Pechersk highway. Pechora Railway

If you travel from Moscow to Vorkuta by train, you can see a lot of interesting things outside your window. The train route runs along two famous northern highways - the Arkhangelsk Mainline, built by the merchant Savva Mamontov and Pechora highway, built mainly by prisoners in the unbearable conditions of taiga, tundra and permafrost.

During the two-day journey, the train crosses the Moscow, Yaroslavl, Vologda, Arkhangelsk regions and almost the entire Komi Republic...

The road from Moscow to Vorkuta starts at Yaroslavsky railway station, where the Trans-Siberian Railway officially begins. A stylized kilometer post tells about this:

The track adjacent to the Moscow-Vorkuta train is occupied by the Moscow-Blagoveshchensk train, which is crowded with tourists.

This is exactly the cost of traveling from the capital to the far north. In principle, the price is quite reasonable. You can also get to Vorkuta by plane, the flight takes about 3 hours, but the prices for the plane represent the height of idiocy: 15,000 rubles one way. For those who value it, there is a budget reserved seat with the traditional smell of socks and drunken shift workers, and crazy people can use a seated carriage for a trip to Vorkuta for a ridiculous 1,500 rubles.

The train starts moving and begins to move in a northerly direction. During the first hours of the journey, a landscape characteristic of central Russia flashes outside the windows:

The carriage is empty - there are very few people willing to travel north in the summer. Looking ahead, we note that it will remain just as empty until the very end of the journey. No one ever got into our compartment.

The carriage is a very ordinary brown Ammendorf with authentic windows that you could open and lean out of.

Sterile toilet. Conscientious guides washed him two or three times a day throughout the journey. I never expected such service from a “five hundred oar” train...

In the meantime, the train is traveling through the Yaroslavl region. This is perhaps the fastest section of the route - the train covers almost 300 kilometers from Moscow to Yaroslavl in 4 hours. Along the road you come across small stops with stations built in the style typical of the Arkhangelsk Mainline, along which the first part of the route passes.

Right up to Yaroslavl, the area outside the window does not undergo any significant changes: forests and meadows.

Finally, the train reaches Yaroslavl, crossing the Kotorosl River within the city:

Yaroslavl-Glavny is the first long-term stop of the train, it takes almost 40 minutes. This is just enough to quickly get acquainted with the station and its surroundings. Here is the station itself:

And here is a monument to Savva Mamontov, who built the Arkhangelsk Mainline, against the background of a map of the Northern Railway drawn on the wall of the nearest station building.

A closer look at the map reveals glaring inaccuracies. From Kotlas to Mikuni, according to this map, it takes almost 15 minutes, the authors of the map moved Sosnogorsk to the middle of the branch leading to Troitsko-Pechorsk... Shame and disgrace!

And this is what the station square of Yaroslavl looks like. Apparently, since I served military training in this city in 2009, it has changed very little.

Beyond Yaroslavl Railway crosses the Volga on the bridge.

Quite northern stops in small villages. However, some kind of infrastructure in the form of platforms with railings is present here. A few passengers are waiting for the evening train to Yaroslavl:

And the train continues to move north.

The next stop is Danilov, a docking station and also a junction station, where a branch to the latitudinal railway departs from the Arkhangelsk Mainline." Saint Petersburg- Kirov", the so-called northern passage of the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Apart from this detail, there is nothing remarkable in this town, and this is clearly evidenced by the view from the station crossing bridge:

The long stop of all trains without exception gives rise to a lot of street vendors. They sell literally everything - from boiled potatoes and pickled cucumbers...

To plush toys. Although it’s hard to imagine that someone buys plush toys along the way on the train.

A local resident looks with curiosity at the train leaving further. Apparently he reads the name of the route on the sign..

Meanwhile, outside the window, the Vologda region begins with neatly plowed and sown fields.

A section of forest where a tornado swept through in 2010. More details are written at varandej in this post. As we can see, since then no one has even scratched the surface to somehow put this place in order.

But here they are proud of their Russian citizenship! The most ordinary village house at Baklanka station carries a proudly waving Russian flag:

And then the train reaches Gryazovets station. It was here, on the platform of this station, that the opening scene of the famous Soviet trash film “City Zero” was filmed. It is also noteworthy that the hero of the film disembarked from the train heading to Vorkuta (visible on the train route board).

