501 construction site detailed map. Dead ghost road: the tragic story of construction (66 photos)
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 headed 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 up and pulled it out with the help of a 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 are two huge holes in the ice, where the Ural fell down to the nave (the depth of the hole was determined by the folk method of 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 platform. 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, the WV California, is the 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 - a former camp for prisoners who were building a 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 walks mostly along the railway embankment, avoiding bridges along 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 at different times. 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)
ON THE WAY TO A GLOBAL RAILWAY NETWORK
TKM-World Link will connect Eurasia and America into a single transport system (Fig. 1): from London through Moscow to Anchorage and Washington, Tokyo and Beijing and the like.
Transcontinental Highway across the Bering Strait will become the main element of the transport and energy infrastructure of northeast Russia. Length of new railway tracks from Yakutsk to Cape Uelen will be about 4000 km, and about 2000 km more will need to be built in North America. It is proposed to build a tunnel under the Bering Strait or build a bridge across it.
In 1945 I.V. Stalin discussed the idea of uniting the transport systems of the USSR and the USA, but due to rivalry between the countries, the project turned out to be inappropriate. In the post-war years in the USSR, construction of separate sections of the Circumpolar Railway from Vorkuta to Uelen was carried out and construction of a tunnel to Sakhalin Island (10 km under the Tatar Strait) began, but in 1953 the work was stopped.
1. TRANSPOLAR BACKWAY
Section from Salekhard to Igarka
Construction sites No. 501 and No. 503
1949 – 1953
CONSTRUCTION OF THE POLAR ROAD
SALEKHARD - IGARKA
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE SITE MATERIALS:
Yamalo-Nenets District Museum and Exhibition Complex named after. I.S. Shemanovsky
Sergey MASLAKOV."Beep" (10/22/2005)
TRANSPOLAR HIGHWAY
Was the labor of the forced builders of the Transpolar Railway in vain?
Will the “dead” road come to life?
At the beginning of the 20th century, Academician Mendeleev determined the geographical center of the Russian Empire. It is located on the territory of the Krasnoselkupsky district - on the right bank of the Taz River, one and a half kilometers below the mouth of the Malaya Shirta River. It is the central point between Warsaw and Wellen. And next to the village of Kikke-Akki, the geographical center of the Soviet Union was later determined - the central point between Uellen and Brest. At the end of the 70s, memorial signs were installed in each of these geographical centers by an expedition of the USSR Academy of Sciences. One can imagine the size of this area if the distance between Brest and Warsaw fits within its borders...
In April 1947 year, by resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, a decision was made to begin construction of the railway from Ob to Yenisei length of almost one and a half thousand kilometers with the prospect of its further access to the Bering Strait. It was planned to build a naval submarine base at the mouth of the Ob. Exploratory drilling of oil and gas wells has also begun.
In 1949 in order to increase the pace of construction of the Polar Railway, the 501st Construction Directorate of SULAGZhDS (Northern Directorate of Camp Railway Construction) was divided into two camps - Ob and Yenisei. The work was generously financed. Any equipment was delivered to the construction site, from excavators to bulldozers and Lend-Lease trucks. It was busy here about thirty thousand people, including twenty thousand prisoners.
Already since 1950 trailer cars began to run as part of Vorkuta trains from Moscow to Labytnanga. In August 1952, traffic opened from Salekhard and Moscow to Nadym. For direct communication with Moscow, telephone poles were installed along the highway. These lopsided larch pillars, clinging to the ground, still stand to this day.
By March 1953 The volume of construction and installation work performed amounted to 4.2 billion rubles. With the then salary of 50 rubles, civilian builders here received double salary, every six months a 10% increase in salary plus northern allowances. They did not spare money for the construction, hoping to more than recoup all costs within a few years after the Polyarnaya was put into operation. Academician Gubkin's forecast about the gas and oil riches of Yamal was known even then. We can say that under each sleeper of the Polar Highway there is a golden chervonets buried.
In the spring of 1953 business was open train movement from Salekhard to the Turukhan River. It was planned to put the highway into operation in 1955. However, just a few days after Stalin’s death, a decision was made to stop construction. For some reason, the incredibly promising road was no longer needed.
They only remembered her in the late 1970s, in the midst of the development of gas fields in Yamal. The area was restored from Nadym to Novy Urengoy. In the mid-1980s, a railway from Surgut was brought from the south to Novy Urengoy. So what is next… Further, as in 1953, there is a fork in time...
...Will it be possible to eliminate the “fork in time” and revive the “dead road”? The only answer is “yes”, because Without the Polar Highway, the development of Yamal is unimaginable even today. But when - it depends on many factors. But the first step has already been taken.
SALEKHARD. At the height of summer, troops landed in the Krasnoselkupsky district in the southeast of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. It was one of two groups joint expedition of MIIT and JSC Russian Railways to the Salekhard - Igarka railway. The second group, led by MIIT professor Valentina Tarasova, landed on the banks of the Yenisei, in the village of Ermakovo. Our goal was to find out what remains of the “dead” road, which is destined to be reborn.
