In 1956 the USSR stopped producing steam engines and official policy was to phase them out by 1970. As with most official plans in the country, this one overran a little and a second official end of steam was announced for 1987, when the number of locos stood at over 6000. Some of these were sold as scrap to Germany and Korea but many were stored as a ‘strategic reserve’ in remote sidings and used very occasionally for shunting work; there are some to be seen along the Trans-Siberian line (see the Route Guide for locations). In 2000, however, it was decided not to retain steam engines within these strategic military reserves so numbers are now falling fast. Each of the country’s 32 railway administrations is allowed to keep just 10 steam engines so now there are probably no more than 320 working steam locos in the whole of Russia. In Northern China there are numerous steam engines still at work.
In 1836 Russia’s first locomotive, a Hackworth 2-2-2, was delivered to St Petersburg to pull the Tsar’s private carriages over the 23km (14 miles) of six-foot gauge track to his palace at Tsarskoye Selo. The Russians have always been (and still are) conservative by nature when it comes to buying or building engines. Usually large numbers of a few standard locomotives have been ordered so there’s not much of a range to be seen today. They seem to be uniformly large, standing up to 5m (17ft) high, and larger than British locos, partly because the Russian gauge is almost 9cm (31/2 inches) wider than that used in Britain.
They are numbered separately by classes, not in a single series and not by railway regions. If variations of the class have been built, they are given an additional letter after the main class letter. Thus, for example, the first type of 0-10-0 freight locomotive was Class E and those of this class built in Germany were Class Eg. Classes you may see in Siberia include the following (Roman alphabet class letters given in brackets; * = very rare):
- Class O (O) The first freight trains on the Trans-Siberian route were pulled by these long-boilered 0-8-0 locos (55 tons) which date back to 1889. The ‘O’ in the class name stands for Osnovnoi Tip meaning ‘basic type’. Production ceased in 1923 but as late as 1958 there were 1500 of these locomotives still at work.
- Class C (S)* 2-6-2 (75 tons) A highly successful passenger engine. ‘S’ stands for Sormovo, where these locos were built from 1911. Class Cy (Su) (‘u’ for usileny, meaning ‘strengthened’) was developed from the former class and in production from 1926 to 1951.
- Class E (Ye) 2-10-0 1500 Ye 2-10-0s were imported from the USA in 1914.
- Class Ey/Em/Ep (Cyrillic text) (Eu/Em/Er)* (subclasses of the old type (E) 0-10-0, 80 tons, built in Russia from 1926 to 1952. The old type E was also produced in Germany and Sweden, as Esh and Eg subclasses.
- Class Ea (YeA)* 2-10-0 (90 tons) Over 2000 were built in the USA between 1944 and 1947 and shipped across the Pacific.
- Class l (Cyrillic text) (L) 2-10-0 (103 tons) About 4130 were built between 1945 and 1956.
- Class P-36 (P36) 4-8-4 (133 tons) 251 were built between 1950 and 1956 – the last express passenger type built for Soviet Railways. ‘Skyliner’-style, fitted with large smoke-deflectors, and painted green with a cream stripe. Preserved examples at Sharya, Tayga, Sibirtsevo, Skovorodino, Belogorsk, Mogzon and Chernyshevsk.
Classes O, C/Cy, E (O, S/Su, Ye) have all disappeared from the steam dumps but you will see the occasional one on a plinth.
For more information refer to the comprehensive Soviet Locomotive Types – The Union Legacy by AJ Heywood and IDC Button (1995, Frank Stenvalls/Luddenden Press). There’s also a good deal of information about Russian trains on the internet; a good place to start is www.transsib.ru/Eng/ – the Trans-Siberian Railway Web Encyclopedia.
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