earliest childhood. Its main station, "Rodina," is located next to Pervomaysky Park, where my sister and I often went for walks. We would ride the train along a marshy lake — not far, but exciting all the same. From our mother's stories we knew that she too had visited this railway as a child. Then one day we saw archival documentary footage of the DZhD's opening on television, and our mother said: "I was there with my father." I remember staring at the screen, hoping to spot our grandfather and mother in the crowd. That was how my sister and I learned that the railway had existed even before the war. Indeed, the first children's railways began to be built in the 1930s. There was a shortage of skilled workers at the time, and three years of training on the DZhD gave schoolchildren knowledge equivalent to a railway technical college, allowing them to start working immediately. That is probably why children's railways began appearing one after another. The very first DZhD in the world opened in 1935 in Tbilisi. It is said that the idea originated with the Pioneers, which is why the first station was named "Pionerskaya." By 1939 there were already 12 such railways: in Dnepropetrovsk, Krasnoyarsk, Gomel, Yerevan, Moscow, and other cities. It was at this same time that the children's railway opened in Gorky (as Nizhny Novgorod was then called). It linked Kanavinsky District and Avtozavodsky District of the city. The railway was built through a community-wide effort. Not a single kopeck was allocated from the city budget, yet local enterprises pitched in (I suspect not always voluntarily, though the cause was a worthy one). The Gorky Automobile Plant built the "Schastlivaya" station; artists from the opera and ballet theatre painted the ceiling at the "Rodina" station; the Krasnoye Sormovo Plant converted the locomotives. The Gorky Circus gave three charity performances and donated the proceeds to the railway's construction. And how many community work days there were! Not only enterprise workers but also housewives took part in them. Collective farms helped too, sending crews of carpenters and bricklayers to the construction site. Through this combined effort the railway was built in just five and a half months. It became the longest children's railway in the USSR: 9 km 100 m in length, with four stations, four level crossings, and a bridge. At the terminal stations — "Rodina" and "Schastlivaya" — stone buildings were erected to house the station halls, classrooms, libraries, and conference rooms. The wooden station building at "Pushkino" resembled a fairy-tale terem (a traditional Russian tower-house). On 8 November 1939 the railway was formally inaugurated and train services began. At that time trains ran on the DZhD year-round, several times a day, carrying not only passengers but freight as well. More than 800 schoolchildren were studying the basics of the railway profession in the young railwaymen's clubs. Each week they had three hours of theory and three hours of practical training. A year later, 1,500 children were enrolled in the clubs. In 1940 a railway transport museum opened on the DZhD. Officially the DZhD was called the Little Gorky Railway. It operated until the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War, and in 1941 was converted into a vocational training facility. Adult institutions were housed at the stations, and one of the locomotives was leased to the Krasnaya Etna factory. After victory, the partially destroyed track was restored, the dilapidated stations were repaired, and the DZhD began operating again. It was fitted with new equipment, and the young railwaymen received uniforms. The museum and clubs reopened. This continued until 1966. Meanwhile the city was growing, and according to its development plan two highways were to cross the DZhD's main line. To avoid hindering road traffic, it was decided to relocate the track, but doing so would have required demolishing 48 houses. In the end the railway was simply "shortened" to one and a half kilometers. It lost its transport significance but continued to operate. In 1992 the DZhD was partially reconstructed, and its current length is 3 km 200 m. The railway has three stations: "Rodina" (the original one), "Pushkino," and "Schastlivaya" (newly built), as well as a museum. Since 1977, DZhD club members (now numbering around a thousand) have also been engaged in modelling locomotives and other equipment. They train in approximately 20 professions, including conductor, train driver, station duty officer, and carriage inspector. During the school year the children study theory, and in summer they work as train drivers (operating trains under the supervision of adult instructors), conductors, ticket clerks, and dispatchers, among other roles. Not only Nizhny Novgorod residents take part in the practical training, but also children from Murom and Vladimir. It is a shame the railway was cut so short — if it were longer, there would be more working positions available for trainees. The Little Gorky Railway has always operated with up-to-date equipment. At first its rolling stock consisted of two narrow-gauge steam locomotives of the Kp series, converted to the "Iosif Stalin" locomotive type. In the late 1950s these were replaced by a TU-2 diesel locomotive. In 1997 a more modern locomotive appeared on the railway — a TU-7, built at the Kombark factory in 1985 — and in 1996 a Kp-series steam locomotive (a "kukushka," or cuckoo), this time not a conversion. We first saw it at the "Future of Russia" exhibition, held to mark the centenary of the All-Russian Industrial Exhibition of 1896. At the time it would never have occurred to me that one day I would be able to look at a locomotive's technical passport and even toss a few logs into its firebox. The biography of our "kukushka" is rather interesting. The locomotive was built in 1955 in Poland: the steam boiler was made in Sosnowiec, the tender in Wrocław, and the locomotive itself was assembled at the Dzerzhinsky Locomotive Works in the city of Chrzanów. It is worth noting that narrow-gauge K-series steam locomotives were built not only in Poland (the Kp series) but also in Hungary (the Kv series) and in the RSFSR at the Votkinsk factory (the Vt series). They were used mainly in industry. Ours was no exception. It arrived in the USSR in the summer of 1955 and worked for several years at Atbasar Station on the Kazakh Railway. It was then transferred to Facility No. 5, and in 1962 the locomotive changed workplaces again, going to the sleeper-impregnation plant at Kalikino Station on the Gorky Railway, where it remained until its "retirement." In 1970 an entry appeared in the locomotive's technical passport stating that its "boiler is no longer in service." The next entry (dated 7 September 1978): "The locomotive is in preservation." Whose idea it was to restore it to life is not recorded in the technical passport. But eighteen years later the "kukushka" was delivered to the Gorky-Moskovskiy locomotive depot, and from there to Sergach, where in August 1996 it underwent a full overhaul including complete inspection of the boiler, after which the locomotive returned to Nizhny Novgorod — for the exhibition — and from there made its way to the children's railway depot. The next time I encountered the "kukushka" was in 2000, when I brought my son to the DZhD for the first time. We began calling this locomotive the "little steam engine," as the flippant bird-name really did not suit it. So we arrived at "Rodina" station, strolled around before the train departed, and looked into the depot. There stood our "little steam engine" — not a machine at all, but a toy. We did not recognize our old acquaintance at first, because it had been repainted: it was no longer green but light blue. It turned out that the "little steam engine" runs only on especially festive days: 1 June — the start of summer practice — and on City Day (the first Sunday of September). Since then we have not missed either event. Of course, it would be nice if the "little steam engine" ran more often, but firstly, the locomotive is rather old and must be handled with care. Secondly, it is no longer in production, so any repair becomes a serious problem. If a particular part is needed, it is extraordinarily difficult to find. Last year, for instance, the flue tubes needed replacing, and they were finally located only somewhere in the Urals. Thirdly — and most importantly — instructors are needed under whose supervision the children can work (the boiler pressure is 13 atmospheres, after all), and there are not many people who know steam locomotives thoroughly; as a rule, they are pensioners. The profession is disappearing… And yet it is a fine thing that we have such a wonderful railway, that one can come to the cozy station and, without going anywhere at all, simply sit on the platform and watch the trains. One's heart lifts when you see the children performing their duties with such extraordinary seriousness. There is, of course, no shortage of graduates from railway colleges and vocational schools today. But let children's railways continue to exist — children need them very much. In my view, the "grown-up" Gorky Railway acts wisely in preserving such a seemingly modest yet very important division. |
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See also
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