The Narrow Gauge Railroad Museum in Lavassaare is one of the two existing museums in Estonia covering the history of railway traffic. The museum in Haapsalu tells mainly about the railway connection with this city. The museum in Lavassaare , a suburb of Pärnu , tells the story of the Estonian narrow gauge railway .
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The uniqueness of the Lavassarean museum lies in the fact that it is one of two museums located on the territory of the former USSR dedicated to this subject (the second is located in the village of Talitsy, Pereslavl region, Yaroslavl region of Russia). Collection of exhibits for the Estonian Narrow Gauge Museum began in 1980, after 750-mm canvases were replaced with standard ones with a size of 1520. The first locomotive in the collection was the VP-1-899 locomotive.
In the fall of 1987, a society was organized by enthusiasts, the main task of which was the construction of a full-fledged railway museum. A year later, it secured the support of the Society for the Protection of Antiquities ( Eesti Muinsuskaitse Selts ). At the same time, the arrangement of museum territory in Lavassaare began.
The museum is located in the depot of peat railways. In the 1920s, it connected with the city of Pärnu, in the 1980-2010s - with the Tootsi peat enterprise.
For visitors, the doors of the museum opened only in 1992. By that time, the collection of equipment available here could already be called impressive. Even today it surpasses the Pereslavl museum in its wealth and variety. Lavassaar collected samples of Estonian railway equipment, as well as Ukraine, Russia, Latvia and Lithuania. The museum management notes that all this was made possible largely thanks to the help of the Society for the Protection of Antiquities and the Tallinn Railway Depot.
In 1996, when the centenary of narrow-gauge railway communication in Estonia was celebrated, the Lavassare Museum was officially registered as a non-profit enterprise. At the same time, the opening of the internal exposition took place, which collected numerous artifacts and documents of the time. Today the museum's collection has 65 units of various equipment.
In the museum you can not only admire the trains, but also explore some of them from the inside. The museum is connected to the village by a narrow-gauge railway, on which a passenger train runs several times a day, delivering visitors here.