Objects

Railway
The village of Mõisaküla on the Estonian-Latvian border was founded and grew in connection with the railroad. The old station master's house (1932) is now a museum of the history of Mõisaküla and the railroad.
Here you can see locomotives' factory plates, models and miniatures, and tools used to construct a narrow-gauge track. The museum also displays a bronze ashtray from the state railcar of Nicholas II, Tzar of Russia - this was preserved when the car was dismantled at the Mõisaküla factories in the 1920s.
The Pärnu–Mõisaküla railroad was a nearly 50 km long stretch, constructed in 1895-1896 as a narrow-gauge supply line connected to the Valga–Ruhja–Pärnu railroad. 1897 saw the inauguration of the Mõisaküla-Viljandi line, nicknamed the Mulgi Railroad (after the term used for people from the area). Railroad workshops and a factory were built in 1900, to repair the steam locomotives. In 1934, the train factory started to produce passenger railcars. The era of the narrow-gauge railroad between Pärnu and Mõisaküla ended in 1975, when the last general-service narrow-gauge train left Mõisaküla; it was replaced by a broad-gauge railroad that formed part of the Tallinn-Pärnu-Riga line. The poor quality of the tracks, however, meant that rail service could only be kept up for a little over a decade.
Virtual tour