Situated close to Novgorod, about 120km south east of St Petersburg, this project has a well-populated hinterland and thus is assured of sufficient enthusiast-volunteers to make steady progress. The terrain is marshy, this being a peat area which in Soviet times supplied power stations serving, among others, Leningrad. When the peat industry spread, new settlements were also named Tesovo, each wit
h a serial number; so the Tesovo-Natyl'skii peat centre became Tesovo-1. In the 1970s the line was modernized and could boast concrete sleepers and semaphore signals. A passenger service operated between Tesovo-1 and Tesovo-2. However, in the 1990s the railway began to shrink as power stations turned to other fuels. Peat production more or less ceased but there has been a small revival recently, with 20km of line still in use for its original purpose; at its peak, the line had measured about 200km. The enthusiasts' project, the Tesovo Narrow Gauge Railway, has been developing over the last decade and is based on Tesovo-1. Its basic aim is to preserve and present a traditional peat railway. Currently it has at its disposal about 200 metres of track, a TU4 locomotive, a PD1 railbus, and several motor-trolleys. Considerable publicity was gained earlier in 2014 by a re-enactment of the spring 1942 military operation - an attempt to break the N**i blockade of Leningrad - which took place largely on the territory once served by this narrow-gauge railway. A good deal of vintage military equipment, manned by military enthusiasts of the region, provided a spectacle that was featured by the local television and press. Presumably the circumstance that the original operation resulted in the heroic destruction of the Soviet 2nd Shock Army, commanded by General Vlasov who subsequently defected to the Germans, and that in Soviet times this disaster received little publicity, added spice to the reenactment.
