The history of the Russian state and the definition of its borders are connected with the development of the Russian North and the development of communication routes in this territory. North Western Siberia has always played and continues to play a significant economic and political role for Russia. At the end of the 19th century, the Russian Empire was experiencing a real railway boom. The railways built during this period connected Central Russia with the outskirts. The most important of them, the Trans-Siberian Railway, stretching from Chelyabinsk to Vladivostok (1892-1916), became a connecting link in the active development of the southern territories of Siberia.
Construction idea railway with the prospect of further access to the Bering Strait and the possibility of connecting with Alaska appeared during the reign of Alexander II.
IN late XIX- at the beginning of the 20th century, a number of projects and ideas appeared related to the construction of a railway in the Arctic region in the direction of Arkhangelsk - Obdorsk - Yakutsk with its extension to Chukotka. Such a highway could become an addition to the Northern Sea Route (NSR).
The first highway project in the direction of Indigirskaya Bay - Salekhard - Turukhansk - Yakutsk - Okhotsk was proposed in 1907. For the first time, this highway, along with the Trans-Siberian Railway, was officially presented on the map of the long-term development of railways of the USSR, approved in 1924 by the Council of Labor and Defense.
At the end of the Great Patriotic War The Arctic Research Institute justified the need for the construction of strategically designated Main Northern Sea Route facilities.
The resolution of the Council of Ministers of April 22, 1947 provided for the construction in the Gulf of Ob on Kamenny Cape seaport. It was planned to connect a railway to it from the Vorkuta area from the Pechora Mainline, which already existed by that time. By the end of 1948, train traffic was opened on the Chum - Labytnangi section. At the height of construction, it became clear that the Gulf of Ob was unsuitable for strategic purposes due to its shallow waters. On January 29, 1949, Resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 348-135ss was adopted on the liquidation of construction on the Yamal Peninsula, the transfer of the head port and other objects of the Main Northern Sea Route to Igarka, on the construction of the Salekhard - Igarka railway 1263 km long with ferry and ice crossings across the Ob and Yenisei . It was decided to move the port to Igarka and build the Polar Highway Chum - Salekhard - Igarka. Construction was envisaged with simplified technical conditions. The main purpose of the road is military-strategic support for the northern borders of the country. The Polar Highway, as well as domestic construction in general, is characterized by: length, significant volumes of work, undeveloped areas and difficult natural conditions.
About the technical characteristics of the line Salekhard - Igarka
The total length of the line is 1300 km (by 1953, about 700 km had been completely built), a single-track line with sidings at 9-14 km, stations at 40-60 km, a total of 106 sidings, 28 stations. The average speed of a train with stops at sidings is about 40 km/h, including acceleration and braking. The traffic size was set at 6 pairs of trains per day. The main depots were planned at the stations Salekhard, Nadym, Pur, Taz, Ermakovo, Igarka; revolving depots - at the stations Yarudey, Kataran, Turukhan, Yeniseiskaya.
People called the Salekhard-Igarka road "Stalinka", and the pace of its construction was amazing - about 100 km per year. Already in the spring of 1949, the route was extended along Krasnoyarsk region, in the tundra and taiga zone, stations and depots were built, bridges were built. The construction was carried out by production columns of two construction departments of GULZhDS - 501 and 503. The work was carried out according to a two-beam organizational scheme. By 1952-1953 The builders were supposed to meet on the banks of the Pur River, approximately in the middle of the 1,300-kilometer route. To build a grandiose facility on permafrost in a high-quality manner in a short time is an unrealistic task, and therefore it was decided to build the road according to low standards and with a huge concentration of labor.
By 1953, work traffic was already taking place on the Salekhard-Nadym section and further up to 620 km, on the 970-1155 km section between the Ermakovo and Yanov Stan stations, and on the 620-640 km and 1400-1482 km section, the roadbed was poured. There was a ferry and ice crossing across the Ob River, and there was a low-water bridge on the Nadym River. In a short time, 17.5 km of track and a depot were built on the Taz station site, and the entire population moved to the village of Sidorovsk.
After Stalin's death, the grandiose construction project was initially mothballed and then stopped, with the exception of a few small sections.
After construction was completed (Resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR 895-383ss of March 25, 1953), some of the material assets were removed, but the main equipment and machinery remained in place; it was unprofitable to remove them.
In 1956, the Chum - Labytnangi section was transferred to the jurisdiction of the USSR Ministry of Railways, and the eastern part - to the Norilsk Mining and Metallurgical Combine
Currently, the road presents a picture of all conceivable and inconceivable types of destruction. The name "Dead Road" couldn't describe it more accurately. current state- the remains of a rail track, dilapidated embankments, rusting remains of steam locomotives and carriages.
