Narrow Gauge Railway Museum

Kolochava is in the south-west of Ukraine, about 100 km from the borders of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania. This small railway museum among the ridges of the Carpathian mountains aims to save surviving elements of the Transcarpathia railway heritage. The museum consists of a single train with an operating steam locomotive and ten cars. The exhibits tell the story of the development of narrow-gauge railways in the region. They include passenger cars in which lumberjacks went to work in the mountains, freight cars for livestock and timber, equipment used by railway workers such as helmets and signal lamps and unusual survivals such as a car and an ambulance adapted to ride on rails. Visitors see exhibits largely in the condition in which they were rescued. Around the museum is the open-air village museum, which preserves over 20 buildings, among them a forge house of the 1930s, a carpenter’s workshop, a house filled with examples of traditional weaving and a school.