But in general - the most ordinary linear station in an ordinary provincial city.

It's getting dark. At the entrance to Vologda, fantastic mushroom-shaped clouds grow in the distance:

Despite the fact that we are traveling north, the forests for some time give way to almost continuous fields.

There are very few trees here; the area is more similar to the forest-steppe in the Voronezh region.

Directly before Vologda, the train passes without stopping a huge marshalling station with the idiotic name Losta (remember the TV series Lost on Channel One?). Losta station is one of the largest marshalling stations in the European part of Russia: here the Arkhangelsk Mainline is crossed by the latitudinal route St. Petersburg - Kirov, or rather, it does not completely cross, but at some point these roads turn out to be combined. There is also a locomotive depot (TC-11), opened in 2004.

Vologda itself looks very ordinary from the train, if not sadly: five-story panel buildings interspersed with brick high-rise buildings...

One of the types of products from these regions is timber in logs:

Vologda Station is quite large by provincial standards:

On the roof of the station there is a small but beautiful weather vane with the inscription "Vologda"

Bell. I immediately remember the famous “Give me back my bell, bl#”... There is nothing else to see at the Vologda station.

Upon departure from Vologda, the buildings of the Spaso-Prilutsky Monastery are visible on the left along the train. The Spaso-Prilutsky Monastery was founded in 1371 by Saint Dmitry of Prilutsky, a student and follower of St. Sergius of Radonezh. In 1812, the treasures of the patriarchal sacristy, the Trinity-Sergius Lavra and a number of other Moscow monasteries and cathedrals were kept here. After the revolution, it housed a colony for street children and a transit camp for the dispossessed, and later a military unit. What was not here... Currently, the monastery operates for its intended purpose.

Enchanting evening Vologda dawns, which gave the name branded train Moscow-Vologda:

Hay is collected in the fields:

At night the train reaches Konosha-I station in the Arkhangelsk region. At this station there is a farewell to the Arkhangelsk Mainline: then the route turns east. At the same time, electrification is ending - the Pechora Mainline is completely diesel-powered.

Notice how light it is here at night - at three o'clock in the morning the sky is only slightly dark.

And inside the station we will see an impressive exhibition of children's drawings. Students from local art schools painted. There are scribbles and some impressive drawings.

Among the railway artifacts, it is worth noting the gorgeous typesetting schedule from the times of the Ministry of Railways (and, possibly, the USSR).

The most beautiful section of the road from Konosha to Valdeevo was not possible to photograph due to darkness. The morning began at this station:

The station is located in a village of the same name, surrounded by forests and impassable swamps. There are no roads to the outside world (except for the winter road), you can only drive a tractor. Well, on the train. In the village itself there is terrible dirt, puddles and dull barracks. But there is store number 21.

Pechora highway in the vicinity of Sengos station. It is worth noting that the curves on this road are an exception; it mainly consists of arrow-straight segments.

All around are harsh northern villages, gray and shriveled with time, with the broken eye sockets of unpainted houses. These landscapes evoke incredible melancholy...

The depressing impression of northern devastation is slightly diluted by the relatively decent barracks of railway workers at rare stops. But they are also surrounded by rickety sheds and toilets:

And severity and poverty inexorably remind us of themselves. Here Urban-type settlement Udimsky.

The only thing that is “urban” in it are two-story barracks.

The railway turns north in small portions, revealing long straight sections. The wind carries smoke and the stench of diesel fuel to the end of the train...

The floodplain of the Northern Dvina begins:

The river itself. Even in the middle reaches it is huge - the width of its channel is in no way less than the width of the Volga channel:

Having crossed the bridge over the Northern Dvina, the train arrives at the Kotlas-Uzlovoy station:

The diesel locomotive is coupled to the tail of the train in order to drive the train to the Kotlas-Yuzhny station.

Then the diesel locomotive will again be hooked to the head of the train and the train will go further to Vorkuta, passing Kotlas-Uzlova again. All these driving back and forth are due to the lack of opportunity to turn onto Kotlas-Yuzhny directly from the bridge over the Northern Dvina. Although they could have built a loop from Kotlas-Uzlovoy to the Kotlas-Kirov branch a long time ago. But, apparently, it is cheaper to waste the time of passengers and drivers and diesel fuel.

