Rybinsk was built on one trade: moving grain up the Volga. In the nineteenth century this was the point where cargo from the big river boats was transferred onto smaller craft for the canal routes to St Petersburg, and every summer tens of thousands of barge haulers gathered on the embankment to sell the strength of their backs. The town grew rich on it, and the old grain exchange building on the waterfront, with its arcades and little towers, is the monument to that money. Next to it stands the Transfiguration Cathedral with a bell tower that rises high above the low skyline and is visible from far down the river.
The other great fact of Rybinsk is the dam. In the late 1930s and early 1940s the Soviet state built a hydroelectric plant just upstream and flooded a vast area behind it, creating the Rybinsk Reservoir, one of the largest artificial lakes in Europe. Whole villages and the old town of Mologa disappeared under the water, and the memory of that loss is kept in a small museum. Ride out to the dam and the sense of scale is startling: on a grey day the reservoir looks like an open sea.
As the finish of a ride down the Volga from Uglich and Myshkin, Rybinsk is a good place to end. The roads that bring you here run along or near the river through farmland and forest, mostly flat, with some rough surfaces and long straights where trucks set the pace. The town itself is busy with traffic, tram tracks and cobbles in places, so take the last few kilometres calmly. The embankment is wide and pleasant for an evening walk, with river boats tied up and old merchant houses facing the water.
Rybinsk has around two hundred thousand people, so fuel, workshops, hotels and restaurants are all easy to find. It is also an aircraft engine town, home to a big factory that has built engines for decades, which gives the place a practical, industrial feel under the old facades. If you have a free morning, the cathedral and the exchange are a short walk apart, and the view across the river from the embankment at sunset is the right way to close the day.