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Railfan for Life
Enjoy a rich journey across the American railroading landscape through the lens of Hal Carstens!
NEWS AND OTHER STUFF WE THOUGHT OF A Trip To the Exclusion Zone
In this all-new collection, you’ll enjoy more than 100 pages of color photos selected by our editors spanning Hal’s trackside adventures from the last sixty years. From coast to coast, from steam to diesel (and trolleys, too), from main lines to short lines and everything in between!
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The Semikhody station (TOP) is used for employees entering the Chornobyl plant for the continuing clean-up work and construction of the New Safe Confi nement arch. This is the side facing to- ward the Chornobyl plant. Everyone departing this station must pass through a radiation detection checkpoint before boarding a train. Yaniv station (ABOVE) has been refurbished, and is used by zone employees for fi xing heavy machinery. The railroad “graveyard” is behind the station.
WE TAKE A BIT OF A DEPARTURE from our usual route in this issue with Emily Moser’s story on the railroads of Chornobyl (for those who missed the note at the beginning of the ar- ticle, we chose to use the transliterations of Ukrainian names instead of the more famil- iar Russian spellings, reflecting Ukraine’s independence; thus, we used “Kyiv” instead of “Kiev,” among other changes). So why this story? That’s a very good question. There is no denying the events of April
26, 1986, changed the world. Nuclear energy hasn’t been viewed quite the same since an experiment went wrong in Reactor 4. In the aftermath, there was an effort to cover up the accident at the local level, attempting to hide it even from the Russian government. When the rest of the world figured out something had gone wrong at Chornobyl (radiation levels coming out of the region were off the charts, and quickly began spreading over Europe),
Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev insisted that the information the Soviets had be shared with the world. This accelerated his program of glasnost, began the lifting of the Iron Curtain, and ultimately contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union. What has never been told before is the story of the railroads that served the region and how they played a role in a nuclear plant being established there in the first place. Emily heavily researched information about the nuclear plant, the re- gion, and the railroads, in some cases finding information where no one else on this side of the globe had looked before; she taught her- self how to read Cyrillic to find information that was not available in other texts. While tours of the Chornobyl Exclusion
Zone are readily available to those wanting to make the journey, visits to the railroad fa- cilities are usually not a part of the standard itinerary. The smaller the tour, the more flex-
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