Lomonosov’s first three years of full-time employment set the direction of his entire research career. His start was inauspicious: he was effectively dismissed from the Khar’kov locomotive-building factory for misconduct after just three months. But having quickly found a job with the nearby Khar’kov-Nikolaev Railway, he developed his first assignment there into a large-scale research project in locomotive engineering that even attracted interest from the distant MPS in St Petersburg. This project not only generated his lifelong fascination with locomotive testing, but also provided practical experience that helped him earn junior faculty appointments at two of the new polytechnic institutes, in Warsaw and Kiev, without having even started the necessary postgraduate studies.