@DrMcStrange I just dug in a little deeper: it appears that the first Russian rail terminal in St Petersburg in the 1830s had a pleasure garden (a "Vauxhall") attached to it to entice vistors. People ended up using the word to describe the whole terminal complex rather than just the pleasure garden, then it was downcoded to a generic eponym for other terminals as the rail lines spread through the Tsarist Empire (much as any periodic thermal spring is called a "geyser" in English, after Geysir in Iceland).@matt #language #rail #russian #ukrainian
