Russian and Soviet steam locomotives

ACHTUNG!

Wir bieten den Reiseburos und den Privatpersonen die Zusammenarbeit bei der Organisation und der Durchfuhrung der Gruppenfahrten durch die Ukraine und die GUS-Lander an!

KEITH R. CHESTER

The E's were tested quite extensively by both the MPS and NKPS. Here E^-4151 (NyHo 1336/1921) is seen prior to such a working on the Nicholas Railway on 21 October 1922. Lomonosov is the rather portly gentleman in a peaked cap, standing between the rails in front of no. 4151, and immediately to his right in a trilby is Gunnar W. Anderson, the owner of the Nohab factory. They are surrounded by a group of Soviet, Swedish and German representatives. Other tests were held in Germany on Lomonosov's portable stationary testing plant at Esslingen; Lomonosov is reported to have described the results achieved there in 1924 with £°-5570 (Wolf 1086/1922) as "almost a miracle".

Courtesy Leeds Russian Archive, Mrs P. Browning

EDITED BY

RUSSIAN AND SOVIET STEAM LOCOMOTIVES Vol 1:

•E' Class 0-10-0, -S' Class 2-6-2, 'P36' class 4-8-4 Keith Chester First Published 9/2000

All rights reserved. Except for normal review purposes no part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electrical or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior consent from the Author and Publisher.

©Copyright Keith R.Chester and Trackside Publications.

Designed by Donald Binns.

Published and type-set by Trackside Publications, 50 Long Meadow, Skipton, North Yorkshire, England, BD23 1BW.

Printed by Amadeus Press Ltd, Ezra House, West 26 Business Park, Cleckheaton, England, BD19 4TQ.

PAROVOZY is projected to appear in three volumes This the first deals with three of the most significant locomotive types constructed in Russia and the USSR in the twentieth century. Volume II will cover aspects of   steam   locomotive   development,   including experimental work, whilst Volume III will be devoted to the narrow gauge.

As always sincere thanks are due to the many people who have helped put this book together, whether as contributors  of articles  and/or photographs  or providing answers to queries; all are, I hope, acknowledged in the appropriate place. I would also like to thank Uwe Bergmann, Ian Button and Peeter Klaus for so willingly making photographs available from their extensive collections and, as ever, Donald Binns for his support during the, at times rather difficult, gestation of this book. I am also deeply indebted to Vladimir Grishin, Jana Lobozova, Roman Mikulski, David Neely & Lyubov' Kozhevnikova and Johann Sattler for their assistance in translating Russian texts.

Keith R. Chester Vienna, December 1998

Foreword

The first railway in Russia was the 25km long six foot (1829mm) gauge St Petersburg to Tsarkoe Selo line, which was formally opened on 30 October 1837. The very success of this spurred other projects, but it was only with the completion of the St Petersburg -Moscow railway in 1851 that Russia had its first significant trunk route. Railway development was hampered by a lack of capital but even so in 1866 there were already 5,000km of railways in operation; by the turn of the century this had increased to over 53,000km and had reached nearly 145,000km in 1985, making the railways of the former Soviet Union the largest unified railway system in the world.

In Tsarist Russia, the railways were operated by a mixture of state-owned and private regional companies. These all came under the control of the Ministerstvo putei soobshcheniia or Ministry of Ways  of Communications   (MPS),   which   acted   as   a interventionist regulator.  Whilst many of these companies pursued an independent motive power policy, increasingly after the 1880s standard designs were to be found on many Russian railways, particular on the state lines, over which MPS influence was greatest. After 1901 responsibility for developing and approving new designs lay with the MPS Commission for Rolling Stock and Motive Power. Thus a man like Prof. N.L. Shchukin, whose name will feature frequently in these pages and who was appointed Chairman of the Commission with the brief to oversee the development of standard designs for both state and private railways, was able to wield enormous power. A Commission, however,  is by its very nature conservative and slow-moving, which no doubt explains why young Turks like the mercurial lurii Vladimirovich Lomonosov were so critical both of it and of Shchukin.