Subgrade
The roadbed of the “Dead Road” is basically a low (up to 2 meters) embankment. When crossing watercourses, which are found in large numbers on the route, the height of the embankment increases to 6-8 meters in the western sections and over 10 meters in the eastern sections. To pass small streams under the embankment, plank and log pipes of triangular cross-section were built. To cross small rivers and beds that dry out in the summer, small bridges were built on wooden piles and rack supports 6-25 m long with spans made of wood, rail packages and solid metal beams, mainly made in Germany. The large low-water wooden bridge across the Nadym River was finally demolished only in the 70s. Bridges across the Barabanikha and Makovskaya rivers are three- and four-span metal on concrete supports. Their length is 60 and 100 m, their height is 12-15 and 15 m, respectively, above the water's edge. The bridge over the Turukhan River - the most significant structure - is not completed. Bank abutments were erected and three river concrete supports were brought to working marks. The builders left, abandoning concrete work. At the very top of the supports, where the ice drift does not reach, blackened plank formwork is still preserved. The most typical destruction of the railway track is blowing, subsidence, and abyss. The most significant destruction occurred in watercourses. The washouts, reaching the base of the embankment and thus reaching 10-15 m in depth, are tens of meters along the edge of the embankment. Almost all small bridges were pushed up several meters above the embankment, forming huge humps. Large road bridges were seriously damaged. The sleepers have rotted, the rails are bent and hang above the track, heavily corroded by rust.
Along with the rails of the Kuznetsk rolling mill of the 30s, rails of pre-revolutionary production were widely used, up to the oldest and lightest types weighing 30.9 kg/m. 16 types of domestic rails were discovered, including 12 types of pre-revolutionary rails dating back to the 19th century. IN the greatest number there are rails produced by the Nadezhda plant (M.-Kazanskaya railway, 1914 KZD, 1911, etc.), state-owned factories of Prince Beloselsky (1901, etc.), Novorossiysk society (1909), Nizhny Tagil factories of Demidov ( West Ural, Moscow-Nizhny Novgorod railway 1870), as well as the rails of the Ural Mining Railway. d. 1877
The path, unique in its weakness, was laid on a section of the river. Taz. There are no intermediate fastenings along the length of the rail, the rails are sewn to the sleepers, and there are gaskets only at the joints. The plates are flat, made of a thin steel plate with traces of home-grown forging, secured only with outside rail. Inside, instead of metal plates, wooden blocks are used.
Mostly low-power pre-revolutionary steam locomotives were used during construction. It was possible to discover 11 steam locomotives from 1904-1907, about 80 carriages. Many cars were built by well-known domestic enterprises - the Sormovo plant in Nizhny Novgorod, "Russian-Baltic Carriage Plant", in Riga, "Engine" in Revel, "Phoenix" in Riga, Mytishchi Carriage Plant, as well as the Pinsk workshops of the Polesie Railways and a number of others. There are carriages of Austrian, Czech, German, and Hungarian production.
Today, interest in railway construction in the Northern regions is growing again. And the revival of the “dead road” Salekhard - Igarka, as an integral part of the Circumpolar Highway from Vorkuta to Uelen (with continuation to Alaska through a tunnel under the Bering Strait), can become an important link in the creation of intercontinental transport corridors in Eurasia.
Everyone remembers with what enthusiasm earlier in the 70s our country received the news about the construction of the BAM. Impact construction, the shortest access to the Pacific ports, the road to new fields... But few know that BAM had a kind of northern twin - the Transpolar Mainline, the Chum-Salekhard-Igarka railway, which was built at an accelerated pace in 1949-53 and just as quickly forgotten in subsequent years.
It is necessary to connect the deep-water seaport in the geographical center of the country, in Igarka, with the country's railway system! It is necessary to facilitate the export of nickel from Norilsk! Give work to the hundreds of thousands of prisoners who filled the camps and prisons after
the end of the war is also necessary! And in the deserted expanses of the tundra, from the Ob and from the Yenisei, columns of prisoners stretched towards each other. The western part is the 501st construction site of the Gulag. Eastern part - 503rd.
In 1949, the Soviet leadership decided to build the Igarka-Salekhard polar railway. The prisoners built the road. The total planned length of the road is 1263 km. The road runs 200 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle.
Construction problems rested not only on climatic and geographical problems - permafrost and a ten-month winter. The route had to cross many streams, rivers and large rivers. Wooden or concrete bridges were built across small rivers; crossing the Ob was carried out in the summer by heavy ferries, and in the winter by rails and sleepers laid directly on the ice. The ice was specially strengthened for this purpose.
The northern regions of Siberia are characterized by the existence of winter roads - temporary roads that are laid in winter, after snow falls, and numerous swamps and rivers are covered with ice. In order to make road crossings across rivers more reliable, crossing points are additionally frozen - water is poured over them, increasing the thickness of the ice. Railway ice crossings were not just watered, logs and sleepers were frozen in them. Construction of ice crossings for railway transport- a unique invention of Soviet engineers, this probably never happened either before or after the construction of the Igarka-Salekhard road.
Construction was carried out simultaneously on both sides, on the Ob side - 501 construction projects and on the Yenisei side - 503 construction sites.
