Museum Stations

HISTORY OF THE STATION

In 1868, just a few kilometres from the village of Seleznevo in the Tula province, a section of the Moscow-Kursk railway line was opened. With the participation of the village peasants, a wooden station, a water pumping station, and a number of outbuildings were built. Five two-story red brick houses appeared, a house for the station master, an outpatient clinic, a bathhouse, and a warehouse, which was only recently dismantled.

The station was named Gorbachevo.

There are several versions of the name’s origin – after the name of the builder and engineer called Gorbachev, the nearby village of Gorbachevka, or by the steep "humpbacked" terrain because in Russian "gorb" means "hump."

The latest finds during the renovation of one of the brick houses from the era of Emperor Alexander III showed that it housed a fire tower built by the landowner Gorbacheva. The station became a junction on 21 December 1899, when the first train passed through it on the newly opened Dankov-Smolensk line. While changing trains en route to Optina Pustyn, Leo Tolstoy stopped for tea in the wooden station building, which survived the war.

Gorbachevo station is one of those junctions on which much depended during the Great Patriotic War: ensuring the timely provision of the fighting army units with shells and food, the evacuation of civilians, and the rapid passage of medical trains. As a memory of this time, there is a monument over a mass grave next to the building of the modern station.

Construction of the new station building began in 1945. German prisoners of war dug a pit, laid the foundation, and a basement. Then, for some reason, construction ceased, and rumour has it that the following story is associated with its completion. "...One day in 1949, the train of the "Father of the People" Josef Stalin stopped at the station. Looking at the pit and unfinished walls, the Soviet leader asked one of the attendants when the station would be ready. The answer was that it would be in two years. The train left, and work at the construction site went into high gear – Stalin did not like it when his subordinates made idle boasts. Russian specialists and German prisoners of war did all the stonework and workers from Tula and the art school complete the finishing work. Exactly two years later, the station received its first passengers."

After the war, the station was completely restored, and in 1957-58 the railway was electrified. For the 45th anniversary of the Victory, the mass grave was reconstructed. In 2010, workers from the Tula branch of Moscow Railways replaced the granite slabs with marble ones and installed a new fence.

HOW TO GET THERE

By trains plying the following the routes: Tula – Cherni, Tula – Orel. Gorbachevo.