International Railroad Discussion > Armenia, part 3. Yerevan yards

After watching train 686 depart I walked along the tracks to the railroad yards, hoping I'd find interesting passenger equipment and locomotives.

While walking the tracks was fine, the yards had someone in a shack or a building near the end of the yard. I don't recall if he motioned to me to go, or if I just steered clear of the equipment. Either way it seemed perfectly reasonable for them not to want people poking around.

There were a couple sets of the turret cab regional trains, and one very beefy looking mated pair of electric motors.

Photos

1) A nice scene, with a turret cab trainset and an interesting electric locomotive I hadn't seen anywhere before

2) Detail on the locomotive

3) Detail on the turret cab

Photos taken around Nov 1, 2017

Location https://www.google.com/maps/@40.14511,44.5082115,440m/data=!3m1!1e3
(I see from the Google aerial photo that there is a large passenger car yard on the east side of the yards a little further to the south).

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I walked through the adjacent streets looking for other equipment that could be seen from a public space, but didn't find much that could be adequately photographed with an iPhone.

4) Looking south on the east side of the yards

5) A couple blocks south of the above photos, looking NE (this part of the yard was fenced off)

6) Same location, looking SE. Lots of catenary bridges, though yard tracks no longer have wires.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/02/18 01:07 by gobbl3gook.

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I had the idea that the best way to view the yards was from the roof of a housing block. In Tbilisi nobody had cared at all that a stranger was wandering the halls of the apartments (or that strangers were wandering anywhere else in the entire country) so I walked into one of the housing towers and took a rattly little elevator to the top floor, then went up one more flight to the roof.

The roof access to the west was occupied by a little hut occupied by an old man, and a chain link fence "yard".

I don't normally impose on people at all when travelling, but I took a bit of a risk on this one and knocked on the gate, motioned to myself, said "Tourist," motioned to his yard, held my hand over my eyes like a hat brim (pantomime for "looking around", and asked "okay?"

He didn't say anything, but didn't react negatively either, so I stepped into his yard, snapped a couple photos, said "thank you" and 45 seconds later I was headed down the stairs.

This would have been a good spot for a long lens camera. On the other hand, maybe he would have thought I was an Azerbaijani spy and called the authorities if I'd have been sporting a fancy camera.

7. 8. 9) As you can see, the view was terrific, even if the lighting was difficult and the camera not powerful enough to get any detail.

In retrospect, there was another stairwell at the other end of the building, I could have gone down there to see if there was a more public access point.

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Bonus photos --

The apartment blocks had "garages" or sheds clustered around the base. They loosely filled the areas between the high-rises and the edges of the railroad yard. This was common in Yerevan. Elsewhere in the former USSR the adjacent grounds were usually parks.

10. 11.) In this particular area, many garages were obviously converted train cars. Most were boxcars, there might have been a few passenger cars. A pretty good trick, I thought.

My vantage point for photos 7, 8 and 9 was the roof in the center of photo 11. You can see that there is a room added to the roof on the left, with just a parapet on either side of it. The was the "hut" and yard of a nice retired Armenian man. Maybe he's a railfan...

12.) Another hallmark of the former USSR is large concrete buildings built, used, and abandoned (common) or only half finished, then abandoned (not common, but not rare either). This is an example of the latter, a block or two south of the train station. As you can see, it is was going to be quite a structure, but work certainly stopped a long time ago, mid-stream, and isn't likely to ever start again. I'm guessing that many of the half-finished buildings dated from the late 1980s when the USSR economy was falling apart.

Questions, comments?

Ted in OR



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 03/04/18 14:43 by gobbl3gook.

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In that last photo, those uncompleted buildings look like homeless magnets. Or maybe I am too "woke" on the situation, living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The whole place is "junkie" looking.

Thanks for all of your work in writing your photo narratives and posting your most interesting photos.
We don't see many from that part of the world.
ALLEN

tomstp Wrote:
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> The whole place is "junkie" looking.


It's what any place looks like after the nation it was part of breaks up and is then looted of 60% of it's industry virtually overnight. Look for it coming to a place near you soon.

Really like the rooftop views. Did you get a good view of Mt. Ararat? In two weeks of traveling around Armenia I never once got a look at it without substantial cloud cover.

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Where to next???

GettingShort --

Ararat appeared on days 4 and 5, I'll post more photos later, but here's a start.

After Yerevan I took a train northwest to Gyumri, then bicycled to Batumi, Georgia.

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How did you like Gyumri? You see the Russian military base there? The Russian Army and Air Force are responsible for protecting Armenia's borders with Turkey and Iran.

GettingShort Wrote:
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> tomstp Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
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> > The whole place is "junkie" looking.
>
>
> It's what any place looks like after the nation it
> was part of breaks up and is then looted of 60% of
> it's industry virtually overnight. Look for it
> coming to a place near you soon.

Yet most of Armenia (including urban areas) is safer for tourists than much of 'Frisco. Certainly safer than most of Oakland. Or Baltimore, Newark, Philly, Detroit, Cleveland...