The grand opening of one of the sections of the road. 1952
Camps were built along the single-track along the entire route at a distance of 5 - 10 km from each other. These camps still stand today. Many of them are perfectly preserved.
It was almost impossible to escape from the camps. The main road was controlled by security. The only path to freedom lay to the Yenisei, then up it 1700 km to Krasnoyarsk or north 700 km to the mouth of the Yenisei or to Dudinka and Norilsk, which were also built by prisoners and heavily guarded.
Camp near the river Penzeryakha.
The door of the punishment cell.
Cell bars.
Preserved cauldrons from the catering department.
Punishment cell.
Everything needed for construction, from bricks and nails to a steam locomotive, was imported from the mainland. For construction site 503, cargo was delivered first along the Trans-Siberian Railway to Krasnoyarsk, then down the Yenisei in the summer by river boats.
Also, barges brought rails, steam locomotives, wagons, and railcars, which still stand in the tundra.
In the post-war years, there were not enough rails in the USSR. Rails removed from existing lines were imported. The rails and spikes of the road have a wide variety of production dates - starting in 1879.
Timber also had to be imported. At the latitude of the road construction there is tundra and forest-tundra, there is no construction timber. It was specially harvested to the south and floated down the Yenisei in rafts. IN winter time, after the end of navigation, large supplies of goods from the mainland were impossible. Navigation on the Yenisei lasts 3-4 months.
Establishing an ice crossing.
The lack of sufficient material support forced a constant search for unconventional engineering and construction solutions. The roofs of the barracks in the camps are not covered with slate or tin. For roofs, wood blocks were specially split along the grain. They were splitting, not sawing. 40 years after construction, such roofs continued to perform their functions.
By 1953 - the year of Stalin's death - more than 900 kilometers of single-track railway were built by prisoners. After the death of the Leader, construction was hastily curtailed. Camps, locomotives, bridges, and other property were simply abandoned in the tundra. The great construction project, which took the lives of more than 100,000 people, ended in failure.
Over the next few years, a small part of the property was removed; in some areas adjacent to the Ob and Yenisei, the rails were removed.
42 billion rubles were invested in construction.
The transpolar highway today. The Salekhard-Nadym section.
Among the many Stalinist “great construction projects” (White Sea Canal, Volgokanal, Kotlas - Vorkuta railway, sections Baikal-Amur Mainline etc.) the epic construction of the Salekhard-Igarka road is particularly ill-conceived and obviously senseless. Stalin's "construction of the century" railway track along the Arctic Circle, turned out to be of no use to anyone. The historical ruins are fascinating. In a huge country, the ruins are endless. One of these monuments of our recent history stretches for hundreds of kilometers along the Arctic Circle. This is the abandoned railway Salekhard - Igarka, which is also called the “Dead Road”.
The construction of the Salekhard-Igarka railway, in 1947-1953, can be considered one of the most utopian projects of the Gulag.
In 1949, the Soviet leadership decided to build the Igarka-Salekhard polar railway. It was built by prisoners from 1947 to 1953 under a veil of complete secrecy. The first information leaked at the end of the Khrushchev Thaw.
The total planned length of the road is 1263 km. The road runs 200 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle. Construction problems rested not only on climatic and geographical problems - permafrost and a ten-month winter. The route had to cross many streams, rivers and large rivers. Wooden or concrete bridges were built across small rivers; crossing the Ob was carried out in the summer by heavy ferries, and in the winter by rails and sleepers laid directly on the ice. The ice was specially strengthened for this purpose.
The northern regions of Siberia are characterized by the existence of winter roads - temporary roads that are laid in winter, after snow falls, and numerous swamps and rivers are covered with ice. In order to make road crossings across rivers more reliable, crossing points are additionally frozen - water is poured over them, increasing the thickness of the ice. Railway ice crossings were not just watered, logs and sleepers were frozen in them. The construction of ice crossings for railway transport is a unique invention of Soviet engineers; this probably never happened either before or after the construction of the Igarka-Salekhard road.
The development of the North with the help of railways was a long-standing dream of Russian engineers. Even before the revolution, projects for a highway through Siberia and Chukotka to America were being developed. True, then no one imagined that forced labor would be used to fulfill grandiose plans.
After the war, Stalin continued to transform the country into an impregnable fortress. Then the idea arose of moving the main port of the Northern Sea Route from Murmansk to the interior of the country and building a railway approach to it. At first, the port was supposed to be built on the shore of the Ob Bay near Cape Kamenny, but the construction of a railway line with a design length of 710 km, having reached the Labytnagi station on the shore of the Ob River opposite Salekhard within a year, faltered: it turned out that the sea depth was insufficient for large ships, and the swampy tundra did not allow even build dugouts. It was decided to move the future port even further east - to Igarka - and to build a 1260 km long Salekhard - Igarka railway with ferry crossings across the Ob and Yenisei. In the future it was planned to extend the line to Chukotka.
