Zheleznodorozhny is a town located in the Moscow Region, 21 km to the east of Moscow. It is a railway station as well. The town territory makes 25sq.km.

The population of Zheleznodorozhny makes138 thousand people (as of January 1, 2013).

History of Zheleznodorozhny

It was founded in 1861 as a settlement by the railway station Obiralovka on the Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod railroad. Obiralovka was named so after one of the early owners of the village. From 1877 it was Obiralovka station settlement. The year 1877 saw the publication of Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina, where life of the heroine tragically ended.

The housing estate of Obiralovka appeared on the basis of the station and was transformed into the Zheleznodorozhny working settlement in 1938. In 1952 it became a town.

Later the working settlements Kuchino (from 1960), Savvino (from 1959) and the villages Temnikovo and Sergeevka (from 1960) were included into the town. Population of Zheleznodorozhny town was 19.2 thousand people in 1959 and became 39.6 thousand people in 1960 considering the number of people in attached settlements.

Kuchino Settlement on Pekhorka River was for the first time recorded in written sources of 1573-74 as a heathland. In the second half of the 17th century mining of clay was launched in Kuchino, where the Danilovs brothers organized production of red brick in the early 19th century. At the end of the 1860s the Moscow merchant D.I.Milovanov acquired handicraft brick production and constructed a brick-works, which gave its first production in 1875. Soon there appeared brick-works of merchants Kupriyanov and Golyadkin.

In 1896 at the initiative of the manufacturer Vikula Morozov (grandson of the famous patron of arts Savva Morozov) the Savvinsky Manufactory was constructed, which provided basis for the Savvino Settlement.

Architecture and Sights

Preobrazhenskiy church (the second half of the 19th century).

Zheleznodorozhny railway station (late 1980s – early 1990s). The old station square and the southern part of Zheleznodorozhny have been built up with modern multi-storey buildings.