It's about the Gavya railway station
On the Ivye land, the railway was built in 1907-1908.
A railway station, three four-apartment buildings and a water tower were built here at that time.
A water pumping station was built on the Gavya river to take water and supply it through the water supply to the Gavya station and to the columns on the railway tracks to feed steam locomotives with water.
Arched railway bridges were built on the Zhizhma and Gavya rivers. When the Germans retreated on July 6, 1944, the bridges were blown up. Trains moved along a temporary wooden bridge. The bridges were restored only in 1953.
At the end of 1909, the first freight train with construction materials arrived from Molodechno to the Gavya station. Seeing the "devil on wheels" people from neighboring villages were surprised, children and horses were afraid of him.
During World War I, in 1915, when the front was established along the Smorgon-Vishnevo-Bakshty-Lyubcha-Stolbtsy line, a German rear military unit was stationed in the village of Sudrogi, which provided the front with food.
German soldiers mistreated local people: robbed peasants, beat men, raped women. At st. Gavya from Germany daily arrived trains with military supplies, artillery, soldiers, and the Kaisers sent back their wounded soldiers and looted goods.
It was a hard time, I had to starve; diseases spread: scabies, typhus, Spanish flu, people died in families. To survive, the peasants tried to farm. There were not enough seeds, they used sprouts from it to plant potatoes. I had to eat weeds.
After the end of the First World War, life gradually began to improve. Land-poor men got a job at a railway station as track workers, switchmen, on duty at level crossings, and linemen. They were paid well. Passenger trains Molodechno-Lida-Grodno, Molodechno-Lida-Vilno ran through the Gavya station. Passengers could have a bite to eat at the station buffet.
On a narrow track
To deliver building materials, and later other goods, a narrow gauge railway was built from the Gavya station to Ivye. The narrow-gauge railway was served by men from the village of Sudrogi and neighboring villages. At st. Gavya built a depot for a steam locomotive, a ramp for unloading and loading goods, goods from wagons, broad gauge platforms on a narrow one. There were four freight and passenger cars, three platforms.
Before the outbreak of World War II, the narrow-gauge railway worked well, transported goods, three times a day passenger traffic Gavya-Ivye-Gavya ran with stops. The services were used by residents of nearby villages for a small fee. The movement of these traffic was coordinated with the schedule of passenger trains that stopped at Gavya station.
In the first years of the Great Patriotic War (1941-1942), the Nazis also used a narrow-gauge railway: they exported goods and stolen goods from the Jews from Ivye to the Gavya station, and from there they sent everything to Germany.
In September 1942, partisans blew up a steam locomotive near the village of Drobyshi, after which the movement was stopped.
After the war, the narrow-gauge railway was dismantled and transported to the Yuratishki railway station. And in 1950 the narrow-gauge railway was transported to the Lida region to a peat enterprise, where a peat briquetting plant and the village of “Pervomaisky” were built. Now it is renewed and operates at a new peat extraction in Dainova of the neighboring region.
Such is the fate of the narrow-gauge railway station. Gavya-Ivye.
