The Soviet artist Porfiry Krylov was a member of the Kukryniksy creative collective, which gained global fame for their social, political and anti-war cartoons. In September 1933, the Kukryniksy received a call from the editorial office of the newspaper Pravda (“Truth”) and offered to take part in a creative journey along the railways of the USSR.

The Kukryniksy recounted this trip in their book “The Three of Us”: “We traveled in a special editorial car and visited the Donbass region, rode along the Southern Road and across the Urals — Magnitogorsk, Chelyabinsk, Nizhny Tagil, Sverdlovsk. We never missed even small railway stations. During one such trip, we traveled twenty-two thousand kilometers in a month.”

The main task of this journey was to identify problems in the railway transportation system and tackle them with the help of satirical cartoons in the press. These trips resulted not only in the creation of a series of cartoons, but also paintings by the members of the Kukryniksy — Porfiry Krylov, Mikhail Kupriyanov and Nikolai Sokolov.

Later, many drawings by the Kukryniksy on the subject of Soviet transportation were included in a separate album, published under the title “Hot Roast”. The painting by Porfiry Krylov depicts one of the many stations the artists visited during their travels. This is Verkhoturye, it was built in 1903 as the terminus of a narrow-gauge railway running to the city of Nadezhdinsk — modern-day Serov. Today Verkhoturye is a large freight and passenger station of the Sverdlovsk railway in the village of Privokzalny. In 1991, the station achieved the status of an architectural monument.