Lost Places - Chornobyl Zone

This is already the third our campaign on the railway station Yaniv which is in semikilometer from southwest suburb of Pripyat. Each of these campaigns not so much gave answers to questions, as raise new :) The second our visit on station in the spring of 2007 (Zona. Spring. Part 1), aroused real squall of letters with questions from fans of railway technics. I had no answers to these questions, and I have understood that it is necessary to go again on Yaniv and once again, more carefully, investigate its vicinities.

Head and car of DR1 near the access road to storehouse of Pripyat’s (ORS).

The western direction towards Vilchya. One kilometre from station " Yaniv".

Branch line, from station side, opposite to base ОРСа. On Google’s photos of 2003, these carriages and locomotives still stands on rails.

It is possible to look all photos of the railway technics, in vicinities of station " Yaniv", here:

"Railway technique"

The destroyed station warehouse. Four hundred metres from station.

We go towards station. If I am not mistaken, on the right bottom photo, the cart from diesel locomotive TGM-1.

There is a truck’s repair shop in station now, and in a court yard parking of the motor vehicles belonging to one of building organisation, working in the Zone. A photo of year 2006.

After failure on ChNPP in 1986, the station settlement has been almost completely taken down, and on its place a pine forest is planted. Only a few buildings have remained. You can see one of them - on the central photo, to the right of a memorial to the victim in the Second World War (there is a dosimetric label on a house wall). Here Red Army soldiers, who were lost in 1943 in fights around station Yaniv are buried. Among them is the Hero of Soviet Union Egor Ivanovich Lazarev (1906-1943), the commander of field-engineer squad. The same Lazarev which name names one of the streets in Pripyat. On the right a photo of an original form of a memorial. The author of a photo: J.V.Evsjukov (a photo from a picture album "Pripyat" of 1986). Scan by V.Litovchenko.

At station we have got to talking with the watchman. Man about sixty years old. Works on Yanov twenty eight years. "Eh... How it was here before failure! Beauty! Kitchen gardens... And here, near the road, where now pines grow, there was a furniture store!" On a word "furniture!" watchman has emphasised and has grandly shaken by a forefinger of the lifted right hand. We come back to our car which we left near Pripyat and the watchman goes with us. We cross a station court yard, we pass tracks, and through platform of one of rusty DR (carriage), we get on an opposite side.

We say goodbye. The watchman artfully screw up his eyes and shuffles a boot by the ground. "Do you know, what is this stones at you underfoot?" I look narrowly, really - underfoot the rests of a paved cobblestone road. The watchman maintains a theatrical pause: "This is the rests of secret strategic military road which have constructed in the twenties, when there was no railway". And the forefinger of the right hand of the watchman has again significantly buried in the sky.