Kanavinsky Bridge

In the autumn of nineteen forty-one, they attempted to run a train of four flatcars carrying tanks and artillery guns along the tram tracks of the Kanavinsky Bridge. The train crossed the Oka River only on its third attempt. It was pulled by a shunting electric locomotive from the railcar repair plant: a steam locomotive’s running gear was not suited to the city line.

Nizhny Novgorod was then called Gorky. German forces had approached Moscow and cut almost all the railways linking the capital’s rail hub with the rear. Evacuated enterprises, military trains, and equipment from local factories passed through the city. However, Moskovsky Railway Station stood on one bank of the Oka River, Kazansky Railway Station on the other, and there was no railway bridge between them.

The permanent city crossing here had opened only eight years earlier. Before it, a pontoon bridge on barges linked the upper part of the city with the fair, Kanavino, and Moskovsky Railway Station. It was dismantled in autumn to protect it from ice drift. The new bridge made year-round travel across the Oka River possible; trams began running across it alongside cars immediately. The tram gauge matched the railway gauge—an alignment that changed almost nothing in peacetime.

Nikolai Adrianov, an engineer at Gorky’s Zheldorproekt, sought a way to send trains around front-line Moscow and proposed using the city tram line. Ivan Yudov, head of the tram administration, and Ivan Popov, head of the track service, adapted it for railway cars. The route ran from Moskovsky Railway Station across this bridge to Kazansky Railway Station and then farther south.

During the test, railway workers, bridge builders, and tram workers stood on the bank beneath the first span. This was bridge builders’ practice: the people responsible for the calculations and the track remained beside the structure while it was under load. On the third attempt, the electric locomotive pulled all four flatcars through. After that, trainloads were sent through the city around the Moscow rail hub, and military equipment from Gorky factories began reaching the front about a week earlier. Those who took part in adapting the track were awarded Medals “For the Defence of Moscow”.

The tram rails were removed after traffic over the bridge ceased. Its present name appeared in nineteen sixty-five, when another crossing opened over the Oka River and the former name, Oksky, no longer distinguished this bridge from the others. It was named Kanavinsky after the district on the left bank to which it leads. Beneath the asphalt remains the same line across the Oka River along which four flatcars carrying tanks crossed only on their third attempt.