Salekhard

The Dead Road

Construction No. 501 and No. 503 (officially the North-Siberian Railway, popularly known as the "Dead Road" or the Transpolar Mainline) was a massive, classified Soviet Gulag megaproject executed between 1947 and 1953. Aimed at laying roughly 1,450 kilometers of railway across northern Siberia along the 66th parallel connecting Chum, Salekhard, Nadym, Novy Urengoy, Yermakovo, and Igarka, the line was built over continuous permafrost and peat bogs by tens of thousands of forced laborers. Abruptly abandoned weeks after Joseph Stalin's death, it left behind hundreds of kilometers of twisted tracks, abandoned labor camps, telegraph poles, and rusting steam locomotives stranded in the Arctic wilderness.