Old railway station, Thessaloniki

This summer, on annual vacation, in addition to enjoying the beach, swimming, walking along the coast and the pleasant sun without high temperatures, I was also looking for some interesting locations that would make my vacation even more interesting.
And in Thessaloniki, a city that has existed for two millennia and its surroundings, there is no shortage of such interesting things.

I visited the oldest church in Thessaloniki a wreck outside the bay of Thessaloniki, as well as a military cemetery from World War I.

And on the tour map and on my #worldmappin map, there was also a place for a strange museum, 10 km from the hotel where I stayed, the railway museum.
It's not the kind of museum you expect to see.
Old Railway Station Museum

At the entrance, next to the large metal door, a large steam locomotive will welcome you.

In addition to the central building, built in the period from 1891 to 1984, when this museum space was actually a railway station, there is a display of exhibits throughout the complex.
Unfortunately, I don't know what the Greek authorities are thinking when they keep such exhibits, which are more than a hundred years old, in this condition, without restoration and maintenance.
The only thing that looks like a museum is actually the central station building.

In this building there are various exhibits related to the railway.
There are telephone sets that were used for communication between the main railway stations and remote outposts and way stations.

The uniforms of the dispatcher and the head of the station, as well as the tool used by conductors to validate train tickets.

Various instruments and devices for measuring, lighting and communication, as well as this telegraph through which the officials communicated via Morse code.

Exhibits of the railway orchestra, trumpets, tubas and trombones are also on display.

And it would have been unimaginable at that time, if a train ticket did not have a stamped date, so there are various types of stamps.

When you step out of the museum over the steps with the year of the station building carved into them, you emerge on a beautiful sunny day into the yard (complex), which looks more like a train graveyard than a museum, with a few exceptions.

This is the first museum where I was able to ride on one of the exhibits using my own muscles, just as people did 100 years ago. The only thing is that this requires four or at least two, and I tried it alone. When you get a kick out of it, it's not so bad, it kind of turns around 😀

In an autonomous vehicle (self-powered), I drove to probably the biggest attraction of this museum.

Two wagons from the beginning of the 20th century, which cruised on European rails between the two world wars.
Luxury sleeping cars and vqgon restaurant - cars of the Belgian company CIWL, were part of the Simplon Orien Express that traveled from Athens, through Thessaloniki, Skopje, Belgrade, Zagreb, Munich and all the way to Dortmund.

I stepped into this composition and had the impression that I was in an Agatha Christie film, as a passenger of the famous Orient Express from Paris to Constantinople.

A restaurant wagon with wooden chairs covered in red leather gave the impression of glamour.

A narrow passage, with an armchair for the waiter on duty, led to the passenger cabins.
Small apartments represented at that time the most perfect and most comfortable form of passenger transportation and the privileged ones, who in those years had the money to choose this as a form of transportation, had guaranteed enjoyment.
They could sleep like at home, they had a sink, a mirror, and a storage room for small things. In one of the cupboards I came across a saucer with details of Egypt, maybe a prop from filming a movie in this apartment?

In order for all these passengers to enjoy their journey, the restaurant car is equipped with a kitchen, where delicious meals were prepared, I believe, and there is also a toilet, which has not drastically changed its appearance even in modern train compositions.

When I got out of this time capsule, I took a closer look at what the locomotives that powered these luxury cars looked like. Mostly in that period they were steam locomotives, and you can see pictures of their boilers and wheels in these pictures.

For a serious railway network to function, it had to have good logistics and maintenance.
People who came to work to distant station branches, in addition to the autonomous vehicle (manually driven), had their own small, and very interesting vehicles, which transported people, as well as maintenance tools.

Walking around the complex, I came across a separate wagon, which seemed interesting to me.
I entered it and at one end, I saw a table with boxes. Toys? No.

They were boxes with models of trains, as well as a set scenario of two railways, with tunnels, hills, bridges, accompanying facilities with lots of rails and trains.

After exiting this car with an interesting display, I came across a part of the complex with various tools and machines for train maintenance and repair, and when I was slowly bringing the visit to an end and looking for a toilet to freshen up, the lady who sold me the ticket, also the curator of this museum, asked me if I had seen the reconstructed wagon?

"I saw, one reunited and one reconstructed. Why do you ask?"

And then she explained some historical facts to me.
This station was originally an ordinary transit station, but during the First World War, it was given the role of a military station.
This station saw everything during the First World War.

Between the two world wars, it waited for countless passengers of the luxurious Simplon Express, and during World War II, it was a witness to the horrors and holocaust.
From this station, in wooden wagons (cattle), the Jews of Thessaloniki were transported from Thessaloniki to the concentration camps.

The curator does not have precise information, but she mentions 19 compositions, which drove about 45,000 members of the Jewish Serdart community to their deaths from here.

One of the family members of a former Jewish prisoner donated funds to reconstruct one of the wagons.
And he now stands there as a witness to the suffering of a nation in a few months in 1943.

Fortunately, I heard about this wagon and its history at the end of the tour of the entire complex, because if I had known what kind of dark story this complex holds, I believe that the tour would not have been as interesting to me as it was.

In any case, I put this pin on my map and recommend a visit to the location, and I sincerely hope that the Greek authorities will devote a little more time and resources to this place, so that the old railway station continues to live and convey interesting (and terrible) stories from its history to future visitors.