An open-air Soviet train museum on a Zenit-E

In December 2019 I took a short trip to Belarus with a good friend. It was the last plane trip I would take for more than two years; only a few weeks later, the world locked down amid the horrors of a global pandemic.

Belarus was once a part of the Soviet Union, and remains, politically at least, the closest satellite in Moscow's sphere of influence. The boulevards of its capital Minsk were rebuilt in the 1950s with a puffed-up, Soviet grandeur. There were still echoes of the USSR amid the gleaming glass of modern office blocks and Western cars. Policemen's hats looked like they were moonlighting from the tense parts of a Cold War spy film. Cyrillic signs glowered amidst the familiar Western brands.

A few hours by train from Minsk lay the city of Brest, just over the border from Poland, where we ended up for a couple of days. One reason was the Brest Fortress, a redoubt that was memorialised in the post-war Soviet years for its resistance during the first days of the German invasion in the summer of 1941.

There's another museum in Brest that turned out to be just as fascinating, and an absolute pleasure to photograph – an open-air railway museum.