Following the October Revolution Russia's railways were run by the railway trade union, but workers' control proved anarchic. To put an end to the chaos, all railways, both state and private, were brought under the strict control of the Bolsheviks in March 1918 and the MPS was transformed into the NKPS (Narodnyi komissariat   putei   soobshcheniia   or   People's Commissariat of Ways of Communications). After April 1946 it became known once again as the MPS. There was never an organisation officially known as Soviet Railways (or similar), the railways were merely a very large department of a vast ministry. The designation SZD (Sovetskie Zheleznye Dorogi or Soviet Railways) was a creature of the UIC and hardly known inside the former USSR to the public at large. Soviet railwaymen, however, would have been familiar with it as all wagons were marked SZD.

For an excellent brief introduction to Russian and Soviet railway history and locomotive development, readers are referred to the opening pages of Soviet Locomotive Types : The Union Legacy (Heywood & Button 1995). A more detailed account can be found in the various writings ofJ.N. Westwood.

Relatively little has been published in English on Russian and Soviet railways and the steam locos which worked over them. The German language media paid rather more attention to the subject, probably due to the fact that until 1914 many German engineers held senior positions on Russian railways, but even so coverage was patchy; and this was even more the case after 1917. Yet it would be false to conclude from this that the topic has never been tackled. Both in Russia and the Soviet Union, engineers and locomotive historians have written extensively on their subjects. Much of this lies buried in obscure journals and the mere fact of the language barrier has hidden it from the attentions of many elsewhere who would otherwise be interested in it.

A substantial literature on the steam locomotive does, then, exist in the Russian language. Undoubtedly the best known in the West are the writings of V.A. Rakov, who in 1955 published his classic work Lokomotivy zheleznykh dorog Sovetskogo Soyuw (The Locomotives of the Soviet Union). This was a remarkably comprehensive and detailed account of the history of the steam loco in both Tsarist Russia and the USSR and is the starting point for any study of the subject. A German translation was published in the GDR in 1986 making the work more accessible. Forty years later, in 1995, Rakov published a revised and greatly expanded version of his history. It can only be hoped that an English or German translation of this will eventually be published.

For my Parents

This view of ER-773-24, taken at L'viv in February 1994, shows clearly the simple and robust construction of this type - which no doubt partly accounts for the large numbers built and their longevity. Keith Chester

Probably a more familiar sight in the 1990s than it ever was in Soviet times: an E1 at the head of a passenger train. The collapse of the former USSR has permitted the operation of railtours and given many western railway enthusiasts their first taste of Soviet steam. ER-7l-04 (Skoda 2478/1950) was photographed on a runpast on the Fastov to Zhytomir line on 28 February 1993. Keith Chester

Many people have contributed to this article, willingly sharing their time and knowledge. Especial thanks are due to: Roland Beier; lan Button; David Fakes; Viktor Gorodnyanskii; Anthony Heywood; Serban Lacriteanu; the late Mike Page; Peter Slaughter; Paul Spencer, Gyorgy Villdnyi and John Westwood.

Between 1925 and 195] nearly 2,700 examples of the S11 class 2-6-2 were put into service. For over four decades: this development of the 1914 designed S1' was to be found, either singly or in pairs, at the head of the great majority:  -of passenger trains in the USSR. The class lost its last regular passenger turns only in 1979, thus bringing to an end'. a story which can be traced back directly to Malachovski's class S. This photograph is believed to have been taken • -in Estonia in the 1950s.

Keith Chester collection:

When Latvia became independent in 1919 and formed its own railway, the LVD, some S type 2-6-2s were on its territory and two were taken into stock as class Gks In 1923-24 these were augmented by an additional seven purchased from Poland. Independent Latvia fell into the Soviet sphere following the Soviet-German Nonaggression". Pact signed by Molotov andvon Ribbentrop on 23 August 1939 and in 1940-41, the NKPS transferred an additional seven prairies. When the Germans invaded in the summer of 1941 there were thus 16 S class informer Latvia, 11 of which were taken into DR-Ost stock. Five S worked from ex LVD MPDs in the 1950s but were all transferred to industry in 1959. The photograph shows a well-kept Cks.l48 in the 1930s.

Toms Altbergs collection .

P 36-0176 has just come off a Leningrad - Moscow train and is being serviced on Kalinin MPD. 1959.

J.N. Westwood

A pair of P 3 6s pull out of Leningrad in 1959 with a long distance train to Kislovodsk in the Caucasus.

J.N. Westwood