In the Gulag system there was a Main Directorate for camp railway construction, which numbered more than 290 thousand prisoners alone. The best engineers worked there.
There were no projects yet, research was still underway, and trains with prisoners were already arriving. On the head sections of the route, camps (“columns”) were located every 510 km. At the height of construction, the number of prisoners reached 120 thousand. At first they surrounded themselves with barbed wire, then they built dugouts and barracks. To meagerly feed this army, they developed waste-free technology. We found abandoned warehouses of dried peas somewhere, compressed over many years into briquettes in which mice had made holes. Special women's brigades They broke the briquettes, cleaned out the mouse droppings with knives and threw them into the cauldron...
Camps were built along the single-track along the entire route at a distance of 5 - 10 km from each other. These camps still stand today. Many of them are perfectly preserved. It was almost impossible to escape from the camp. The main road was controlled by security. The only path to freedom lay to the Yenisei, then up it 1700 km to Krasnoyarsk or north 700 km to the mouth of the Yenisei or to Dudinka and Norilsk, which were also built by prisoners and heavily guarded.
People of the older generation remember the expression “five hundred is a fun construction site.” It came from the numbers of two large construction departments specially formed in the Ministry of Internal Affairs - No. 501 (Obsky, covering the western half of the highway from Salekhard to Pur) and No. 503 (Yenisei - from Pur to Igarka). The latter’s chief, Colonel Vladimir Barabanov, became the inventor of a system of credits that somewhat shortened the terms of camp labor for shock workers.
"Five hundred-cheerful" - typical example pioneer construction on lightweight technical specifications: guide slope (maximum slope for which the composition and weight of trains are designed) - 0.009% minimum radii of curves - up to 600 m, and on temporary bypasses - up to 300. The line was designed single-track, with sidings every 9-14 km and stations - 40 -60 km.
From Salekhard to Igarka, 134 separate points were planned - the main depots were set up at the stations Salekhard, Nadym, Pur, Taz, Ermakovo and Igarka. At the stations Yarudey, Pangody, Kataral, Uruhan - turnaround. Traction distances (distances traveled by trains without changing the locomotive) were designed for medium-power freight locomotives of the "Eu" type and ranged from 88 to 247 km. The estimated weight of the conventional train was 1550 tons at an average speed of 40 km/h, throughput 6 pairs of trains per day.
The equipment, along with the prisoners, was transported on ocean-going “lighters” from the north to big water. After the “death” of the road, it was more expensive to remove anything from isolated areas, and a kind of museum of the then technology of camp railway construction remained there.
Most of the work, including excavation, was done manually. The soil, which turned out to be unfavorable almost along the entire route - dusty sands, permafrost, - were transported in wheelbarrows. Often its entire trains went into the swamp, as if into a hole, and the embankments and excavations that had already been built slid and required constant filling. Stone and coarse sand were imported from the Urals. And yet the construction progressed.
By 1953 - the year of Stalin's death - more than 900 kilometers of single-track railway were built by prisoners. After the death of the Leader, construction was hastily curtailed. Camps, locomotives, bridges, and other property were simply abandoned in the tundra. The great construction project, which took the lives of more than 300,000 people, ended in failure. Over the next few years, a small part of the property was removed; in some areas adjacent to the Ob and Yenisei, the rails were removed.
And this despite the fact that financing was carried out at actual costs, without an approved project and estimates, which were submitted to the government only on March 1, 1952. Total expenses were supposed to be 6.5 billion rubles, of which 3 billion were expenses of previous years. It was assumed that through traffic to Igarka would open at the end of 1954, and the line would be put into permanent operation in 1957. However, the documents were never approved. After the launch of the Salekhard-Nadym section, it became clear that there was no one and nothing to transport along the new road. Construction was supported only by Stalin’s directive, which was not canceled by anyone, and as soon as the leader passed away, it was stopped by a decree of the USSR Council of Ministers of March 25, 1953. In a matter of months, the road was deserted: the prisoners were taken to the Urals. They also tried to remove equipment (for example, rails from the Ermakovo – Yanov Stan section), but much was simply abandoned. Everything was written off, except for the telephone line, which went to the Ministry of Communications, and the Chum-Labytnangi railway line, which the Ministry of Railways accepted into permanent operation in 1955. And the road died.
After the discovery of large oil and gas reserves in the North, new stage its development. But the railway came to Urengoy and Nadym not from the west, not from Salekhard, but along the meridian - from Tyumen through Surgut. It turned out to be almost impossible to use the remains of the “Dead Road”: new lines were built according to different technical conditions, more straightforward, and there was absolutely no need to fit into the winding sections of the “Stalinist” route, even where it passed nearby.
