No. 85: Train Station
Nikolaevsky Railway Station
The train station on Znamensky Square marks the end of Nevsky Prospect. Built during the reign of Nicholas I, the station opened its doors in 1851, when the train on the St-Petersburg – Moscow Nikolaevsky railway line made its virgin journey. The two-storey clock tower on the terminal building, designed by architect Constantine A. Ton and engineer K.A. Zhelyazevich, was in the style of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century city hall buildings in Western Europe. Like The Singer tower on 28 Nevsky, the clock tower served as the architectural high point at the end of the capital's main avenue. In 1909, the equestrian statue of Alexander III by the sculptor Paolo Trubetskoy was erected on Znamensky Square, becoming an important landmark in the late imperial capital. Click here to see the monument.
The same architecture was used in Moscow's Nikolaevsky station, which was finished earlier, in 1849. The trip between the two cities in the middle of the nineteenth century took between eighteen and nineteen hours. At the time, Znamensky Square was located on the periphery of the capital. In 1912, the architect V.A. Shchuko was chosen to reconstruct the terminal, including the main building, but because of the war, he did not complete the project, and the old terminal still stands today. In 1923, it was renamed October station, in honor of the October revolution in 1917, and in 1930, Moscow station.
The city's biggest train station, it appears in three other itineraries of Mapping Petersburg: Tramvai (Nikolaevsky station); Anatomizing Modernity (Meat); and Visions of Terror (The Baltic, Nikolavsky, and Warsaw Railway Stations)
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