Kotlas-South. The repair of the station goes on and on, and there is no end to it:

Station square with a steam locomotive monument and infernal puddles on the crumpled asphalt. Behind the scenes there are the most terrible abandoned wooden barracks, if you don’t know about them, then, in principle, it looks within the acceptable limits, of course adjusted for the Russian outback:

Seagulls shit on the head of bronze Vladimir Ilyich:

TO bus stop loaves from the PAZ plant are arriving...

Next to local towns and villages, deprived of such a blessing of civilization as the railway:

In general, life is in full swing. And we drive back past a tattered and abandoned elevator. Apparently, this is the vicinity of Mostozavod station:

The next train stop is Solvychegodsk. The real Solvychegodsk is still about twenty kilometers from here, however, the station looks much more decent than the station of a large city and the regional center of Kotlas:

Here stands a monument to the victims of the builders of the Pechora highway - hundreds, thousands of nameless prisoners who built the road in inhuman conditions among the taiga, tundra, permafrost, in a snowstorm and thirty-degree heat, suffocating from cold and vileness. A chill creeps through the skin at the sight of this simple, austere monument...

Pyrsky. This is the name of the station a little further from Solvychegodsk:

To the east of Kotlas, huge impassable swamps stretch along the railway. This is, for example, the Rada swamp:

It was not possible to find out the name of this swamp.

“Russians call the place where they are going to pass a road” - this quote involuntarily comes to mind when looking at what serves as a road here. Only a logging truck, a tractor, or a shift truck can pass along such a road...

In general, this is the main transport here - the main product of the Arkhangelsk region is timber. Forest, forest, forest, nothing more. The beggar area sits on a wooden needle.

The south of the Komi Republic, which suddenly begins outside the window, looks similar: pine whips piled to the skies at Madmas station:

There are also eerie ruins here, similar to those already seen in the Arkhangelsk region: if you do not know the location of the border, it is difficult to determine where one region ends and another begins. The rotten barn bears the proud sign “ELECTRIC SHOP”:

If the administrative border of the Arkhangelsk region and the Komi Republic passes somewhere near the Madmas station, then the difference becomes obvious to the eye after crossing the Vychegda River. By the way, the river is no less impressive than the Northern Dvina:

The train here goes to the northeast, and the nature outside the window begins to gradually change. Beyond the Vychegda the southern taiga begins with a predominance of coniferous trees:

Deserted landscapes are occasionally interrupted by traces of human activity:

Mikun is a large junction station in the southern part of the Komi Republic. The train here takes about 20 minutes and a large number of passengers get on and off. "Usy" depart from the station to Vendinga and Syktyvkar, people transfer here to local trains.

View from the bridge. Our train will go there after a while:

A paddy wagon of the Federal Penitentiary Service is also waiting for its passengers:

Station Square. Compare with what you saw in big city Kotlas. Here the difference in income of neighboring regions is especially striking:

North of Mikuni, the train crosses the Vym River on a bridge:

And then neat houses appear in the forest. This is the city of Emva, in which the Knyazhpogost station is located.

The station itself. There is exactly the same station in Sosnogorsk, further along the train route.

The most peeling houses in the city. Remember the town of Udimsky...

Another river, its name could not be established. At a distance you can see the place where it flows into the Vym:

A typical linear station on a highway: an electrical center post, also known as a train station, a barn (or a toilet?), a transformer booth and some kind of platform. However, passenger traffic here is so small that more is not needed.

The road continues to turn north.

By evening the train reaches Ukhta.

A large marshalling yard in a large city. Behind the station you can see Mount Vetlasyan, on which Lenin’s head is located. Once upon a time this head also glowed in the dark, then the illumination was stolen.

Private sector of the city. These very comfortable houses are present here.

The railway passes here directly under the slopes of the mountain.

On the right is the mountain, and on the left is the valley of the Ukhta River.

Sosnogorsk. Also a large station, from which a branch departs to Troitsko-Pechorsk. Unlike the fantasy of the map compilers on the wall in Yaroslavl, Sosnogorsk is located directly on the highway. True, there is still a Sosnogorsk-II station, but it is doubtful that it was discussed there.

I took pictures of the Sosnogorsk station on the way back, but in fact the sun was already setting:

The distance to Moscow is already the same as from Adler, however, there are still almost 700 kilometers to go to Vorkuta.

