Paveletsky Railway Station

Paveletsky Station, on the square of the same name, receives trains from the Volga region, the Central Black Earth region and the southern parts of the country, and since the early 2000s has also become known as the starting point of the express train to Domodedovo Airport. It is one of the capital’s nine railway terminals, retaining a historic building from the turn of the 19th–20th centuries combined with modern suburban and airport infrastructure.

The building was erected in 1900 for the needs of the Ryazan–Ural railway; the design is attributed to the architects Nikolai Kvashnin and Yuly Diederichs, although some publications name Alexander Krasovsky as the author. The grand opening took place on 1 September of that year and was accompanied by a service with the blessing of water, attended by construction engineers and representatives of the business community. Contrary to the popular claim that the station was originally called “Saratovsky” (after the location of the railway’s administration), pre-revolutionary guidebooks and maps of Moscow from the 1900s already record it as Paveletsky — named after the settlement of Pavelets in Ryazan Province, from where the final branch of the line arrived.

A special place in the station’s history belongs to January 1924: on the 23rd of that month the funeral train bearing the body of Vladimir Lenin arrived here, an event mentioned by Vladimir Mayakovsky in his poem of the same name. In memory of this event, the square in front of the building was officially named Leninskaya from 1941 to 1992, and at the turn of the 1970s–1980s a separate pavilion-museum dedicated to that funeral train appeared next to the main building.

In the early 1980s the station underwent a large-scale reconstruction, which had to modernise its infrastructure while preserving the recognisable historic silhouette of the building, which had become part of the appearance of the city square. The renewed complex opened on 3 November 1987 — its area had grown sixfold, and the vestibule of the metro station of the same name, which had stood nearby, was partly incorporated into the new building.

On 3 August 2002, an express Aeroexpress train to Domodedovo Airport was launched from the station, making Paveletsky one of the main transport hubs of the southern direction. Today dozens of suburban electric trains depart from here daily for Kashira, Stupino and Uzunovo, and the platforms are divided into a free zone for long-distance travel and a paid suburban-airport zone with turnstiles.

Paveletsky Station remains a rare example in Moscow of a transport hub where turn-of-the-century historic architecture continues to function under the conditions of intensive modern passenger traffic, and where the memory of symbolic 20th-century events coexists with the everyday rhythm of suburban and airport transportation.