Despite the humid stuffiness reigning under the trees, the switch, corroded by rust, was as cold as the permafrost itself. It has not been translated, at least since the “cold summer of 1953.” The railway line, one of two leading from the fork, broke off at the edge of the ravine. The surviving rail was visible, turned out like a mammoth tusk and aimed at the clear northern sky . There was no further road, the rails led to nowhere, into emptiness. Mechanically, I grabbed the switch lever with both hands and pulled it towards me. Grinding, he changed the position of the rails. Now, instead of the dead end where the tracks had led for the past fifty years, they were directed east, as planned from the very beginning. Like the lever of a time machine, the old railroad switch took us to the beginning of construction The Great Polar Road, in 1947.
...Leaving us on a completely uninhabited shore, tens of kilometers from the Arctic Circle, the Yamal boat, churning up crystal-white breakers behind the stern, rushed back to Krasnoselkup. The pebble beach of the steep bank of the Taz was strewn with rusty railroad spikes, rails, and overlays. It seemed that half a century ago a disaster similar to Chernobyl had occurred in the vicinity: the remains of civilization and not a single living soul around.
At first the silence was deafening, but the silence was soon broken by midges, attacking us with frenzy, as if they had been waiting for us for the last fifty years. We walked through places where no human had set foot for several decades. And they puzzled over riddles. For what purpose was the rail and sleeper grid dismantled here? Why did bulldozers level about fifty meters of the embankment from the locomotive depot to the Taz station? Did someone try to prevent the removal of equipment? Or make it difficult to access? Instead of answers, there are local legends about how hunters saw railway platforms with Studebakers and ZISes in the remote taiga, and stories about mysterious reinforced concrete bunkers with blown-up entrances. The rails are neatly stacked along the overgrown road. Looking at them, we can safely say that all of humanity participated in the construction of the Polar Highway. At least, there were rails made in Austria-Hungary and Tsarist Russia, in the British Empire and Kaiser Germany. Nearby lay the rails of the Nazi Reich and the North American States. Having passed Sedelnikovo, from which two dilapidated houses and the “skeletons” of communication switchboards remained, the expedition came to a well-preserved section of the road with a double-track siding. Here the Miitovites carried out a geodetic survey. The last time the route was picketed was in the late 40s.
... The most amazing feeling is the effect of the presence of living people. It seems as if any moment from behind the nearest platform a guard, forgotten here half a century ago, will come out and bark: “Stop, whoever is coming!” No, the Polar Road is not dead; such a feeling does not arise on dead objects. Here everything is frozen, waiting in the wings.
Having made our way through the bushes with which the embankment is densely overgrown, we emerge onto a canvas covered with a carpet of white polar moss. The roadbed leads upward, in one of the sections its height reaches 12 - 15 meters. It seems that the Polar Road goes into the sky. We pass by a huge quarry - soil was mined there for backfilling. Then the road ends abruptly, followed by bushes and clearings strewn with metal debris - all that remains of the repair shop equipment and two tractors. And finally, the outlines of steam locomotives appear through the foliage ahead. Seeing them here is the same as meeting live elephants, they look so strange surrounded by birch and larches.
Yamalo-Nenets District (Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug). 501 construction
Was there a 501 construction project that, unfortunately, despite all its costs, was never completed? only by Stalin's extravagant project or there were similar projects before it and what is happening with the Transpolar Railway these days.
The impact made on the development of the capital of the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug by construction No. 501, better known to the general public as "Stalin's" or “Dead Road” is difficult to overestimate even today. Many Salekhard residents still live in houses built during the railway epic of the mid-twentieth century.
The term “dead road”, which appeared in 1964 thanks to the light hand of journalists, made it possible to present it to the public for a long time construction No. 501-503 solely as a monument to the Soviet totalitarian regime. At the same time, the attitude of many people towards railway construction itself has never been unambiguous, especially after the country’s triumphant discovery of countless reserves of oil and gas in Western Siberia (including the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug). The exhibition features exhibits delivered by expeditions to construction sites 501, photographs, maps and documents from the MVK funds, samples of minerals and stories about companies that build railways in the Arctic today.
2. TUNNEL and FERRY on the island. Sakhalin
Construction sites No. 506 and No. 507
1950-1953
Immediately after Stalin's death, the construction of the tunnel on the island was also stopped. Sakhalin along the bottom of the Tatar Strait. My grandfather, Yu.A. Korobin, at that time worked in Komsomolsk-on-Amur and was building a railway to Sovgavan. It was built by captured Japanese and managed to finish it. In 1965 I had the opportunity to drive along this road. The writer V. Azhaev (1915-1968), a former prisoner, wrote a book “Far from Moscow” about the construction of the tunnel, for which he received the Stalin Prize.
Both roads are marked on the map - both to Sovgavan and to the tunnel site, and from there to the south to Korsakov. Instead of a tunnel, a ferry crossing across the strait was later installed. It still works today.
SAKHALINSK TUNNEL- unfinished construction of a tunnel crossing through the Tatar Strait, one of the construction projects of the Gulag of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs and the USSR Ministry of Railways.
The idea of building a tunnel to Sakhalin was put forward at the end of the 19th century, but was never realized. Research was carried out already in 1929-1930.
In 1950, I.V. came up with the idea of connecting Sakhalin with the mainland by rail. Stalin. Options were considered ferry crossing, bridge and tunnel. Soon, at the official level (secret resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR dated May 5, 1950), a decision was made to build tunnel and reserve sea ferry.