People walking around reserved seat carriage. Meanwhile, no more than 5 people remained in our carriage.

The road north of Sosnogorsk goes through continuous taiga.

Kerki station. Kerki in the Komi language means “huts”, “houses”. Several houses actually exist here, along with an ancient “Cossack” on a platform made of old sleepers. I wonder where you can drive it here?

Because civilization here has already completely ended.

The huge Pechora River near the city of the same name. A train crosses it at night.

Taiga. Pay attention to the shape of the spruce crowns, how different it is from the fluffy Central European trees we are used to.

Well, the sun has already come out. The picture was taken at 3 o'clock in the morning? morning?

A tributary of the Pechora is the Usa River. Even this river is not inferior in size to the Volga in its middle reaches. The photo was taken on the way back, that's why it's so dark.

Suddenly, swampy bald spots appear in the taiga, behind which you can see the peaks of the Polar Urals mountains:

There are no longer any signs of human activity here.

Along the road there are wired communication lines, which, of course, have not been working for a long time. But it is extremely unprofitable to remove wires from these fucking places to hand them over for recycling. So it all rots.

Railroad workers' barracks at the Shore crossing. Or Pyshor. Or Pernashor. Or maybe Amshor? I don’t remember which one, they are all so similar. Judging by the time of filming, it seems that this is still Pernashor...

Seyda is the last long-term train stop before Vorkuta. Despite the fact that the junction is formally the Chum station, from which the only “live” section of the transpolar highway Chum-Labytnangi departs, the local train “Vorkuta - Labytnangi” runs with a mandatory stop at Seyda, having unimaginable stops there for an hour and a half to two hours . The Vorkuta train stops here for 23 minutes, during which passengers storm the local store.

After Seida, the taiga ends and the forest-tundra begins:

Bridge over the Seyda River. In a few minutes the train will travel along it. What's interesting is everything railway bridges unguarded here.

On the right along the way you can see the already familiar Usa River

The conductor brought a guest book. There was this mention in it. Drunk shift workers are not a myth!

And outside the window there is already tundra.

Because of the permafrost, the path is constantly swollen. The speed at which here there's a train coming, does not exceed 60 kilometers per hour.

We were just driving somewhere there. The path is on an embankment that offers an impressive view of the local "roads" - ruts in the mud that a crawler bulldozer would barely pass.

Kykshor junction. The railway workers don’t live here; they all work on a rotational basis. Simply because it is impossible to live here - there is nothing around. Absolutely nothing.

Another bridge over some tundra river, of which there are a great many:

The Arctic fox crossing.

Basically, the name of the station says it all. No comments here...

This barn still remembers the times of the Ministry of Railways of the Russian Federation, judging by the sign.

Finally the train arrives in Vorkuta.

The train is immediately washed from dirt and soot.

This is how the trip along the Pechora Highway ends. The highway itself does not end there, but goes to the village of Severny, where the Ayach-Yaga station is located, but there is no longer a public passenger service there. Our journey of 2264 kilometers is complete.

