Steam Trains and Engines

In a land the size of the U.S.S.R., rail traffic plays a major part in the country's economy, and despite the rapid growth of air travel the railways of Russia are expanding and modernising on a very large scale.

For many years under the Soviet regime, freight traffic had priority, indeed passenger travel was in many cases limited by a strict system of permits and controls. For ten years after the war no passenger locomotives were either constructed or imported, except for a solitary Czech Class '476' 4-8-2 presented in 1951 as a ' token of friendship '; in 1950, however, the Kolomna locomotive works had produced a prototype 4-8-4, the first of this type in Russia, and in 1954 construction of ' Project 36 ' began in earnest. In two years some 250 were in service.

All built at Kolomna, the P.lft 4-8-4s have two 23 in.x3! in. cylinders and 6 ft. 1 in. driving wheels; equipped with roller bearings throughout, and with a grate area of no less than 73 sq. ft. and 213-lb. boiler pressure, they develop 2,500 h.p. with an axle load of only 18 tons. Certainly the most impressive locomotives to be found in Russia today, the majority of the class were concentrated on the Moscow-Leningrad and Moscow-Brest main lines before electric and diesel traction took over. Both these routes carry tourist traffic, and largely for prestige purposes the locomotives are painted in apple green or light blue, with red and white wheels; our picture shows two of them leaving Leningrad with a heavy express for Kislovodsk, in the Caucasus.