UrBC, Yekaterinburg, July 24, 2015. Uralvagonzavod Corporation’s head plant is going to make and present to the city of Nizhniy Tagil two full-size models of the first Russian steam train which was designed by Cherepanovs (father and son), local inventors and industrial engineers, in the 19th century.

The company press service reports a copy of the locomotive will be mounted on the embankment of Tagilsky Pond by the Park Inn by Radisson Hotel. Incidentally, the hotel is being put up by one of the corporation’s member enterprises. The other one will be displayed at the plant’s open air railway vehicle exhibition next to the armored vehicles museum.

‘The steam coach, as the Cherepanovs’ invention was called back then, came in two varieties. The one developed in 1835 is generally better known, whereas the one created a year earlier was less powerful, with a differing wheel size, and a crowned funnel. No drawings of this earlier version survived. Only one sketch remains that shows what the machine looked like on the outside. This naturally presented the greatest difficulty when the company engineers started working on the drawings for the models,’ the press service says.

The plant workers are trying to make these models as accurate as possible; there is, however, one more thing: back in the 19th century, only blacksmiths worked on the original loco, and all the parts got assembled with the help of rivets. Today, welding and casting make machine-building much easier, so some of the parts of the machine will be imitations.

Models will be made from authentic materials such as pig iron, steel, and wood. To protect the steam coach from negative environmental impact, special paint coating will be applied by workers from the plant’s painting department, with the design office providing the historically accurate color scheme.