Trans-Siberian Railway (Russia)

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The Trans-Siberian Railway had been on my list of "things to do before I die" for as long as I can remember. For anyone with a sense of adventure and a liking for trains - by far the most civilised way to travel in my opinion - it's a must. It's the Big One (or at least the Long One), the ultimate railway challenge and experience.

When my elder son went to work in Harbin in Northern China for a year, my wife ...
...seriously long rivers on the Trans-Siberian route aren't encountered until one reaches Asia. But the realisation that this unheralded stream is nearly four times the length of any British river brings home to the traveller the sheer scale of the land into which the train is steadily and relentlessly carrying him.

The train is not fast. The 450 km from Gorkiy to Kirov takes another six hours, an average speed of rather under 50 mph. ... more

Yaroslavski Station in Moscow is not the most comfortable place in which to wait for a train. Unsure of ourselves - of our local knowledge, of our feeble grasp of the language, of procedures - we made a point of being there early, two hours in advance of the 23.30 departure time scheduled for the No 10 "Baikal" special to Irkutsk.

Procedures. Always an important aspect of life in Russia, although the need to know the ropes is much less critical these days than in the past. You are no longer in danger of being frog-marched off into oblivion for having the wrong papers or saying the wrong thing. I am told, and I believe, that it is perfectly possible these days just to turn up at a mainline railway station and buy a ticket. But the Soviet bureaucrat mentality has not disappeared. You would worry that you might find the ticket office unaccountably closed. Even assuming it to be open and that you had battled your way to the front of the queue, if you did not speak Russian (and maybe even if you did) you would not want to rely on the ticket clerk to issue you with the right ticket at the right price for your intended journey.

So we had booked in advance through Intourist in London. Whether we thereby saved ourselves any time or aggravation is arguable. (There's a "Buyer Beware" op waiting to be written about Intourist in London, but it's not this one.) Nevertheless our tickets had eventually turned up at our Moscow hotel after only a little confusion and anxiety. A cab had whisked us directly and quickly to Yaroslavski station without the driver even demanding to be paid in dollars. Maybe things were looking up.

Not that we'd had a bad day in Moscow. Moscow in summer is a vibrant city, full of interest and charm. (There's a "Great Places to Visit" op waiting to be written about Moscow, but it's not this one.) We'd had coffee in one of the open air cafés opposite the Kremlin, taken the riverbus down the Moskva River to Gorkiy Park, picnicking in the open air, seen the elephants' graveyard of old Soviet statues, then back via the metro and an early dinner in Old Arbat to pick up our bags at the hotel.

But we were nervous about catching the train. Railways termini tend to be shabby and chaotic places anywhere, and we'd had experience of how difficult Russian stations could be the previous year in St Petersburg. And Yaroslavski, the mainline station for the east, seemed to confirm our worst fears, with its seething hubbub of travellers, incomprehensible signage and general air of confusion. "Worse than King's Cross," I hear my younger son muttering on the home video that I have just replayed to remind me of the experience.

We wedged our way into a corner of a table in the cafeteria amid the bags and bundles of our fellow-travellers, fended off the beggars, and as the departure time drew closer I forayed out ever more often to see what I could discover about the train. So far as I could tell it was unlisted either on any of the big boards or at the platforms. Then I noticed a group of obvious Westerners - Germans as it turned out - waiting at a particular platform entrance. "Irkutsk?" I asked hopefully. "Jawohl," they assured me. I don't know how they knew, but I took their word for it and went back to fetch my wife and son.

By the time all three of us were back at the platform the train was waiting and there were scrums around every carriage door. I don't know why everyone feels the urge to rush and push under these circumstances, or rather, I do: it's the fear, perhaps not unfounded, that if you don't you'll find someone else ensconced in your compartment by the time you reach it, and have the devil's own job to get them out.

On this occasion it was unfounded. The provodnitsa (carriage attendant, female) quickly assigned us our compartment, took the standard fee from us for clean bedding and left us to make ourselves at home. We did so, and still had time to step out onto the platform for a last look around in the gathering gloom (nightfall comes late in midsummer at these latitudes). Suddenly everything seemed calm and orderly, except for the odd straggler hurrying to catch the train. Soon we were back on board as the train gradually gathered speed through the suburbs to the east.