Economists subsequently calculated that the decision to abandon construction at such a stage of readiness led to losses for the country’s budget much greater than if the road had been completed, not to mention its promising continuation to the Norilsk industrial region. The fate of individual sections of the road varies greatly. The head section of Chum-Labytnangi was accepted into permanent operation by the Ministry of Railways in 1955. The fully completed Salekhard-Nadym line was abandoned and was not restored. Until the early 90s, signalmen servicing that same telegraph and telephone line rode along it on a semi-homemade handcar. The section from Pura (now Korotchaevo station) to Nadym was restored by the Ministry of Oil and Gas Industry in the 70s, and in the early 80s a new highway came to Korotchaevo from the south - from Tyumen. The condition of the route from Korotchaevo to Nadym was unimportant; in the mid-90s, passenger trains from the south were shortened to Korotchaevo station, and only in 2003 the Korotchaevo-Novy Urengoy (formerly Yagelnaya) section was put into permanent operation. WITH eastern section The roads and rails were removed in 1964 for the needs of the Norilsk plant.
Only the “island” section in the area of the Taz River remained practically untouched - about 20 km from the Sedelnikovo pier on the right bank. towards Ermakovo, with a branch to the Dolgoe depot and the ballast quarry. It was on this site, the most inaccessible of all the others, that the track, buildings, depot and four Ov steam locomotives - the famous “sheep” of pre-revolutionary construction - remained almost untouched. On the tracks near the depot there are several dozen cars - mostly flat cars, but there are also a few covered ones. One of the cars came here from post-war Germany, after being converted to the domestic 1520 mm gauge. 15 km. from Dolgoye, the remains of a camp have been preserved, and not far from the depot, on the other bank of the stream, there are the remains of a settlement of civilian workers and the construction administration, consisting of almost two dozen buildings, as well as a wooden ferry lying on the shore.
Historians and journalists are all arguing about the reasons for this construction. Some consider the polar railway and sea port on Yamal near Cape Kamenny to be Stalin’s senseless undertaking, which is confirmed by the decision in January 1949 to build, instead of a port in the Gulf of Ob, a port in Igarka and, accordingly, a railway from Igarka, as well as the subsequent one after his death Stalin in March 1953 - the liquidation of all construction.
Others explain the need to build these facilities from a military-strategic point of view. Pirate raids of the battleship Admiral Scheer and submarines fascist Germany in the Kara Sea and in the Ob Bay showed the vulnerability of the Siberian Arctic. Therefore, in addition to the seaport and ship repair plant, it was planned to create a secret base for the Soviet navy in Yamal, for which they were going to dig a canal from the port pier to a deep-water lake, which would turn into a bay for sheltering submarines in case of bad weather.
Creator new empire Stalin was least concerned about the economic feasibility of gigantic projects. The main thing for him was the greatness and grandeur of his plans. From this - Chkalov flights, ice expeditions, launches into the stratosphere, ski and horse treks. Material costs and human casualties do not count. The resources of slave labor and cannon fodder seemed inexhaustible.
Thousands of people froze, died from exhaustion and overwork on this route, marked only with a conditional direction - their bodies were simply buried without coffins, tying only a tag with a personal file number to their legs... the corpses were barely covered with earth.
During construction, 75 workers' settlements, 35 station buildings and 11 warehouse buildings were built in the tundra and along river banks. The largest settlements where civilian construction workers lived were Ermakovo and Yanov Stan. The population of Ermakovo was about 15 thousand people. In the free settlements there were village councils, children's institutions, schools, hospitals, clinics and other infrastructure facilities. Life has changed in the old villages, in Salekhard.
After Stalin's death in the fall of 1953, a hasty evacuation of people and equipment from the disgraced route began. According to eyewitnesses, it looked more like an escape. In Ermakovo alone, 20 carriages with various electrical equipment, thousands of cubic meters of lumber, dozens of steam locomotives, and hundreds of carriages were written off and destroyed. Two power plants, 7 boiler houses, a woodworking plant, and repair shops with all their equipment were abandoned.
Unlike other “great construction projects of communism,” the Northern Railway turned out to be a dead road. Great amount material assets were never removed (due to the distance from settlements and lack of transport). Much of the equipment, furniture, and clothing was destroyed before the eyes of the residents of the railway villages. What remained were abandoned locomotives, empty barracks, kilometers of barbed wire and thousands of dead construction prisoners, the cost of their lives beyond any accounting.
Sunday repost! On this hot day, we remembered the post dated March 30, 2012 about the Dead Road “Salekhard” - “Nadym” - Construction No. 501. It was an expedition to Salekhard “City on the Arctic Circle”. I combined two posts into this material.
Well, let's get back to the expedition. After lunch on the 7th day, after a good steam in the bathhouse, we moved towards the winter road, stopping at a small museum along the way. . Accordingly, while we were traditionally stupid, we lost a lot of time, and we already left for the winter road in the late afternoon.
First, the road descends onto the ice of the Ob and runs along the river for a couple of kilometers, then forks. The winter road goes to the left to Yar-Sale, and we go to the right to Nadym. Here the first surprise awaited me (I was driving at that moment): I don’t know how to drive on riffles. On the first slightly difficult section, I planted our minibus well in the snow. We dug out and pulled it out with the help of the Skorokhod on the L200. While they were doing this, a column of Urals overtook us (offering help), who were traveling to the 150th kilometer of the winter road, where the base of road workers is located.