The length of the tunnel itself from Cape Pogibi on Sakhalin to Cape Lazarev on the mainland should have been about 10 km (the narrowest section of the strait was chosen), its route ran north of the ferry crossing. It was planned to build a branch on the mainland from Cape Lazarev to Selikhin station on the Komsomolsk-on-Amur - Sovetskaya Gavan section with a branch to a temporary ferry crossing. It was planned to build a traction power station near Lake Kizi. The completion of construction with the organization of a temporary ferry crossing was scheduled for the end of 1953, and the commissioning of the tunnel is planned at the end of 1955. The total cargo turnover of the designed line in the first years of its operation was envisaged at 4 million tons per year.
Construction of railway lines to the tunnel conducted mainly by freed Gulag prisoners. In agreement with the USSR prosecutor's office, with the permission of the Council of Ministers, the Ministry of Internal Affairs released from forced labor camps and colonies up to 8 thousand people, by sending them to the Ministry of Railways before the end of their prison term. The exceptions were persons convicted of banditry, robbery, premeditated murder, repeat thieves sentenced to hard labor, prisoners in special camps of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, to whom permission from the Ministry of Internal Affairs did not apply.
It was on Sakhalin Construction 506(Tymovskoe village), on the mainland - Construction 507(village of De-Kastri). By the beginning of 1953, the total number of railway builders on both sides of the strait was more than 27,000 people.
Preparations for the construction of a tunnel on the mainland were carried out by parolees, civilian specialists and military personnel(Construction of 6 MPS). The number of builders by the spring of 1953 was 3,700 people.
After Stalin's death, work on the entire project was curtailed.
Quote from the memoirs of engineer Yu.A. Kosheleva, who supervised the construction of the first shaft to the tunnel axis:
“In December 1951, I graduated from MIIT. I was sent to work at Construction No. 6 of the Ministry of Railways on Sakhalin Island... The contingent of builders was difficult. The bulk were early released. The only way they differed from those who came here from the outside was that they were given a written undertaking not to leave.
In the spring of 1953, Stalin died. And after some time the construction site was closed. They didn’t fold it, they didn’t mothball it, but they closed it. Yesterday they were still working, but today they said: “That’s it, no more.” We never started digging the tunnel. Although everything was available for this work: materials, equipment, machinery and good qualified specialists and workers. Many argue that the amnesty that followed Stalin’s funeral put an end to the tunnel - there was practically no one to continue construction.
It is not true. Of our eight thousand early released, no more than two hundred left. And the remaining eight months waited for the order to resume construction. We wrote to Moscow about this, asked and begged. I consider stopping the construction of the tunnel to be some kind of wild, ridiculous mistake. After all, billions of rubles of people’s money and years of desperate labor were invested in the tunnel. And most importantly, the country really needs the tunnel...”
3. KOLA RAILWAY
in the Murmansk region from Apatity to Ponoy on the White Sea
Construction No. 509
1951 — 1953
KOLA RAILWAY- modern unofficial name construction No. 509. This is an unfinished railway in the Murmansk region, one of the construction projects of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
The route of the Kola Road is shown in green.
The Murmansk railway is shown in black.
D. Shkapov . From the reference book: “The system of forced labor camps in the USSR”
The construction of a broad-range railway across the Kola Peninsula was prompted by plans to create two naval bases on its eastern coast. Additional naval bases were needed due to the experience of the Great Patriotic War. The Northern Fleet base, Rybachy Peninsula, was cut off from the country during the war and found itself in a state of blockade, and the Murmansk base was subjected to air bombardment.
A road was laid for the construction of bases and their future supplies Apatity - Keivy - Ponoy length about 300 km with branch to Yokanga Bay. The Apatity-Iokanga railway route crosses aluminum ore deposit areas.
In 1951, an aluminum plant was launched in Kandalaksha. Due to the fact that the construction of the Kola Road was not completed, the Kandalaksha plant operates on raw materials from the city of Pikalevo, instead of using the raw material base of the Kola Peninsula.
At the same time it was being built Umbozero-Lesnoy road(using the labor of soldiers). For road construction at the end of 1951 an ITL was created near the Titan station, which contained up to 4900 prisoners, in further distributed at seven camps along the route(45, 59, 72, 82, 102, 119 and 137 km).
According to some sources, in just over a year 110 km of rails were laid, for another 10 km - the track has been prepared. According to others, by 1952, 60 km of road had been built, an embankment had been laid for another 150 km, and a temporary road and communication line had been laid to Iokanga.
IMMEDIATELY AFTER STALIN'S DEATH IN MARCH 1953, CONSTRUCTION WAS STOPPED, mothballed and abandoned for several months, like all other railways that were mothballed after Stalin's death.
The section of road from Titan station to point 45 km is still in use (in particular, a branch line to Revda departs from it). In 2007, the railway was destroyed. The remaining laid rails were removed, probably shortly after construction ceased. The railway embankment and dirt road were partially preserved until at least 1963.
Construction site No. 509 Ministry of Internal Affairs
Iron road to the very ends of the Earth
Was mercilessly laid down by the fate of people...
Inscription on the monument in Salekhard.
After another two hours of travel, Alexey reported that we were about to cross “three tundras” and the tent would be visible. He called “tundra” a treeless area, which is indeed “an elastic concept” - it could be three or twelve kilometers wide.
And then it seemed to me that I was going crazy. A locomotive with a tall chimney emerged from behind a hillock, followed by another, a third, a fourth...
- What is this? - I burst out.
“A long time,” answered Alexey.
- What kind of Long?
- City.
- They didn’t tell us about this.