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The Trans-Siberian Railway had been on my list of "things to do before I die" for as long as I can remember. For anyone with a sense of adventure and a liking for trains - by far the most civilised way to travel in my opinion - it's a must. It's the Big One (or at least the Long One), the ultimate railway challenge and experience.

When my elder son went to work in Harbin in Northern China for a year, my wife and I decided at once that we would visit him, and our first thought was the Trans-Siberian. Then we realised that this would give us little time to see China, and we reluctantly dropped the idea, flying instead to Hong Kong and working our way up from south to north.

Now, just a few months later, we were heading east again, this time following our original instinct, taking the Tran-Siberian and seeing something of Russia on the way. And somehow our younger son had talked his way into coming along for the ride.

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Considering the novelty of the experience and the motion of the train, that first night we slept remarkably well. For the three of us we had booked all four berths in a second-class "coupé", an extravagance, but worth it for the privacy and luggage space. Furnishings are basic, with lace curtains the only ornamental touch, but clean and functional. The berths were wide enough for comfort and the bedding, rolled away during the day, more than warm enough for the time of year. The temperature within the carriages is in any case centrally regulated and even in the winter, I understand, kept pretty hot.

We were barely woken by the halt at 6.00 in the morning at Gorkiy, 460km east of Moscow, though from there on I did peer groggily from the window to see shabby concrete track-side towns, with early morning travellers taking their places on the platforms, little wooden houses with vegetable-patch gardens and the first of the interminable birchwoods.

We had missed seeing the crossing of the Volga River at Gorkiy, and had to make do with the Viatka some hours later. You've never heard of the Viatka? No, neither had I; at 1370km it's only the 5th longest river in European Russia and the 6th longest in Europe. The seriously long rivers on the Trans-Siberian route aren't encountered until one reaches Asia. But the realisation that this unheralded stream is nearly four times the length of any British river brings home to the traveller the sheer scale of the land into which the train is steadily and relentlessly carrying him.

The train is not fast. The 450 km from Gorkiy to Kirov takes another six hours, an average speed of rather under 50 mph. There are three stops between the two cities, each of just two minutes, too short a time to leave the train.

Fortunately, we have brought our breakfast from Moscow, and eat it in our compartment as the monotonous landscape unfolds outside. At the end of each carriage is a samovar with continuous near-boiling water on tap, from which thermo flasks can be filled and tea-bags infused.

Kirov proves to be a drab faceless city amid farmland, but the train stops for a quarter of an hour, time in which to step out onto the platform to buy supplies for lunch. There is plenty on offer, both from permanent kiosks and from individual entrepreneurs, anything from likely lads with bundles of goods to old babushkas with buckets of potatoes or mushrooms. I wonder how anyone could cook these on the train. Haggling is brisk in the time available, prices reasonable, and soon we have brought bread and oranges to supplement our Muscovite leftovers, and beer.

Probably in defiance of the rules and perhaps in return for a cut in the take to the provodniks, one or two traders found their way onto the train. My wife bought local wool to knit into a multi-coloured poncho on which she was working, and shawls as gifts to take home.

Onwards and eastwards. The landscape changes gradually: slightly hillier, fewer towns, more wooden farmhouses and log cabins, vegetable fields amid the woods, few roads. A mere three hours plus to the next stop at Balyezino, for a welcome leg-stretcher while watching the engines being changed. Then another three hours plus to Perm.

It is now early evening and we have come 1400 km, about the same distance as from the Scilly to the Shetland Islands, the utmost length of the UK in fact. Our journey has hardly begun.

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We were taking our journey in three stages: Moscow-Irkutsk; Irkutsk-Harbin; Harbin-Beijing. This is why we were on No 10 Baikal rather than the No 2 Russiya that runs on alternate days and goes all the way through to Vladivostok, covering 9289 km and crossing 7 time-zones in 7 days 10 hours if it runs to time.

After Irkutsk we would pick up the No 20 Trans-Manchurian, which covers the Moscow-Beijing run (9001 km, 6 time-zones) in similar time. A quicker way to Beijing is on No 4 Trans-Mongolian, which cuts down through Ulan Bator to save over a 1000 km and half a day in time. But if you are doing the journey by train time-saving is not your main objective, and in our case we wanted to go back to Harbin. Also, the Trans-Manchurian route is run by Russian trains, which we wanted to experience, whilst Chinese trains, which we had already experienced, operate on the Trans-Mongolian.