We have remembered these Urals more than once, since they left behind a completely broken road, along which it was quite difficult to drive. And if you don’t know how, then it’s generally pitiable. Having parked the car for the second time (we dug it out ourselves), I gave the steering wheel to Vita - fortunately, he clearly has more experience in this type of driving. Or just talent :) By the way, it was already completely dark, we were tired as hell, but we continued to stubbornly crawl towards Nadym.
In the darkness we encountered the first traces of the 501st construction site - the remains of an embankment and some kind of bridge. After some time, the winter road reached the Dead Road route and then walked next to its embankment, through the forest. Here, at the 70th kilometer, we encountered the fear and horror of the entire trip. Here the fate of the entire expedition was decided...
A small river flowing from the forest overflowed in front of the embankment and formed a frozen lake. With a good slope towards the embankment. Right in the center there are two huge holes in the ice, where the Ural fell through the hub (the depth of the hole was set folk method poking it with a stick). On the left, near the forest, one could drive through, but one had to climb there on clear and very slippery ice. On the right, the ice ended, and there was a meter-long cliff into which some truck had fallen, leaving beautiful imprints of the sidewalls of the wheels on the snow parapet. In general, at that moment it seemed to us that we couldn’t get through here.
While we were deciding what to do, a lone truck caught up with us, carrying workers to the base. The driver, a young guy, asked why we got up and if we needed help. We said no, since he didn’t have a helicopter :) He chuckled, wished him a good trip and overcame these ice holes without any problems. At this point we felt completely sad, and we decided to return to the 65th kilometer, where there is a small area. We'll spend the night there and decide what to do next.
To top off the situation, Skorokhod’s plastic canister of diesel fuel leaked and doused his entire hypercube and all its insides with diesel fuel. This completely knocked us down and we were in a very depressed state. We decided that in the morning we would return to that place and try again with a fresh mind and daylight. If it doesn’t work out, then we’ll return to Salekhard and use another winter road to go back.
So, it’s the morning of the eighth day of the expedition. We met him at the 65th kilometer of the Salekhard-Nadym winter road.
For general information, it will be enough for you to read Wikipedia, where an inquisitive reader can independently find material of interest to him. And using Google and Yandex, in general, is not so difficult.
1. L200 Skorokhod and Yurievich. The hypercube is open for drying, all things were dumped at night and left. A morning inspection showed that the diesel fuel did not particularly harm them. Some things had to be thrown away, but most of the things in the center of the cube were not damaged at all. Diesel flowed down the walls of the structure and wet only what was lying on the edge.
2. If I remember correctly, it was one of the coldest nights of our trip, something like -20 or -25. But we were generally lucky with the weather: during the whole time there were no terrible colds or snowstorms.
3. This hill is the remains of a railway embankment.
4. And the overgrown embankment itself. In August 1952, work traffic, including passenger traffic, was opened on the Salekhard-Nadym section.
5. Winter road. That part of it that runs through open areas is often swept away. It is quite difficult to drive on such rifts of loose snow. And forest areas or areas along the railway embankment are passable even for passenger cars. According to locals, sometimes there are seasons when you can even drive a nine on the winter road, but this is very rare.
6. Morning. We have breakfast, wash up and get ready to go storm that stupid place. Nobody wants to return to Salekhard.
7. A convoy of three Urals, which are transporting insulation to Salekhard, stops nearby. We ask them for directions - they say that there are difficult sections in open spaces. Well, let's go.
8. One of the many small bridges on the railway line. Incomprehensible construction in the permafrost zone, on the border of zero degrees. Any intervention in the ground leads to a disruption in the thermal balance, and the permafrost instantly melts, turning into a swamp. And the structures themselves are susceptible to swelling. The permafrost does not like it when something is stuck into it - it squeezes out the wooden piles of the bridge supports. Most of the bridges on the highway are temporary, built of wood.
9. The coastal abutment of the bridge is a wooden well filled with sand. By the way, we overcame the place where we got up at night without any problems during the day. Alas, I didn’t take any photos then. :(
10. There once was a sand embankment here, which was completely washed away.
11. Rails for the track were collected all over the country. The earliest rail that was found on the construction site dates back to 1877!
12. Until now, historians argue and speculate why Stalin authorized this construction - without any research, projects (it was more or less ready only by 1952, when construction was nearing completion) and justification. In fact, he personally ordered the construction of this road. You can read more about different points of view on Wikipedia.
13. It’s surprising that an iron span was used for such a small bridge.
14. Typical view of a winter road in the forest part.
15. With the start of railway construction, a telegraph communication line was built from Salekhard to Igarka. It was maintained in working order until 1992. Its workers used the railway for their transportation. After 1992, both the telegraph line and the railway were completely abandoned.
16. Our expedition vehicle - WV California - best car for winter travel. I have already provided a link to Viti’s review for the apex more than once, where you can read in detail about all the advantages and disadvantages of this camper.