- A dead city, actually. There's a railroad there. We don’t go there – we’re afraid.
- What are you afraid of?
Alexey did not answer this question.
From the notes of an ethnographic expedition to the Taz River in the spring of 1976.
Dead road... This eerie epithet appeared in everyday use relatively recently, when articles, books, and stories began to be written about this story. It just so happened that, unlike the Trans-Siberian Railway, BAM and even the Pechora Railway, the construction of the Salekhard-Igarka highway did not have its own established name. Polar, polar, transpolar road - as they called it. It went down in history by the numbers of construction departments - No. 501 and 503 GULZhDS NKVD of the USSR, and most often they remember the “five hundred and first”, spreading this number throughout its entire length. But what suits it best is the name “Dead Road,” which reflects the fate of both the highway itself and many of its builders.
After the Great Patriotic War, the country's leadership and I.V. Stalin clearly realized the vulnerability of the strategic route - the Northern Sea Route. Its main ports, Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, were located too close to the western borders of the USSR, and in the event of a new war, communication along the NSR could easily be paralyzed by the enemy. It was decided to create a new port in the Gulf of Ob, in the area of Cape Kamenny, and connect it by a 700-kilometer railway with the already existing Kotlas-Vorkuta line. The main provisions for future construction were determined by Resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 298-104ss of 02/04/1947, and by Resolution No. 1255-331ss of 04/22/1947 construction was entrusted to the GULZhDS (main department of camp railway construction) of the NKVD-MVD of the USSR.
Construction of the line began simultaneously with the search for a site for the future port. After some time, it became clear that the Gulf of Ob is completely unsuitable for such construction - very shallow depths, large wind surges and water surges do not allow the construction of any large port on its shores. Already in January 1949, a fateful meeting between I.V. Stalin, L.P. Beria and N.A. Frenkel, the head of the GULZhDS, took place. It was decided to curtail work on the Yamal Peninsula, stop construction of the line to Cape Kamenny, and begin laying a 1,290 km long railway. to the lower reaches of the Yenisei, along the highway Chum - Labytnangi - Salekhard - Nadym - Yagelnaya - Pur - Taz - Yanov Stan - Ermakovo - Igarka, with the construction of a port in Igarka. This was enshrined in decree No. 384-135ss of January 29, 1949. In the future, it was planned to extend the line from Dudinka to Norilsk.
Construction Department No. 502, which was involved in laying a line from Chum station of the Pechora railway to Cape Kamenny with a branch to Labytnangi, was abolished, and two new departments were created - western No. 501 with a base in Salekhard, which was in charge of the section from Labytnangi to the river. Pur, and eastern department No. 503 with a base in Igarka (later moved to Ermakovo), which built the road from Pur to Igarka. The concentration of manpower and materials between these constructions was distributed approximately 2:1.
The technical conditions for laying the line were extremely easy; bridges across the Ob, Pur, Taz and Yenisei were not planned at the first stage - their function was to be performed by ferries in the summer, and ice crossings in the winter. Excavation work was carried out mainly by hand, long-distance transportation of soil was carried out using a few vehicles, and filling of the embankment was carried out using hand wheelbarrows. 100-140 km of the route were completed per year on the western section, much less on the eastern section: due to the lack of people and the difficulty of transporting materials.
At this construction site, the terrible phrase that was born during the construction of the Pechora Railway - about “a man under every sleeper” - acquired its literal meaning. Thus, I. Simonova from Tashkent, who worked as an engineer in the 1970s on the survey and completion of the Nadym-Urengoy section, personally saw piles of skeletons after the banks of the Hetta River were washed away, and corpses in the embankment 616-620 kilometers of the line.
In October 1949, ice bound the Ob, and in early November sleepers and rails were already laid on it. A daredevil was needed who would be the first to experience the “ice”. This was not the case among civilian drivers. “Whoever overtakes the locomotive is free,” ordered the construction manager. A volunteer prisoner was found who took it upon himself to drive the locomotive. At first everything went well, but towards the middle of the river the ice began to crack and break. The driver looked out of the booth and was stunned - the Ob abyss, swallowing sleepers and rails, was menacingly approaching the locomotive. But the ice and rail lashes survived. The driver reached the shore and received the longed-for freedom. On the eve of November 7, the authorities reported to Stalin about a new labor victory in the 501st.
Traffic from Salekhard to Nadym was opened in August 1952, and a work-passenger train began running. By 1953, the embankment had been filled almost to Pura, and part of the rails had been laid. In the eastern sector, things were not going so well. A 65-kilometer section from Igarka to Ermakov, as well as about 100 km, was filled and laid. In a westerly direction to Janow Stan and beyond. Materials were brought to the Taz River area, and about 20 km were built here. main passage and depot with repair shops. The least developed was the 150-kilometer section between the Pur and Taz rivers, which was planned to be built by 1954.
A telegraph and telephone line was built along the entire route, which until the 70s connected Taimyr with the outside world. The operation of its section from Yagelnaya to Salekhard was stopped only in 1992.
After the death of I.V. Stalin, when more than 700 of the 1290 km had already been laid. roads, almost 1,100 were filled, about a year remained before commissioning, construction was stopped. Already on March 25, 1953, Decree No. 395-383ss was issued on the complete cessation of all work. Soon, 293 camps and construction departments were disbanded. An amnesty was declared for hundreds of thousands of prisoners, but they were able to go south only with the beginning of navigation - there were no other routes yet. According to some estimates, about 50 thousand prisoners were taken from construction sites 501 and 503, and about the same number of civilian personnel and members of their families. They took everything they could to the “Mainland,” but most of what was built was simply abandoned in the taiga and tundra.