Pechora Mainline (29 photos) Pechora Mainline is one of the four Great Northern Mainlines of Russia, along with the older Murmansk Railway (built before the revolution) and the later Yugra and Baikal-Amur Mainlines. It was built in the very Stalin era, partly during the Great Patriotic War, and since 1942 it has supplied Moscow and Leningrad with Vorkuta coal. Unlike the old and inhabited, mainly sawmill-based South Komi, Middle Komi is a remote taiga region where oil is extracted. Here, the darkest page of the history of Komi - the camps and prisons - is best preserved. The center of the region is the second largest city in the republic, Ukhta. We will travel by train from Knyazhpogost, Ukhta, Sosnogorsk and stop at the taiga station Irael. An hour's journey from Mikuni, the train reaches the Knyazhpogost station, behind which lies the town of Emva (14 thousand inhabitants): Emva is the Komi name for the Vym River, at the mouth of which stands the ancient village of Ust-Vym. The village of Knyazhpogost up the river has been known since 1490, and it was probably the residence of the Zyryan prince. In 1941, the village of Zheleznodorozhny was founded on the other bank, and by 1985 it had grown so much that it received the status of a city. Local architectural landmark - vocational school in the style of wooden constructivism: Abandoned sawmill. Pay attention to the graffiti - remember there was such a party in the 1990s? People on the platform: Due to warming, the snow has turned gray and shrunk from the rain. This is where the endless darkness comes from. The picture was completed by a paddy wagon: Transfer of prisoners in Knyazhpogost from a train to a van: Sindor station is an hour and a half away from Knyazhpogost - many stations on the Pechora Mainline are made in a similar style: Most of the Stalinist stations on the Pechora Mainline are wooden (Tobys station): From Mikuni to Ukhta - almost 7 hours journey. Half an hour before the last one, a black waste heap suddenly grows out of the taiga: This is Yarega - a place much more interesting than it seems. The only OIL MINE in the world is located here. The super-heavy oil of the Yaregskoye field is more like bitumen; it is very difficult to pump it from a well. True, it lies shallow - only 200 meters. What’s even more interesting is that the field is not just an oil field, but a petro-titanium one - that is, titanium ore is also mined along with viscous oil. The station has one of the few authentic Stalinist stations that have survived on the small stations of the Pechora Mainline. The train enters Ukhta, which stretches along the river of the same name (in the Komi language - Ukva) at the foot of the Timan Ridge: In modern Komi, Ukhta is the second largest (117 thousand). residents), over the past 20 years, almost twice as fast as the deserted Vorkuta. Founded in 1929 as the village of Chibyu, since 1933 it became the center of Ukhtpechlag (Ukhtinsko-Pechora camp), which was especially notorious for the “Kashketi executions” - in 1937-38, during the suppression of unrest among the prisoners, more than 2,500 people were shot . The head of the camp, Efim Kashketin, used a very effective method: suicide bombers were led through the taiga, supposedly to another camp, and in a certain place, without warning, they were shot with a machine gun - while those remaining in the camp did not even know about it... However, time passed, located in the center republic, the village grew, and in 1938 it was withdrawn from the Gulag, receiving the status of a settlement and the name Ukhta. In 1939-41, there were plans to move the capital of the Komi ASSR there (due to a much more adequate location). The station at Ukhta station is almost the same as in Inta and Vorkuta: The station is located in a deep lowland, about a kilometer from the city center - but the way there lies through an industrial zone and a bridge, so it’s better to go by minibus. Behind the railway are the high and very steep hills of the Timan Ridge: One of them, Mount Vetlasyan, is crowned by the Electric Lenin... more precisely, it has long been no longer electric, but remains one of the symbols of Ukhta: From the trains the Ukhta Oil Plant is perfectly visible - by all-Russian standards it is small , but in the Komi Republic it is the only one. Oil has been known here since the 15th century, but then people simply did not know what to do with this muck. In 1745-67, ore explorer Fyodor Pryadunov led its extraction - oil leaked from the springs, and he somehow collected it from the water film. As much as 3.5 tons were mined! From Ukhta, oil was sent to Moscow, where it was processed. The next well was drilled a hundred years later (1868), and at the end of the 19th century, Ukhta oil was used to refuel steamships on the Barents Sea, going down the Pechora. And the first oil refinery on this site operated back in 1914-24. The highway runs parallel to the Ukhta River. Vetlasyan station, again within the city: Half an hour by train from Ukhta - and here is the Sosnogorsk station: The suburb of Ukhta (27 thousand inhabitants) is already located on Izhma, at the mouth of the Ukhta River. Actually, it grew out of the Izhma station founded in 1939. From here a branch branches off to Troitsko-Pechorsk, but this is not the main thing: for highway Sosnogorsk is the End of the Earth. Then there is a winter road to Pechora, and...

Original taken from Belaya V

Original taken from alchemik87 to Moscow-Vorkuta: Arkhangelsk and Pechora highways.

If you travel from Moscow to Vorkuta by train, you can see a lot of interesting things outside your window. The train route runs along two famous northern highways - the Arkhangelsk Mainline, built by the merchant Savva Mamontov, and the Pechora Mainline, built mainly by prisoners in the unbearable conditions of the taiga, tundra and permafrost.

During the two-day journey, the train crosses the Moscow, Yaroslavl, Vologda, Arkhangelsk regions and almost the entire Komi Republic...

The road from Moscow to Vorkuta begins at the Yaroslavsky railway station, the same place where the Trans-Siberian Railway officially begins. A stylized kilometer post tells about this: