JHolland:
Thank you for posting the youtube of the Vladivostok car shops. I found it especially interesting since my maternal grandmother & 1 uncle (an infant at the time), emigrated to the USA through Vladivostok. The year was 1917 and with WWI going on, the usual ports of embarkation to the USA for Russian emigres could not be used. The result was my grandmother and her infant son travelled by rail from an area on the Pripyet River, possibly about where Chernobyl is located, to Vladivostok. There, they travelled by ship to Yokohama, Japan. From Yokohama, they then travelled as steerage passengers on the "Siberia Maru" to the USA, with San Franscisco, CA being their port of entry.
I had always wondered what the railway equipment was like as I heard stories from my grandmother when I was a kid about that train journey. My grandmother did say that at station stops, she would get a teapot (known as a "Chainik" in Russian or Yiddish) filled with hot water from the locomotive boiler. Whatever was in the locomotive boiler water could not have been all that bad as my grandmother lived to be 102 years of age, and her infant son made it to 94.
In the photos, I was struck by several things:
-the railway shops had modern equipment, particularly the use of pneumatic tools
-the shop complex and yards had electric power, and in one photo, there are pole-mounted transformers
-the trucks for the railway cars looked to be US pattern 'arch bar trucks'
-the car wheels have "Central Car" cast into them
-in the mechanical workshop photo, there is a camelback drill in the lower portion of the photo with a planetary reduction rather then the more usual open back gearing. This could well be a Barnes, US made drill.
-Westinghouse airbrake systems are used, which also struck me as advanced for the place and time
-the use of spray painting was also advanced for the times, let alone the place
-the completed train of boxcars has a handrail on the catwalk along the top of each car. Someone actually thought of the safety of brakemen ! US boxcars never had that handrail, and brakemen have had to walk (or run depending on the circumstance) on catwalks with nothing to grab hold of if they miss their footing or slip. Could be due to the extreme winter conditions in Vladivostok that this handrail was found to be a necessity.
Of note also is that some of the crates are stencilled in English: "Vladivostok" and some have what appears to be Chinese writing chalked on them. The fact the workforce contains a large portion of Chinese is also of interest. I wonder if the Chinese were brought to Vladivostok as contract labor, due to WWI ?
I also wonder why all the management in the photos are tricked out in what look like military uniforms. Did the Russian military take over the railroads during WWI, or was this just the Czarist government's way of making sure everyone knew who was in charge at the railway shops ?
Interesting set of photos, for sure. My grandmother came from a small village called "Luninetz", and to hear her and other relatives describe the place, it may as well have been in medieval times. Seeing the railway shops and the advanced level of things there is quite a contrast to the village my grandmother came from. I know it os O/T to go on the tangent I did with this post, but I do appreciate your posting this youtube not only for its technical content, but for the connection to my family history.