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, where the richest deposits of iron and copper were already being developed , nickel, coal. The giant gas fields of Western Siberia have not yet been discovered - who knows, maybe then the fate of the road would have been completely different.
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. The rails were removed from the eastern section of the road 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. We visited this area.
The future fate of the Dead Road no longer looks so bleak. The continued development of hydrocarbon reserves in adjacent areas forces Gazprom and the administration of the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug to look for new ways to supply and transport materials. The issue of restoring the Nadym-Salekhard section and building a line from Korotchaevo to the Yuzhno-Russkoye field, passing also along the 503rd construction route, are already being considered. Only Norilsk, with the current volumes of ore production, looks at all this calmly, content with year-round icebreaker navigation along the NSR. But the reserves of its deposits are very large, and the world needs nickel and base metals. Who knows…
Steam locomotive Ov-3821 near the ruins of the Dolgoe depot.
Platforms on a dead-end track near the depot.
The path towards Igarka.
Rails and rolling stock were brought from different places for construction. There are also Demidov rails from the 19th century.
Steam locomotive Ov-6154.
Loneliness.
These locomotives will never stop at any depot again...
Steam locomotive Ov-6698.
Arrow in the depot.
Wheelset with spokes. Now there are almost no such people.
There was no war here. The government just lost interest...
This platform was apparently used by railway workers.
The remains of freight cars are densely overgrown with young forest. Another 50-70 years will pass, and the taiga will absorb everything else.
Platform in the swamp.
A two-kilometer dead-end line to the north along the bank of the Taz River. Why it was built is unclear, there are no quarries there, the line simply ends in the open forest.
Such overlays were also on the main course. On the other side of them were attached wooden plates, now almost rotten.
Again a pre-revolutionary rail. Demidov plant, Nizhny Tagil.
The line is overgrown.
Diesel on the bank of the Taz River. Possibly from more recent times. Not a single flood can move him from his place...
View from the driver's booth.
Depot Long. A few more years and he too will be gone.
Rust and cobwebs.
Despite the beginning of the introduction of automatic coupling, the rolling stock of GULZhDS still had a screw harness.
There were workshops here.
Radiator from the tractor "Stalinets".
Near the depot, the rails were removed from the branch leading to the main passage. Apparently they were taken out along the river.
Turnout details.
Arrow details again.
Trees grow along the rails - there is a different local microclimate there. A similar picture can be observed in old mountain trails.
The 1879 rail is the oldest found. Where did it lie before?...
Strange vandalism.
Contrary to some opinions, metal ties were also used on the Polar Highway. They helped maintain the gauge when the sleepers and fastenings were weak.
Young boletus.
Exit to the embankment.
Gulch.
Trains haven't run here for a long time.
Many small bridges and pipes ceased to exist. You have to cross through such gullies. The boards below are not only sleepers - the embankment was poured on a wooden base, in the image of medieval ramparts.
All-terrain vehicles of gas workers do not spare the Dead Road. She is nothing to them, a hindrance.
Another confirmation of the presence of wooden cages at the base of the embankment.
And this is the youngest rail found - 1937. For some reason we expected to see only these there.
There are also normal fastenings. But there were still not enough materials for the upper structure of the track.
The subsidence of depot tracks gives such misalignment.
Boxcar. The quality of the boards is enviable.
And here is the solution - the carriage is German. Apparently a trophy converted to our track and transferred to GULZDS.
Barbed wire. We didn’t reach the camp, but there was plenty of it in the vicinity of the depot.
Steam locomotive Ov-4171 and expedition members. In the middle is yours truly)
A number of factual materials from V. Glushko’s essay in the book “Polar Highway” were used.
He worked in the Far North for more than twenty years. And just in those places lay the route of the famous construction site No. 501\503 GULZhDS. Railway: Salekhard-Nadym-Igarka. Or as the locals also called it in later times, “Stalinka” or “dead road”. Now in the tundra on the site of that road, there are almost completely destroyed camps, rails overgrown with bushes, collapsed bridges...
I wanted to summarize the available material and try to write a story about that construction site, about the people who worked there, about their life. About how construction began and how it ended. And about the future of this road.
Start of construction.
By the time construction began (1947), the entire north of Western Siberia was completely uninhabited territory. With rare settlements, with a nomadic population of Khanty and Nenets. And complete off-road. It was possible to get there only during a period of short navigation along the rivers. In the summer, it was generally impossible to deliver any cargo deep into the mainland territory due to the conditions of the swampy tundra and forest-tundra. Only a rare message during the formation of winter roads. And it was necessary to develop these territories. And we thought about this even in the pre-war period. And the decision to build the road was made personally by Stalin. According to the memoirs of P.K. Tatarintsev, head of the Northern Expedition, “the question was: what did you do based on your research? But not so: is it necessary or not? To build a road to Igarka is Stalin’s personal order. He said: we need to take on the North, Siberia is not covered by anything from the North, and the political situation is very tense” (source: V. LAMIN. Secret object 503 // “Science in Siberia”, 1990, No. 5, p. 6.)
