In 1945, Soviet war hero Ignat is sent to work as a locomotive mechanic in a Siberian labor camp where he meets an assortment of Germans and Russians.

The action takes place shortly after the end of the Second World War in the Siberian hinterland, among Russians and Germans with damaged personal stories and a strange transformation: the victors seem to be crawling into the skins of the defeated, and vice versa. Ignat, is the embodiment of the larger-than-life image of the Soviet victorious warrior who, in fact, proves to be shell-shocked, sick and broken, although not completely destroyed. Trains become fetish for the heroes of the film, and speed becomes a mania; they virtually become one with their steam engines, while the machines take on human names. The heroes set up an almost fatal race in the Siberian forest, risking their own lives and those of others.—Anonymous

In 1945, in the end of the World War II, the Russian war hero Ignat is sent to a Siberian labor camp of collaborationist to work as mechanic of the locomotive that transports wood. Ignat has a concussion that makes him lose consciousness and loves locomotives, but is not allowed to be a driver. Ignat meets the Russian Sofia that has a German boy named Pashka and he has a love affair with her. When Ignat learns that there is an abandoned locomotive in the woods, he decides to repair the vehicle. But he finds the aggressive German girl Elsa living aboard of the train that tries to protect her abode. But Elsa ends teaming up with Ignat and helping him to fix the locomotive and repair of the bridge to cross the river. When Ignat returns to the labor camp, he has a love affair with the outcast Elsa and Sofia is jealous of her. They both are outcast and Ignat and his locomotive "Gustav" are rejected by the dwellers and lives with Elsa in the train. But when the cruel Major Fishman arrives in the camp, their lives will not be the same again.—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil