Lviv Children's Railway

The child who sells you your ticket is about ten years old. So is the guard on the platform, the conductor waving you aboard and, with an instructor alongside, the driver at the controls. The Lviv Children's Railway is a working narrow-gauge line run almost entirely by schoolchildren, and it has carried passengers through Stryiskyi Park every warm season since 1951. The gauge is just 750mm, the loop only 1.2km, the carriages look like toys. Nothing else about it is pretend: real semaphores, real points, a real dispatcher, printed tickets, a timetable.

The train has a name — Viterets, “Little Breeze” — and it ambles between the chestnuts and limes at little more than walking pace. For Lviv families a ride on it is a rite of childhood. For a visitor it is the city at its most disarming, well off the trail that runs through the centre.

The line came before the children

Rails ran through this corner of the park long before any child drove a train. From 1922 until the Second World War, Lviv's Targi Wschodnie — the Eastern Fair — sprawled across Stryiskyi Park, and narrow-gauge tracks were laid to bring freight and fairgoers up from Persenkivka station. The park had been fairground since the 1894 Galician Provincial Exhibition — 130 pavilions, over a million visitors in one season.

The children's railway opened on 8 November 1951, built along the embankment of that older line and partly from salvaged Austro-Hungarian track hardware. It ran 1.85km then, with three stations and a steam engine. A rebuild in 1976, forced by roadworks on nearby vul. Stryiska, cut it back to today's 1.2km and cost it a station. In 1991 the two that remained shed their Soviet names: Komsomolska and Pionerska became Parkova and Soniachna.

Two stations, a loop, and a Lithuanian rarity

The journey is a single loop between Parkova and Soniachna, about 1.2km and 25 minutes, past a level crossing, points and semaphores worked by teenage signallers. Diesels do the pulling now. The everyday workhorse is a TU2-087; the fleet's pride is the TU3-039, a round-nosed locomotive that came from Panevėžys in Lithuania in 1971 and survives in almost no other collection — a museum piece that still turns a wheel, brought out for holidays.

Passengers ride in Polish-built Pafawag carriages, which replaced the original wooden ones around 1970. The trains keep the fond names they have carried for decades: Viterets, the little breeze, and Orlyatko, the little eaglet. It is all built to full-size railway practice, only shrunk: depot, dispatch office, working signals.

The point is the training, not the ride

The railway exists to teach. Attached to it is the Young Railwayman club, which takes children from about ten to seventeen — some 600 of them at present — for a free course that runs through the school year, with summer given over to working real trains. They qualify in the actual trades: driver and driver's assistant, station duty officer, conductor, switchman, dispatcher, trackman.

Finish the course and Ukrzaliznytsia, the national railway, issues a genuine certificate; for a few graduates it becomes the first line of a railway career. That is what separates the place from a fairground ride. Everyone in uniform is a child doing a real job, and taking it seriously.

When to catch it

The railway sits in the middle of Stryiskyi Park, off vul. Ivana Franka; walk in through the park or take a tram to the gates. It runs only in the warm months and only on some days — weekends in spring and autumn, Thursday to Sunday at the height of summer — so check Ukrzaliznytsia's current timetable before setting out, since the weather shifts it around. Fares are small, sold on the platform or online. Come on a bright, still day, when the park is deep in green and the little train slides in and out of the shade.

The park it runs through

Stryiskyi Park earns the trip on its own — landscaped from the 1880s, once counted among the finest parks in Europe, with a swan pond, surviving exhibition pavilions and long avenues of chestnut and lime. The railway belongs to it completely. For Lvivians it is a place of childhood, where people who once rode Viterets now bring children of their own; for everyone else it is a gentler, warmer Lviv, a long way in spirit from the crowds on Ploshcha Rynok.