The route to Vladivostok via Harbin was the first completed in 1904, the longer all-Russian route along the Amur river following in 1916, just in time to play an important role in the closing stages of the Russian Revolutionary civil war. The railway is still Russia's main transport artery. Although it is, I understand, feasible to drive much of the way, there is still no road right across Siberia. Nearly all the freight and much of the passenger traffic follows the well-worn tracks of the Trans-Siberian.

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After Perm we are in a new time-zone and a new confusion enters our lives. The train runs strictly to Moscow time, not local. So the short night comes earlier according to the clock as we move east. It is dusk when we sit down to dinner in the restaurant car, and we see little of the presumably hillier country as we ascent into the Ural mountains.

There is a menu in the restaurant car, but they do not even bother to show it to us. We are lucky in that the waitress, a charming young woman called Yelena, is a student in English at Irkutsk University doing vac work. She is eager to practise her English on us, and in return tells as to what is really on offer (much less than on the menu) and what might actually be worth eating (less again). Wringing such information from her surly Soviet-style supervisor would have been like pulling teeth from a mammoth with a pair of tweezers.

When the food comes (shrivelled chicken-leg, overcooked vegetables) it is less than appetising but it looks at least as acceptable as what anyone else has so we eat it anyway, washed down with good Baltika beer. There is Georgian wine, sweet and heavy to western taste, as an alternative. And of course there is vodka in ample quantities if you want it, which most of the Russians and quite a few of the Germans seem to.

Prices are reasonable - though value indifferent - by the standards of the Russian restaurants we experienced elsewhere on our travels.

By midnight, train time, we are back in our carriage and the sky is brightening. We are in the Urals, paltry mountains where the train traverses them and unspectacular. By the time we pass into Asia, 1777 km out of Moscow, in the early hours of the morning, we are asleep.

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The provodniks and provodnitsas are the bosses of the train. Each rules his or her carriage with almost absolute power, like petty commissars. They supervise the samovars, let you off or refuse to let you off at stations, during waits at which they also lock the washrooms, which they may or may not reopen afterwards. They also lock your compartment if you leave it unoccupied, and let you back in afterwards. Finally, they choose what music at what volume should be broadcast over the carriage's loudspeakers.

Our provodnitsa on this leg of the journey has an easy-listening taste in Russian popular music, jazz and light classical, which is uninspiring but unobjectionable. She is a decent sort, though somewhat officious in style, as all Russian officials tend to be. She does, unlike some of her colleagues, keep both washrooms clean and open most of the time.

The washrooms on these trains are notoriously inadequate, the facilities in each consisting of one small basin and a toilet pan. With the carriage temperature kept hot for journeys of up to a week in duration, one becomes desperate for a shower. People improvise by pouring water over themselves, sometimes from perforated plastic bottles, a practice that leaves the washrooms awash, although there are holes in the floor for the waste-water to drain through. On the Irkutsk-Harbin leg, the washrooms had a sort of porous plastic imitation-grass covering, which improved matters considerably, although it felt strange underfoot and I was never confident in its cleanliness.

Security on the trains is a concern, since there are rumours of robberies, especially of foreigners. Some are macabre, such as the bribing or intimidation of provodniks to hand over their masterkeys to the thieves while narcotic gas is blown under doors into compartments as a prelude to ransacking them. I was sceptical about this, since there are additional bolts on the compartment doors only operable from the inside, but it is only human to have the odd qualm, especially when leaving the compartment unoccupied.

In the event, we had no trouble, and I remained sceptical. Subsequently, however, I learned that the daughter of some friends of ours and her travelling companions woke up on a train one morning with blinding headaches and missing valuables - but that was in Poland, not in Russia.

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Soon after crossing into Asia the train passes through Ekaterinaburg, scene of the final liquidation of the Tsar and his family. It then winds down through the eastern foothills of the Urals to reach a long level plain as it enters the administrative region of Siberia, 2100 km out of Moscow.

We woke up at Tyumen, the oldest town in Siberia, founded in 1586, a clearing centre over the years for millions of exiles sent east. From the station it looked as nondescript and down-at-heel as any other Russian city along the way. Beyond Tyumen settlements become fewer and further between. The birch woods thin and are reduced to occasional clumps.

