Romodanovsky Railway Station
A place that has connected millions of lives
NovaCard’s production facilities are located within the historic former Romodanovsky Railway Station on Chernigovskaya Street.
The Beginning
The Romodanovsky Station was built in 1904. The name of its architect, unfortunately, has not survived. This elegant two-story building on the right bank of the Oka River, adorned with decorative details and two turreted domes with spires, saw thousands of passengers pass through its doors every day.
As part of the Moscow-Kazan Railway, the station served both passenger and freight traffic along the Timiryazevo-Nizhny Novgorod line, connecting the southern districts of Nizhny Novgorod Province with the Middle Volga Region.
Its original name came from its terminal destination - the settlement of Romodanovo in Mordovia (renamed Krasny Uzol in 1922). Over the decades, the station itself was renamed twice: in the 1930s it became Arzamassky Station, and in the 1950s, after trains began running to Kazan, it was renamed Kazansky Station. Its present-day address, Kazanskaya Square, 1, still reflects this.
Today, Chernigovskaya Street - running along the Oka embankment - is a quiet and sparsely populated corner of the city. But in the early 20th century, life around the station was vibrant. Nearby stood flour mills owned by prominent Nizhny Novgorod industrialists, the Degtyarev and Bashkirov families, as well as warehouses and factory buildings. River piers along the Oka were crowded with vessels.
Adjacent to the station was the city’s largest cab stand; the area also hosted hotels, income-producing residential buildings, taverns, shops, and housing for railway employees. Inside the station itself was a well-regarded restaurant buffet, attracting many locals who came specifically to dine there.
Departing passengers enjoyed views of the green hillside and the wide river. Trains heading toward the Myza station moved slowly - not for the scenery, but out of necessity. Landslides were a serious problem for the railway.
Even during construction, soil movement delayed the station’s opening by two years. Later, retaining walls had to be built along the track bed, and dozens of drainage galleries were manually dug to divert groundwater. Many of these tunnels still exist today.
Pages of History
Since 2003, the Romodanovsky Station has served as NovaCard’s office, production base, and launchpad for expanding into global markets. In 2011, the major restoration and redevelopment project culminated in the publication of Romodanovsky Railway Station: 110 Years of History, produced by the Nizhny Novgorod publishing house Kvarts to commemorate two anniversaries: the 110th year since the start of regular passenger service from the station and NovaCard’s 20th anniversary.
The book contains what is likely the most comprehensive account of the Romodanovsky Station and the Timiryazevo-Nizhny Novgorod rail line, placing them within the broader history of Nizhny Novgorod and Russia as a whole. It features numerous archival photographs, drawings, and documents illustrating the station’s entire journey - its construction, pre-revolutionary and Soviet-era operations, decline and abandonment, and its new life in a different role.
The book was distributed to local libraries and bookstores so that residents interested in architectural heritage and historical memory could access it. NovaCard’s business partners also received copies as a gift.
The Railway
The railway line running along the Oka ascended gradually toward the Myza station and was renowned for its scenic beauty. It continued to the outskirts of the village of Romodanovo in what is now northern Mordovia. The junction station changed its name several times: Romodanovo, then Timiryazevo, and finally, from 1922, Krasny Uzol. The station on the Oka embankment was renamed repeatedly as well: originally Romodanovsky, then Arzamassky in the 1930s, and later Kazansky. A 1913 timetable lists three departures from the Romodanovsky Station - to Lukoyanov, Timiryazevo, and Kharkov. By 1937, the schedule included long-distance trains to Kharkov, Ruzaevka, and Arzamas; three suburban trains to Kudma; and one more to Metallist Station in the town of Pavlovo. Only in the 1950s was the most popular route of this direction launched - service to Kazan. Writer Leonid Andreyev described traveling from the Romodanovsky Station in the autumn of 1902 in his essay The Volga and the Kama. The Nizhny Novgorod-Kazansky Station complex included two depots - locomotive and carriage depots (both closed in 1965) - handled freight, and managed cargo transfer to river transport. From 1936 to 1945, it belonged to the Kazan Railway, and afterward to the Gorky Railway.
The Misery of Abandonment
Meanwhile, on the opposite bank of the Oka River, another transport hub - the Moskovsky Railway Station - was developing rapidly, providing service from Gorky to Vladimir and onward to Moscow. In 1961, the Sartakovsky Railway Bridge across the Oka was completed, making it possible to send long-distance southbound trains from the Moskovsky Station as well.
Kazan Station gradually became a suburban station, and its waiting halls grew noticeably empty. Some of the premises were transferred to a training facility for railway students.
A landslide in 1974 ultimately led to the complete shutdown of both the railway line and the station. Restoring the tracks, which had been buried under earth and debris, proved too difficult and too costly. The remaining rails were dismantled, the last employees and students left the building, and the station slowly fell into decay.
The abandoned structure appeared once more as a functioning station - on screen - during the filming of the Soviet television adaptation of Alexei Tolstoy’s The Road to Calvary in the mid-1970s.
In 2001, after standing empty for more than twenty years, the station building was purchased by NovaCard to house its bank-card production facilities.
A New Life
Despite having been granted the status of a regional cultural heritage site in 1993, the Romodanovsky Station had become a ruin by the early 2000s. This is why Vladimir Krupnov’s decision to acquire such a problematic property shocked colleagues and friends alike.
The purchase itself was relatively inexpensive, but the restoration - based on historical photographs and architectural drawings - and the adaptation of the building to modern industrial operations required enormous investment, which had to be paid off over the next ten years.
For Krupnov, the project was not only about reviving a cultural landmark; it was about restoring an important part of his own childhood memories tied to this place. For several years, he lost sleep and peace of mind, at first doubting the success of the entire undertaking, and spent his days on site overseeing the work.
The restoration project was led by architect Viktor Zubkov (1948–2013). Specialists from Zubkov’s architectural studio succeeded in meticulously recreating the station’s historic appearance - including the entrance group, the small towers, and the decorative façade details - while integrating additional production spaces between the building’s left and right wings where the passenger platform and railway tracks had once been.
The work complied fully with the strict security requirements of international payment systems, yet was carried out with such respect for historical authenticity that even the cafeteria was designed in the same location as the original station buffet.
Epilogue
Many consider the Romodanovsky Station to be one of the most beautiful industrial facilities in Europe today.
“Over the years of its existence, millions of people passed through this station. It is remarkable that today this place is once again connected to millions of lives - those who use the bank cards and mobile phones with SIM cards produced here at NovaCard. These are the threads that tie us together,” reflects Vladimir Krupnov.
* Chernigovskaya Street is the lower embankment of the Oka River. It was developed as part of the broader urban planning transformation of Nizhny Novgorod in 1834–1839, based on the designs of architects Efimov and Gotman. Construction of the embankment coincided with a devastating fire in 1836, when the old, predominantly wooden buildings burned down. After the fire, only stone buildings were permitted along the Oka. By the end of the 19th century, Chernigovskaya Street had formed a unified architectural and industrial complex consisting of income houses, hotels, and facilities of large industrial enterprises. At that time, the Oka embankment was a lively area: one of the city’s largest cab stands was located here, and numerous river vessels crowded the shore - their numbers multiplying during the All-Russian Fair. Today the appearance of Chernigovskaya Street has largely retained the form it acquired by the late 19th century, although the exterior of some historic buildings has been distorted by various alterations, additions to façades, damage, and loss of elements.
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