Mariya Ferneza
The collection of Maria Ferneza includes an album of photographs from the 1948/51 taken at the Lviv Power Lift Trucks Factory. The factory operated from 1948 to 1991.
As soon as in the first year after the Second World War, Soviet government assigned 137 mln. roubles for the construction and development of industry in Lviv. Parallel to the reconstruction and expansion of the available companies in the city, they planned to build and put into service the car assembly plant, electric bulb plant, a factory of telegraph and telephone equipment, a glass factory, a knitted-goods factory, food processing companies, and to resume the operations and increase the capacity of the city electric power plant.
In 1948, they started the construction of a factory of power lift trucks, based at the factory of gas installations (“Ukrgazaparat”) at 7 Zaliznychna Street. Workshop facilities were added one by one: the instruments manufacturing facility, the mechanical repair facility, the foundry repair facility.
In summer, 1948, a large group of engineers and technologists arrived from the Moscow technological institute “Orgavtoprom.” They started developing the technology, and drawings of instruments and appliances. The structure of a power lift truck was designed in Dnipropetrovsk, under the supervision of an automaker Vitaliy Grachov.
As soon as after a year following the design of a power lift truck, the factory launched the mass production. The first batch of machinery came out of the factory on June, 11, 1949. The new power lift machine, a compact powered loading machine, was assigned an index “4000”. Thereafter, in 1949, an annual plan was overfulfilled and over 1,000 power lift trucks were produced. They were the first ever types of machines in Lviv, and in the entire Soviet Union, too.
Over the year, the number of workers at the plant has grown significantly, from 1,100 persons at the start of the year, to 2,285 in the end of 1949. In 1950, they already had an established assembly flow production, and a new make of the fork truck “4000М” was developed. Ten year after, the factory produced the hydraulic cranes "4031", the ten-ton power loaders "4008," and the make "4032" produced not by one brigade, as in 1948/49, but by 19 brigades.
The photographs displayed in the gallery come from the album of the Lviv Power Lift Truck and cover the early years of the factory’s life (1948-1951) when they were establishing the workshops, setting the production, and the manufacturing process, as well as celebrating the first success stories.
