The Baikal-Amur Railway is known as: one of the largest in the world, the most expensive infrastructure project in the USSR, the All-Union Shock Komsomol Construction Project. They composed songs about her, made films, wrote poems and novels. And there are many strange, mystical stories about this large-scale, such a necessary highway country.
Ghost train
This is the main legend of BAM. It was preceded by the real story of the builders-prisoners, which happened before the war. Few people know that the construction was started not by the Komsomol members, but by the prisoners of Bamlag at the end of the 30s. If not for the war, the road would have been built in the middle of the last century.
At one of the sites, the prisoners managed to hijack a steam locomotive with loading platforms. On it they hoped to break through to Yakutia, where it was easier to get lost. The camp leadership called in aviation, which bombed both the train with the fugitives and the narrow-gauge railway around. Soon the war broke out and the construction site was turned down.
Since then, however, local residents have periodically seen the train, soundlessly rushing along the frozen gates. A sort of Flying Dutchman. With the beginning of the All-Union construction, the brigades stumbled upon a narrow-gauge railway lost in the taiga. She was in perfect working order - with sleepers soaked in fresh creosote, polished rails. And it led to nowhere, more precisely, after 26 km it rested against a high hill, densely overgrown with cedar.
The assumption that the road was used by the military or special services has not been confirmed. The mystery remained unsolved. And the narrow-gauge railway was associated with the stories of the Buryats about the ghost train.
Tunnels to other worlds
The Severomuisky tunnel has become the longest in length in Russia. The most difficult in terms of engineering solutions is across the entire Severo-Muisky ridge. And its construction is the longest - 26 years, with interruptions. The underground crossing was glorified by mystical stories, in many cases occurring at different times with its builders.
During the breakthrough of the floater in 1979, several sinkers were walled up by rock debris. One of the workers tried to find a way out of the rubble on his own and came across a metal door in a granite wall. She was green with age, but behind her you could clearly hear movement, signs of some kind of life. The builder could not open the door, began to knock on it and call for help. There was no answer.
A year later, another section of the same tunnel collapsed. A wide gutter appeared in front of the workers, leading into the depths of the mountain. And from its emptiness, the blows of jackhammers were clearly heard. A strange depression was filled with rock and filled with concrete. And the tunnellers were told that they had auditory hallucinations due to the concentration of radon.
These are just the most famous stories. Many saw balls of fire floating out of the cracks towards the builders. They were considered a kind of warning to mountain spirits. Because soon groundwater flooding usually happened.
White shaman
There are white shamans in the Chukchi, Manchu and Altai epics. In Siberian and northern mythologies, they served people, protected them. So a kind White Shaman appeared on one of the construction sites.
The tunnel, which was laid through the Kodar ridge of northern Transbaikalia, became the highest mountainous. Moreover, the mountain range was seismically active, with earthquakes and avalanches. The tunnellers assured that the ghost, that is, the local White shaman, always appeared before the start of any cataclysm. That is, he warned him, and was never mistaken.