Survey work was carried out already during the war. As Doctor of Historical Sciences V. Lamin writes, documents were found in the technical archive of the Northern Railway indicating research in 1943-44. in order to study the connection of the Norilsk-Dudinskaya line with the network of European Russia. The diaries of G. E. Elago, the equipment of the Yenisei expedition of the Zheldorproekt of the NKVD of the USSR indicate that in August 1944 the expedition members were in the Kureika area, where Stalin was exiled before the revolution.
It is difficult to say when exactly the Soviet leadership came to the idea of the need to build the Transpolar Highway. Most researchers are inclined to one conclusion: Stalin came up with this idea during the war. V. Lamin emphasizes that the materials of interrogations of German generals strengthened Stalin’s idea of building the Northern Railway. In particular, it became known that Hitler abandoned the idea of landing 3 landing corps on the Ob and Yenisei. (source: LAMIN V. Secret object 503 // “Science in Siberia”, 1990, No. 3, p. 5.) The very thought of the insecurity of the Arctic coast, the absence of a strategic railway could not leave Stalin alone.
During the war, the Norilsk deposits of metals, in particular manganese, which is essential for steel smelting, were extremely unreliably connected to the “mainland”, because the only route was by sea, but German submarines and the raider “Admiral Scheer” operated in the Kara Sea. They sank Soviet ships and even tried to shell the port of Dixon. In the summer of 1945, the United States acquired an atomic bomb, and this meant a revolution in military-strategic ideas. In particular, this required the creation of naval and air bases where previously they were not needed, for example, on the central and eastern coasts of the Arctic Ocean. The successful creation and operation of military bases would be greatly facilitated by such a reliable method of transport as rail.
The next apparent reason was the state’s desire to industrialize the vast expanses of the Soviet North. The Great Northern Railway Route was planned, which was supposed to connect the northwestern regions of the Soviet Union with the Okhotsk and Bering Seas.
A separate consideration could be, and perhaps was, that the oil and gas potential of Western Siberia was predicted by academician I.M. Gubkin and officially raised the issue back in 1931. Construction began long before the feasibility study prepared by Arktikproekt was made in 1950 Main Northern Sea Route. The effect of constructing a port at the junction of sea and river routes with year-round railway connections was as follows:
1. The distance from the base for cargo departure to the Arctic and the northeast was reduced by 1,100 nautical miles, compared to the distance from the existing base in Arkhangelsk.2. It became possible to deliver goods to the northern Arctic regions using the shortest water and rail routes. For example, the route from Novosibirsk to Provideniya Bay via Igarka was shortened by 3,000 kilometers compared to the route through Vladivostok.
3. Under special circumstances, cargo could be sent to the Arctic and the northeast, bypassing the sea adjacent to the Arctic.
4. Naval and air force bases could be located in the construction area.
It was necessary not only to develop that rich region, but also to strengthen the defense of the country’s northern coast. And for this, a reliable connection with the central part was needed. At one of the meetings attended by Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Kaganovich, Beria, Stalin, having heard Tatarintsev’s data summarized after research, made a decision: “we will build a road.
Initially, it was planned to create a seaport and at the same time a railway center of the North on the Ob (Cape Kamenny). But according to the technical conditions, Cape Kamenny was not suitable as a seaport.
To do this, it was necessary to build a railway there from the Pechora Mainline, but the construction of the seaport began simultaneously with the railway even before the development of the project itself. In general, the entire construction of 501, 502, 503 was carried out in the absence of a project due to the extremely short time allotted for the delivery of the road. The project was developed simultaneously with the construction of camp points along the proposed route of the road and simultaneously with the excavation work for filling the canvas by Gulag prisoners, as a result of which the project was adjusted after the fact. On April 22, 1947, the Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted Resolution No. 1255-331-ss, in which it obliged the Ministry of Internal Affairs to immediately begin construction of a large seaport on Cape Kamenny, a ship repair yard and a residential village, as well as to begin construction of a railway from the Pechora Mainline to the port.
By the end of 1947, the designers came to the conclusion that it was necessary to build, first of all, a railway to the mouth of the Ob, in the area of the village. Labytnangi and Salekhard, located on the opposite bank. This opened up unimpeded transport access to the northern part of the vast Ob-Irtysh basin. The construction of a seaport on Cape Kamenny was proposed to be carried out at the next stage, relying on the construction and technical base prepared in the Salekhard-Labytnangi region. For 1947-1949 In the area of the future port, 3 camps were built in the villages of Yar-Sale, Novy Port and Mys-Kamenny. The prisoners built a five-kilometer pier and storage facilities from larch. The development of the route in the area of the station took place in an island-like manner. Sandy Cape at 426 km (village Yar-Sale). At the beginning of 1949, it became clear that the waters of the Ob Bay were too shallow for ocean-going ships, and it became clear that it was impossible to artificially deepen the harbor.
The construction of a port on Cape Kamenny and the construction of a railway to it were finally abandoned in 1949.