Soon (soon by Siberian standards - three or four hours, half a day, I don't recall) the train is travelling across seemingly endless grassland, flat as a carpet, with what appears to be a constant seam of forest attaching it to the horizon in the distance. One reads in the guidebook that this is not continual forest at all. It is the occasional clumps of trees, merged by the viewer's vision across the otherwise unbroken plain to create the mirage of a solid line.

From Tyumen it is seven hours to the next city, Omsk, from Omsk another eight hours across the Baraba Steppe to Novosibersk. Between, there are a few towns and the odd small settlement, train traffic along the line, otherwise nothing much to look at.

This has got to be the most boring journey imaginable, you are probably thinking at this point. With just such an expectation, I have brought Anna Karenina with me to read en route. I hardly read a word. Instead, I stare out as if mesmerised across these vast open prairies, seeing not just the green summer grassland on each side of the track, but imagining it in sombre windswept white under midwinter skies of almost uninterrupted night.

You look at the map and remember that although the Trans-Siberian is Russia's major artery, the body it serves is huge and cumbersome and almost without veins. Go north at any point and you will be faced with a distance equal to that eastwards across the plain, but trackless and almost uninhabited, just grassland and forest until you reach the tundra and the permafrost of the Arctic shore a thousand miles or more away. Go south through prairie and steppe and you will reach the deserts of Central Asia. The railway is a thin thread across the middle of an empty tapestry.

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I exaggerate. There are hidden stitches dotted on the vast canvas to the north: grim mining and oil towns, lumber camps, military bases that don't appear on maps, probably still prison camps as well. In so far as they are linked at all it is by the great rivers that flow north.

At Omsk a rattling steel bridge takes nearly half a mile to cross the Irtysh, a tributary of the Ob, reached at Novosibersk. The next day at Krasnoyarsk we will meet the Yenisei, and the day after that at Irkutsk its tributary the Angara. The Ob-Irtysh and the Yenisei-Angara are the 5th and 6th longest rivers in the world.

The rivers glisten flat and silvery in the summer sunlight. In the winter they will be frozen. When the railway was first built, before the rivers were bridged, ferries carried the summer traffic while in the winter temporary tracks were laid across the ice, the sleepers fixed by water splashed over them, freezing them in place for months on end.

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Twelve hours and 750 km from Novosibersk to Krasnoyarsk, slowly ascending from the flat steppe and with the woodlands closing in once more. We are entering the taiga, the birch and conifer forest that covers much of Siberia. I have read varying estimates of its full extent, from the size of Europe downwards. Be grateful for it; it is one of the world's lungs.

It's dull to look at, though. My wife bemoans the lack of variety and of colour in the flora, noting that the rose bay willow herb that fringes the woodlands everywhere is not yet in bloom. But even that would have become monotonous hour after hour and mile after mile.

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From the train, Krasnoyarsk is the ugliest city I have ever seen, and I've seen some shockers. Gaunt rusty steel hangers by the trackside, disused factories like bombsites, crumbling stained concrete tower blocks.

On the station platform what looks like a grizzled old she-wolf tries to steal from the babuskas' baskets and is shooed away, to slink off among some apparently abandoned carriages on a nearby siding.

Somehow, we are put off buying any provisions here. In any case, who knows how many train-loads of passengers over how many days have been offered this cooked chicken and dried fish? So that evening (evening? Night has already been and gone; the timeshift, now four hours, is totally disorienting) we return to the restaurant car. Three of the Germans have already been there all day, drinking vodka and beer.

Some of the Germans are sociable and chatty. These three, middle-aged men with a belligerent manner, are not. They shout at the staff and try to grope Yelena's bottom as she passes down the aisle. Establishing that we are English, they say something about scheisse that we forbear to understand. Later, they decide they want to be photographed and ask me to operate the camera. I decline. This could turn nasty, but it doesn't. They've drunk too much to do anything, and are soon slumped in snoring heaps. The Russian staff are no way disconcerted, and a burly provodnik is found to help the restaurant car superintendent carry/push/guide them back, only a little roughly, to their compartment. No one turns a hair; Russians are accustomed to drunkenness.