17. Miraculously preserved semaphore.
18. The entire road was built according to a very lightweight version, so that a steam locomotive with carriages could somehow pass through. Construction was carried out in terrible climatic conditions. And at the same time, the designers and builders had little idea of how to subsequently operate all this in permafrost conditions. The first winters showed that bridges swell up to half a meter, the road surface moves in waves and is washed away. All structures must be strengthened and be able to drain water, otherwise you can easily drown in a “man-made” swamp.
19. Our expedition.
20. Very easy crossing in an open area. Of course, the remains of the construction site should be explored in the summer, when it is not hidden under the snow, but in the summer you can only explore it on foot. By the way, there have already been many such expeditions.
21. In addition to all the construction difficulties that I have already described, it is worth mentioning that there were no building materials at all. Well, that is. there was none at all. Unless it was possible to wash a little sand to fill the embankment. And so - everything, from metal to wood and stone, was brought from the mainland.
22. I photographed this bridge skeleton while walking. Look how he swelled!
23. Let's go back a little, to the morning. After we crossed the ice holes, some local jeep caught up with us. Four stern men came out, greeted us, asked who we were, where we were from, and where we were going. They advised what to see along the way and what to expect. After which one introduced himself as a police chief from Nadym (he did not show any documents) and asked if we had weapons. We answered that no - he really wasn’t there. He also asked who passed in front of us, who we saw. Of course, we talked about cars. Our California especially aroused everyone's curiosity. Then they took machine guns out of the trunk, got into their jeep and, wishing us a good trip, drove on. This is where I felt a bit uneasy. A little further we met them again, exchanged greetings and parted ways completely. And other local comrades suggested this place - former camp prisoners who built the road.
24. Construction began in 1947. Up to 80,000 people worked on the construction of the road. 42 billion rubles were invested in construction.
25. As they say, the road is built on bones. No one knows how many people have perished in this land.
26. In the summer - a vile creature that almost devoured you alive. In winter it is bitterly cold.
27. According to some recollections of engineers, they themselves did not understand why they were building this road. Now there is gas there, but then there was NOTHING at all.
28. Now we can say unequivocally that the road would not have been built on time. And taking into account how the construction proceeded and what the conditions were there, it would have taken many more years to bring it to normal operational condition... If such a road was needed then with such forces - it is impossible to say for sure.
29. But let's return to our expedition. One of the features of our car was the presence of an incredible number of pockets, shelves, drawers and cabinets. Here in the front door pocket you can easily fit 70-200 and a second nickel with 16-35 mm.
30. On the windshield there is a camera that takes road video, and GoPro, which filmed Vitya and me. For navigation - an Asus netbook with OZ and General Staff maps. The video from the expedition can be considered buried. :(Alas, no one got around to collecting it.
31. We met the evening not far from Nadym, but still on the winter road. Here he comes for the most part along the railway embankment, bypassing bridges on ice crossings. At night we finally entered Nadym and immediately fell asleep.
32. It was 300 kilometers of emptiness. There are no settlements here anymore, no cellular communications. Only winter road traffic. In the middle, at the 150th kilometer, there is a base of road workers who maintain it in normal condition. We overcame this, in fact, the most difficult section in a day and a half.
In March 1953, immediately after Stalin's death, construction was stopped. There was an attempt at conservation, but when they realized how much it would cost, they simply abandoned everything. Subsequently, the section from New Urengoy to Stary Nadym was completed, where traffic is at least supported.
Overall, the Dead Road left me with a depressing impression. To pour so much money and people's lives into such a construction project and abandon everything... As I said above, we are unlikely to know why Stalin decided to start this construction project. In my opinion, the time had not yet come for her...
And some links for self-study:
Dead road. Construction No. 501-No. 503
Internet road museum
501st construction site on Wikimapia. In high-resolution sections, the road route can be traced very well
"Dead Road" Small addition
It turns out that the folder on the Mac did not contain several photographs that I wanted to show in the last post about construction site No. 501. On the one hand, the material has already been posted, on the other hand, these photographs will be of interest to those who love various technical solutions. So let's see. Railway bridge over the Idyakha River.
1. As I already said, there were big problems with building materials at the construction site. Everything had to be brought from the mainland.
2. There was a terrible shortage of metal in the country, but it had to be spent on large bridges, otherwise there was no other way. But they tried to make everything else from wood, which was also imported, since the local forest was not suitable for such construction.
3. The coastal abutment and overpass are made entirely of wood.
4. Wooden technical genius.
5. In the future, these temporary structures were supposed to be replaced with reinforced concrete structures...
6. It’s not a bit sharp, but you can see how the metal span rests on a wooden abutment. No hinge supports to compensate for thermal expansion!
7. A little more winter tundra.
10. An excellent illustration of how permafrost squeezes out the wooden bridge piles.
11. Nature here is very harsh.
But all this pales in comparison to some wooden bridges built in different time. Here's what came up on Google:
Viaduct across the Verruga Gorge in the Andes, a filigree structure made of wood. From here.
