World's Ugliest Beautiful Locomotives Toil in the Urals

I love industrial railroads, and the more brutal and massive the industrial landscape, the better. In the Ural Mountains of Russia is a large open-pit Titanium and Magnetite mine just outside of the city of Kachkanar. The big electric locomotives resemble Krokodils on roids, and they haul six wheel trucked air dump cars. The complex only dates back to 1958, built during the Khrushchev era. Nikita was very familiar with the industrial value of the Urals. It was he who was given the task by Stalin to move Soviet industry east and out of range of Nazi bombers.

View Larger Map