The departure of the Germans doesn't improve the food though. All that is available is fish which, if it isn't the same dried fish we already refused on the platform at Krasnoyarsk, is so desiccated and tasteless that it might as well have been.

Although both buying on platforms and eating in the restaurant car add interest to the journey, the traveller on the Trans-Siberian would be very unwise to rely on these sources alone. We took iron rations in the form of Ryvita biscuits, cup-a-soups and Geobars - an odd diet but a reliable and sustaining one when all else failed, as it sometimes did.

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To the east of Krasnoyarsk, the scenery becomes more attractive, mountainous with rivers running amid the forest. It is a logging area, but also one where brown coal is mined, and there is reputed to be a depot where steam locomotives are kept in reserve in case the line's electrification fails. We didn't manage to spot them.

The electric locos on the train are changed several times during the course of the journey. One of our stops to do so was unscheduled, the result of mechanical trouble, and it was two hours before a replacement loco was found. We were now running about three hours late. Again, none of the Russians turned a hair and, if you think about it, three hours in a 75 hour journey is not very long. I wish more trains on my customary 60 minute journey into London were only the equivalent percentage of less than three minutes late.

The delay also made our arrival time in Irkutsk a little less daunting. According to the timetable, this was due at 3.00 in the morning, but of course, this was train-time, Moscow time. Local time would, or rather should, be 8.00. We actually now expected to arrive at 6.00 train-time, 11.00 local. We asked out provodnitsa to wake us an hour before then. Annoyingly, she insisted on waking us at 2.00/7.00, as if the train were going to arrive on time, although everyone knew that it would not.

Eventually though, arrive it did, and we stepped out onto Irkutsk station after a journey of 5150 km. By Russian standards, this train is a smart, clean and efficient one. We grew fond of its dedicated rolling stock, decorated with Irkutsk's symbol of a black polecat carrying a dead red prey. Some of the local trains, and the troop trains, that we had seen along the way were very shoddy and ramshackle by comparison.

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T here is an op waiting to be written about Irkutsk and Lake Baikal, but it's not this one. Irkutsk likes to call itself "the Paris of Siberia". It's an interesting and not unattractive city, but the Ul Karla Marxa is not the Champs Elyssées, nor is the Intourist Baikal Hotel the Georges V or even a match for the least pretentious of Parisian places to stay.

If you ever ride the Trans-Siberian do stop in Irkutsk; but do not, if you can avoid it, stay in the Intourist Baikal; do go out to the lake - unforgettable, sublime - but do not go by Intourist organised tour, nor by hydrofoil down the Angara, a service which was unaccountably not running when we tried it; seek out instead the Sputnik-Baikal Travel Company at 7b St Karl Libkneht, tel. (395-2) 34-14-82, who fixed us up with our own driver and individual boat trip at much less than the price Intourist charges for their excursion.

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Fa res. We paid £130 per berth second class for the Moscow-Irkutsk leg. At 4p a mile, this was hardly expensive. Third class is cheaper, but I am told it is very basic and not very safe. For some reason, first class is only available on the Trans-Mongolian route. Even if it had been available, I doubt we would have wanted to pay for it, though having on another occasion travelled first class on the St Petersburg-Moscow overnight sleeper - an absolutely fabulous bargain at £36 a head - perhaps we could have been tempted. These fares date from 2 to 3 years ago. They may have changed since.

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At Irkutsk we were a little over half-way to Beijing. I am running out of my word allowance and the second half of our journey must wait for a sequel, a follow-op. If this has been long op, believe me, it describes a long journey, and I have used fewer words than we covered kilometres.

It is hard to convey the fascination of the Trans-Siberian railway. On the face of it, this should be one of the world's least interesting journeys: the accommodation is ordinary, the facilities poor, the landscapes often featureless, and the human habitations seen from the train dull and derelict. But the overall effect is haunting, hypnotic.

Would I recommend it? Yes, whole-heartedly, although I cannot in all conscience award it the full five stars. Would I do it again? Yes. I'd go in the depths of winter to gaze out at those vast empty spaces under snow, and I'd stop in Krasnoyarsk, just to see if anywhere can really be as horrible as it appears.

© torr 2003

An account of the second half of this journey (Irkutsk-Beijing) can be found at: http://travel.ciao.co.uk/Trans_Manchurian_Railway__Review_5367602/ 

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