In 1948-1949 the center of railway construction in Siberia was finally transferred to the construction of the Chum - Labytnangi line. However, the very idea of creating a polar port on the Northern Sea Route was not abandoned. A whole commission worked to find a new location for the construction of a port and ship repair yard. A proposal was put forward to move the construction of the port to the Igarka area, which required extending the Chum-Labytnangi line east to the village. Ermakovo on the left bank of the Yenisei. The Igarsky port on the right bank of the Yenisei and the future Ermakovsky on the opposite bank would be approximately equally accessible to river vessels and large sea transport. The entry of the railway to the junction of sea and river communications promised the possibility of creating a large transport hub in the Igarka-Ermakovo area. Economically, this project was more profitable than the previous (northern) one. The development of the line in the eastern direction created real preconditions for establishing reliable transport connections between the northeastern regions of Siberia and the industrial centers of the country, for the development of the Norilsk Mining and Metallurgical Combine. By Decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 384-135-ss of January 29, 1949, the construction site of the port was moved to Igarka, which caused a new direction of the road: “Salekhard-Igarka”. Apparently, January 29, 1949 can be considered the beginning of the second stage of the construction of the Chum-Salekhard-Igarka railway, since the road took a different direction from the original plan. By a resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR dated January 29, 1949, the survey and design of the seaport in Igarka and the complex of structures attached to it was entrusted to the Main Directorate of the Northern Sea Route (GUSMP) under the Council of Ministers of the USSR.
Communication between the builders and the departments was maintained first by radio and then by a pole telephone and telegraph line stretched from Salekhard to Igarka along the proposed route. On January 29, 1949, a Resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR was adopted, which spoke of the need to build the Salekhard railway -Igarka with a length of 1200 kilometers. It was planned to open working traffic in the fourth quarter of 1952, and to begin operating the road in 1955. Crossings across the Ob and Yenisei rivers would be carried out by self-propelled ferries. Under the Northern Administration, two constructions were formed - Obskoye No. 501 and Yeniseiskoye No. 503. They had to pave the way towards each other.
Construction work began without a project (it was completed only in 1952, when more than half of the highway was already ready). They planned to build 28 stations and 106 sidings on the new highway. By the start of construction, there were only 5-6 small settlements along the future highway line, with several houses in each. Very soon there were a lot of them: these were camps for prisoners, located every 5-10 km. From Igarka to Ermakovo there were 7 columns for prisoners - two in the city area, the rest along the Yenisei. From Ermakovo, the camps were located every 6 km; in order to avoid confusion and for clarity and clarity of the picture of the work being carried out, the camps were assigned the number of the kilometer on which they were located. According to A.S. Dobrovolsky, who conducted an expedition along the railway, about 40,000 prisoners worked on its construction. Local sand was used for the embankment, from the valleys of nearby rivers. The situation with the forest was worse: mostly small forest grew in the construction area. Therefore, timber for construction was delivered from more southern regions, where special camps were set up for its extraction. This forest was rafted to the route along the rivers. In general, supplying a construction site isolated many hundreds of kilometers from the populated areas of the country presented a difficult problem. In addition to the already built sections of the road and special aviation, there was only one way to the central areas of the route - through the Gulf of Ob along the Nadym, Pur and Taz rivers with their short northern navigation.
Quite a lot of construction equipment was brought onto the road, including trucks, tractors and even excavators. In addition to scarce equipment, the construction site used the labor of a large number of free people.
Construction .
Camp points were placed along the sections of the route under construction every 5-10 km. They were small, 400-500 people each. A typical camp of this type was an area measuring 200 x 200 m, surrounded by barbed wire, with towers at the corners. It has 4-5 barracks, a dining room, a cultural and educational part, and a bathhouse. There could be a stall, a warehouse for personal belongings, a bakery, a water tank made in the form of a huge wooden barrel. Everything was built quite neatly, not even without architectural delights. Next to the camp there was a guard barracks, not much different from the barracks for prisoners, also about a hundred people, and houses for the authorities. The camp was certainly illuminated, especially the fence, with the help of a diesel-powered engine.
Most of the construction camps were classified as general regime, and the living conditions in them were not the harshest in the Gulag. Construction completely upended and subjugated the life of this almost deserted region. Local production was reoriented to meet construction needs. Masses of people unprecedented before appeared in these parts. Thus, the small village of Ermakovo, where the administration of the eastern construction site was located, turned into a city with a population of about 20 thousand people, not counting the prisoners in the surrounding camps. Everyone was involved in the construction, with its specific Gulag overtones. A mobile camp theater toured in Salekhard, Igarka and other settlements along the route.
Igarka pier.
Igarka. The end of the forties of the twentieth century.
501st construction site (western section).
Already in December 1947, just eight months after the relevant decree was issued, labor traffic opened on the 118-kilometer section Chum - Sob, and the road crossed the Polar Ural river valley - the Sob crossing was already on the territory of the Tyumen region.
A year later, by December 1948, the builders had advanced all the way to the Labytnangi station on the left bank of the Ob, opposite Salekhard. However, at the same time it suddenly became clear that it was simply impossible to create a new seaport on the Gulf of Ob, in the area of that same Cape Kamenny. So, from April 1947 to December 1948, the 196-kilometer Chum - Labytnangi highway was put into operation. It was assumed that the 1,300-kilometer highway would run parallel to the Arctic Circle, would be single-track with sidings every 9-14 km (a total of 106 sidings ) and stations every 40–60 km (28 stations). The average speed of the train with stops at sidings was assumed to be about 40 km/h, including acceleration and braking. Capacity - 6 pairs of trains per day. The main depots were set up at the stations Salekhard, Nadym, Pur, Taz, Ermakovo and Igarka, and the return depots were set up at the stations Yarudey, Pangody, Kataral, Turukhan. A winter road was laid along the entire highway by special tractor trains. The production columns of two GULZhDS departments were located along it. They were built mainly in the short summer season. To begin with, a relatively low two-meter embankment was built (mainly from imported stone-sand mixture), on which sleepers and rails were then laid. All work was carried out in a sharply continental climate with harsh, long winters (up to eight months) and short, cold and rainy summers and autumns.