Bridge in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Hamilton Railroad Bridge
And... drum roll!
From here.
I immediately remember the ancient toy Build Bridges and its sequel Pontifex (first and second)
Everyone has heard about the Gulag camps, this darkest symbol of the dark side of the USSR. But few people saw them - unlike the Nazi concentration camps, they were rarely built permanently and for the most part disappeared almost without a trace, remaining only in the most remote corners of the Far North, where, apart from prisoners and guards, no one had ever lived, and there was no one to dismantle the abandoned barracks and there is no need. One of these places is the Dead Road, the unfinished Transpolar Highway between Salekhard and Nadym: the ruins of camps, clearly visible, are inextricably adjacent to the bridges and sidings shown. I decided to cover the camp theme separately from the railway itself, so let’s go through this route again.
We saw the first camp a little further than the first bridge - at the next turn of the road in the forest above Poluy, this view opened up: the ruins of wooden buildings, including the roof of a food warehouse sticking out of the snow - we encountered such natural refrigerators in the frozen ground more than once along the way:
We made our way to the ruins of the barracks (or what was it?) in knee-deep snow:
And the first thing that caught my eye was what materials it was all built from.
The great Stalinist construction project in the Far North - this very phrase evokes images of barbed wire, sallow people in gray padded jackets, a gloomy guard with a rifle on a log tower and an intellectual frozen in anticipation of a knock on the door in a cold Leningrad apartment. Construction sites No. 501 and 503 were no exception: the Transpolar Railway was laid almost by hand, and 40-45 thousand people worked on its construction at a time, and in the peak year of 1950, even 85 thousand people - more than the entire population of the then Yamalo-Nenets Okrug or present-day Salekhard and Nadym. But contrary to the well-known image of “a dead man under every sleeper,” the 501st Construction in its organization was very different from other Gulag projects. They did not end up here by sentence: Vasily Barabanov, who led the construction until 1951, at whose funeral in 1964 it was no coincidence that many former prisoners took off their hats, called out to the camps of places that were not so gloomy, inviting prisoners to a difficult construction project, the year of which would be counted as one and a half years , and if the plan is exceeded, like two years in the camps Mainland. As a result, in the 501st quarter of the prisoners were political, more than half were domestic prisoners, and only 10-15% were criminals, but all were strictly selected for health reasons and past biography. And although volunteer slaves, when signing up to go to the North, hardly understood what awaited them there, the quality of the labor force and the attitude towards work on Transpolyarka were completely different than on most of the “islands” of the Gulag: the local prisoners were not powerless slaves, but rather fully motivated workers, and Barabanov preferred not to waste such material.
It was better here than in other camps, with supplies - in most camps, according to at least those where there were conscientious leaders, the prisoners were fed to their fill, no worse than in the hungry post-war freedom. But here, in the cold and uninhabited land, it was terrible with housing: trains of prisoners were literally brought “to an open field,” where they themselves first built a perimeter, and then barracks. But even the barracks with thin walls were almost elite housing, and many lived for years in tents, which in winter could only be insulated with a layer of snow, or in dugouts, where in summer there was water right up to the bunks. But in the same icy, damp, mosquito-infested hell lived both civilians from all over the Union (there were more of them at the 503rd Construction site closer to the Yenisei), and specialists (often not having the opportunity to build houses for themselves due to constant movements from object to object) , and security, and coupled with the small number of criminals and the abundance of intelligent political prisoners, the relations themselves at Construction-501 were much more humane. In a summer post about the objects of the 501st in Salekhard, I talked, for example, about the theater that rallied in these camps under the auspices of Barabanov around the famous actor and director (and at that time a prisoner and prisoner) Leonid Obolensky. A lot has been written about the life of the 501st, the most canonical memoirs were left by the “Nadym Count” Apollon Kondartev, and on the same website “Road 501” in the “Library” section you can find a dozen and a half articles. Let's just say that there is much more information about the Transpolyarka camps than about infrastructure and technology.
From Salekhard to Nadym, the road was served by 34 camp points - there were as many of them as there were sidings, but they did not always coincide with the sidings, and apparently the figure was due to the same “step” from object to object - 8-12 kilometers. Detailed review camps with hundreds of photographs are all on the same website, but I will only say that searching for them turned out to be unexpectedly difficult: if the embankment is linear, then the camps are still points that are not always located near the route. In addition, the first quarter from Salekhard Dead Road and completely away from the winter road, but there are still several very interesting camps: “Dagger Cape” (in its barracks the bunks were completely intact), “Prizhim-Gora” with numerous color drawings on the walls of the barracks, “Saber Cape” with a gate made of frame and barbed wire... But also on the road that we drove , finding something is not so easy. Having passed the Russian Field at sunset and descended into the Yarudeya valley, we stopped at a huge camp, into the depths of which well-trodden paths led.
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