Fifteen kilometres to the northwest of Pärnu is the Lavassaare Railway Museum. Out of 630km of narrow-gauge railways that ran across Estonia until the late 1960s, the only 2km left in action are located here and the line is operated by volunteers as it has no commercial potential. The network had been built up between 1900 and 1940 and was initially maintained under the Soviet regime but, in the early 1970s, tracks were either widened to the standard gauge or closed. The museum brochure refers to this as 'liquidation as the structure of the narrow-gauge railways was a threat to Soviet ideology'. Fortunately the threat cannot have been that great, otherwise the wider range of memorabilia now to be seen in the museum building would not have been kept. It in fact opened in 1987, when the Soviet era still had four years to run. Bus 44 runs from Pärnu to Lavassaare. The museum is open only in the summer, and on Saturdays the train runs about every hour. Two plans are being considered for the future. One is to move the museum to Türi in central Estonia during 2007, as this town is the railway centre of Estonia. The other is to bring the engines and the collection to Pärnu Railway Station and to use some of the currently abandoned track to Mõisaküla. Neil Taylor "Estonia. The Bradt Travel Guide", 2007 |