The transpolar highway was built in extreme permafrost conditions. The technologies of the 1940s and the required speed of construction did not allow for the proper development of the railway.
After the onset of above-zero temperatures in Western Siberia, active melting of the top layer of soil and permafrost underneath began, which led to regular and widespread deformations of the road surface and its engineering structures. In fact, a significant part of the road, made over previous seasons, had to be reconstructed with the onset of the new one. Repairs to the embankment, strengthening of the roadbed, bridges and other infrastructure continued continuously, every year.
Compared to other camps of the Gulag system, the construction of Transpolar was relatively good. Here, the extremely difficult working conditions of prisoners were somewhat compensated by a higher standard of food. We will touch upon the living conditions of prisoners below.
The construction site even had its own mobile theater.
The road crossed small rivers on wooden bridges. Bridges across the large rivers Barabanikha and Makovskaya were built much more thoroughly: from metal on concrete supports 60 and 100 meters long, respectively. However, none of the structures built according to “lighter technical conditions” escaped deformation and destruction due to the melting and subsequent freezing of soils.
No bridges were built across the great Siberian rivers Ob and Yenisei. The locomotives first went to Labytnanog, then they were transported across the Ob by a railway ferry. Four railway ferries (“Nadym”, “Zapolyarny”, “Severny” and “Chulym”), built according to projects 723-bis and 723-u for crossing the river. Ob and R. Yenisei, after the closure of construction 501 and 503 worked for some time for the needs of the North. and then they were sent to the Black Sea to work on the Kerch ferry crossing. In winter, ice crossings were established.
Rails, of course, were also delivered from the mainland. In total, researchers discovered 16 different species of them on the route, including pre-revolutionary and trophy ones.
At the end of 1948, the road “approached” the Ob in the area of the station. Labytnangi. They began to build an ice crossing across the Ob. Its construction was supervised by an engineer, then captain of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Zailik Moiseevich Freidzon. According to him, the canvas was strengthened on top of logs laid across. This was enough to withstand cargo trains for five winter seasons until the 501st was closed. In 1952, a bridge was also built across the Nadym River. At its base there were wooden pile supports on which 11-meter metal bags were laid. In the spring, before the start of ice drift, the railway track and packages were removed, and after it ended, they were laid back.
In 1949, two construction departments No. 501 and 503 were organized as part of the Northern Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Construction Department No. 501, located in Salekhard, supervised the section from Chum station to Pur station, including the crossing of the Ob River. All construction was supervised by the head of the Northern Directorate of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, Vasily Arsenievich Barabanov. (It will be discussed in more detail below). According to many reviews, he was a remarkable person in his own way. It was on his initiative that at the construction site, in particular, a theater was created from prisoner actors, whose art was appreciated not only by numerous “citizen bosses”, but also by the prisoners of that time. Initially, V.V. Samodurov commanded the 501st construction site. 503 - A. I. Borovitsky. In the summer of 1952, both construction projects were united under the leadership of V.V. Samodurov.
The break in movement was about a month and a half. By the end of 1952, builders reached the Bolshaya Hetta River. In August 1952, as planned, work traffic was opened on the Salekhard-Nadym section, and by March of the following year there was even a passenger train running between settlements. However, its speed (and the speed of the freight trains used to supply the construction) due to the extremely low quality of the railway track was low and averaged 15 km/h, not even close to reaching the standard values. The Salekhard-Nadym section since 1953 and was completely abandoned before the construction of the Northern Latitudinal Railway began. But until the early 1990s, the railway was used by signalmen to service the Salekhard-Nadym communication line, until the communication line was abolished. Soon after the abolition of the communication line, 92 km of rails, starting from Salekhard, were collected and removed by some company that had coveted the valuable Demidov steel.
The next essay will continue on the construction of the eastern section - construction No. 503.
503-construction...
Construction 503 included the Pur-Igarka section. On the right bank of the Pur River is the old Urengoy, with which there is no railway connection. Between the rivers Pur and Turukhan the road was not completed. So, according to some data, the department in Dolgy managed to build about 15 kilometers of the highway towards Ermakovo, and a branch to Sedelnikovo. Two other construction departments of the 503 construction site, located in Yanov Stan and Ermakovo, by 1953 had built a 140-kilometer-long section and opened work traffic on it, moving further to the west. By 1953, about 65 km of track had been laid from Igarka to the south towards the Yeniseiskaya station (opposite Ermakovo).
materials were used from the book by V.N. Gritsenko “The History of the Dead Road”, the online magazine “UFO-World”
3D “tour” of the 501st construction site. Art. Yarudey http://nadymregion.ru/3d-3.html
3D “tour” of the 501st construction site. Camp site "Glukhariny" http://nadymregion.ru/3d-1.html
The next material will talk about the construction contingent, the leadership, and the everyday life of prisoners and guards..
to be continued
Everyone remembers with what enthusiasm earlier in the 70s our country received the news about the construction of the BAM. Fuck Street, the most accessible access to the Pacific Puts, the doctrine to the new places ... But few know that the bam had a peculiar northern double-a tpanspolate master, an iron chum-saleha-gag, the impact pace of the one 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, 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.
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, 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.