Museum Stations
RAILWAY TRANSPORT MUSEUM
The museum is open free of charge to visitors during the station complex’s working hours.The Museum’s main exhibits are railway rarities. The exposition displays examples of rails from the past, a manual switch and an old semaphore, detailed train timetables from 1883 and 1906, railway uniforms from different years, batons, cockades and stripes, and medals awarded to railway workers during the last century, as well as buffer, tail and manual railway lamps, an inventory of pre-revolutionary trackmen and locomotive drivers.
There are also miraculously preserved household items and antique furniture, such as the telephone which the Russian writer and newspaper journalist Vladimir Gilyarovsky used to dictate messages to Moscow about the victims of the Kukuyevo disaster on 13 July 1882, when a postal train was derailed, killing more than 40 people. In terms of fatalities, it was one of Russia’s 20 most serious rail accidents before 1953.
Separate exhibition stands are dedicated to the great writers Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev and to Alexey Skuratov, the famous Russian navigator and polar researched. The village is named is named after Skuratov, whose own estate was nearby and who took part in Russia’s legendary Great Northern Expedition from 1733 to 1743 to map most of Siberia’s Arctic coast and some parts of the North American coastline.
HOW TO GET THERE
Take the electric trains from Tula and Orel.
THE HISTORY OF SKURATOVO STATION
Skuratovo appeared on the railway map in 1868. Long-distance trains used to make stops in Skuratovo to change locomotives.
To help passengers while away the time waiting for the trains, a stone house with a platform and a canopy 31 sazhens long was built in 1870 – a sazhen is 2.13 m or 7 feet. The house has survived in its original form to this day. According to historians, at the end of the nineteenth century there were only three such buildings – in Serpukhov, Kursk and in Tula region.
A liveried doorman was on duty at the entrance to the waiting room, which boasted red carpets. On holidays, a priest held services at the station for the travellers on passing trains and the local residents.
Many famous names are associated with Skuratovo station. The estates of the Turgenevs and Tolstoys, as well as Bezhin Meadow, are all in the vicinity and it was here that the first meeting of the two great Russian writers Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy took place.
During the Great Patriotic War, the Skuratov railway junction was very important strategically because it took delivery of the tanks and artillery pieces arriving by train and which were used in the heroic defense of Tula and then at the Kursk Bulge. The first Soviet armoured train, armed with the most up-to-date rocket systems of the time, was also based here.