Museum of Railway Technology, Novosibirsk
The Novosibirsk Museum of Railway Technology, located at the Seyatel Station, 20 km from the city center, is the largest in the country after St. Petersburg. It is made in the form of a railway station: 144 exhibits are located under the open sky on six ways, on an area of ??more than thirty thousand square meters. It exhibits all types of railway equipment, historical and modern: locomotives, diesel locomotives, electric locomotives, trains and special-purpose mechanisms, cars - from postal to carriages for the transportation of prisoners - etc. This is mainly a technique that worked on the roads of Western Siberia: the basis of the museum was made up of cars that had accumulated in the depot of the Research Institute of Railway Machinery. Then the exhibits for the museum began to collect specifically. In recent years, a collection of cars and motorcycles has been added to locomotives and rail cars.
The fate of some of the exhibits is amazing. For example, in the museum there is a small steam stagecoach, made in the image and likeness of the first Russian locomotive of the Cherepanov brothers. Museum staff say that during the war he was taken by our soldiers from Berlin and handed over to residents of one of the villages of the Kemerovo region as a trophy. Then the locomotive strangely disappeared, but was soon found in the deaf taiga. To get him out of the forest, the railroad had to make an eighteen-kilometer clearing along an impassable windbreak. Now it is installed at the entrance to the museum.
On one of the ways, you can see a locomotive of the “E” series - the machinists called it “Echo”. Railway workers say that in the war this locomotive proved to be the most reliable and invulnerable. He had the ability to get off at lightning speed and to slow down just as quickly, therefore it was a very difficult target for enemy aircraft.
A special place in the museum is occupied by the surgical car of the ambulance train of the times of the Great Patriotic War. It is divided into several rooms: a chamber with wooden plank beds in three tiers, a room where the wounded were prepared for the operation, and the operating room itself. On the left - a drawer for instruments, on the right - iron boxes for medicines, in the middle there is an operating table under which a drain is arranged. The bloody wounded were washed with water, and then the floors were treated with carbolic acid. Water flowed into the drain hole under the car. This detail, as told by the museum curators, rather terribly revives military history: after the war, this hole was never opened, and the smell of blood and suffering remained alive forever, or rather dead. He makes a particularly strong impression on German museum visitors.
Despite this, the museum is by no means gloomy. Multi-colored locomotives return adults to childhood, and here they are the real ones, and there are many of them. In addition, the museum periodically hosts exhibitions of retro cars.
Join our tours and take a look at this amazing attraction:
Excursions - www.uvisitrussia.com/day-tours/tours-to-siberia-and-far-east/
Tours - www.uvisitrussia.com/tours-to-siberia-and-far-east/
