Ticket to Ride

by Tom Chesshyre

  There were many reasons for this long delay. For years resistance among conservative-leaning bureaucrats proved the biggest stumbling block, along with the anticipated high price tag. Eventually, however, the logic for building the line won through. The argument went that a transcontinental track would be vital to holding together the giant nation (separatist rumblings in Siberia had Moscow worried). It would also allow easier access to the iron and coal reserves of the Urals. Furthermore, the military would be able to mobilise at speed to deal with 'yellow peril' in the east, should any present itself. There was, finally, a jealousy factor: America's transcontinental railway had opened in 1869, while Canada's took its first passengers in 1885. The tsar wanted one, too.

  But the early days of the Trans-Siberian Railway come with a historical twist. The track was seen by many as being far too expensive at a time when the country was racked with poverty. What was the point? Why was Nicholas II bothering? Wasn't it just an expensive folly, a profligate waste? The line seemed almost to symbolise the gulf between the aristocracy – blowing millions of roubles on trains – and the public at large, who often didn't have two roubles to rub together.

  For these reasons, some historians believe that the TransSiberian Railway contributed to political instability in the run-up to the infamous 1917 uprising. Just as in China, with its crucial railway crisis of 1911, trains appear to have fuelled a revolution: perhaps the most notorious rebellion of all time.

  Backpackers and borscht

  Moscow to Ulan-Ude on the Trans-Siberian Railway

  Contemplating this, I walk down the platform, where I am met by a blonde provodnista with her hair rolled up in the style of Princess Leia in Star Wars. Provodnista is the name given to the women – a few, but not many, are men – who attend to carriages on the Trans-Siberian Railway. There are two per carriage, allowing them to work in shifts to cover 24 hours. She squeezes my arm and leads me along the platform, where I am met by the two provodnistas for my own carriage. Their names are Margarita and Yeleyana. Margarita has a milky complexion, steady blue eyes and puffy cheeks. Yeleyana has short spiky hair dyed in a shade of red, and a penchant for colourful flowery dresses. Both have deadpan expressions and regard me inscrutably. They make a formidable pair.

  My cabin is second class, and the entire journey to 'Pekin', as the ticket states, cost £515 from the excellent Real Russia agency (based in north London). This works out at £73 a night, which must make the trip one of the world's best travel bargains. I had had the option of travelling to Vladivostok, which is the longest Trans-Siberian route and moves entirely through Russia (5,752 miles), or of going through Mongolia to Beijing, with a stop at Mongolia's capital Ulaanbaatar (4,915 miles), but I have opted to take the two-country line that travels south through Manchuria to China's capital (5,625 miles), as its departure coincides with my arrangements. Some refer to this as the TransManchurian route, while the journey past Ulaanbaatar is the Trans-Mongolian – both of which cover the line of the TransSiberian Railway that also continues onwards to Vladivostok. All this may sound a little complicated, but it's not really: the 'Trans-Siberian' forks off at various points, forming three distinct pathways to the east.

  I make my way down a narrow corridor. In my cabin I find John, aged 27, a 'project manager for online assessment' from Kingston in south-west London. He seems relieved to see me.

  'Landed on my feet. Landed on my feet,' he says, which takes me aback a bit.

  It transpires that John is nervous about sharing with a Russian, as he has not travelled far overseas before and fears being conned by 'dodgy foreigners' (who might well still join us as there are still two empty berths in the cabin, though nobody does). He asks for tips on where to keep his valuables when visiting shifty foreign climes such as Russia, and I make a few obvious suggestions. He listens to these keenly, fixing me with panda eyes.

  John has a short back and sides haircut and appears not to have shaved for a few days. He favours baggy T-shirts along with khaki shorts that can be (and are) converted into trousers when necessary. Two of the doughy pretzels from the station are looped on the top of a water bottle on the small table. He is reading The Casual Vacancy by J. K. Rowling and is taking the Mongolian route to Beijing, leaving the train in four days in Ulan-Ude, near the Mongolian border. He will spend some time in Ulan-Ude, as well as in Mongolia itself. I am going non-stop all the way to Beijing, with a chance to stretch my legs for a few hours at Zabaikalsk station by the Chinese border, where the train's bogies (undercarriage and wheels) will be changed to comply with the standard gauge on Chinese tracks.

  'I'm going out for a cig,' he says, after listening to my advice. He disappears onto the platform, leaving his valuables in my protection.

  John returns shortly and says, 'Whoa, here we go' as the train moves.

  Then he tells me his current circumstances: 'I split up with my girlfriend, and I had money saved for a mortgage, so I decided to spend it. I quit my job and planned this trip.'

  His savings amount to £6,500, I quickly learn. Romantic affairs had not been working with his ex-girlfriend, whom he says 'reversed my car into a colleague's at work – she admitted full liability but didn't tell me what happened. Her colleague rented an expensive car for two weeks while the small dent was repaired. It cost about £5,000.' This appears to have been the final straw in their relationship.

  His intention is to: 'meet some young people, backpacker westerners, like me, and take it from there: that's the plan'.

  It is midnight and we are moving through the suburbs of Moscow. Fittings in the cabin squeak and creak. John is eager to tell all about his journey so far, which seems to have been eventful. He began by flying to St Petersburg to meet a male friend with a job in the city. 'Terrified of flying, terrified, I am,' he says, which is one of the reasons he is taking the train to Beijing. 'In Heathrow I was terrified. But on the flight there was this Russian woman next to me. Before we even took off, she was rubbing my leg. "Well," I thought, "this is a good start." That's what it was like in St Petersburg. On Tinder I was getting eights and nines saying hello to me.' John is losing me a bit here. I've heard of Tinder, the dating app, but don't know its ins and outs. 'Usually, it's sixes and sevens.' I nod as though I understand what he's on about. I'm guessing these numbers are a way of rating the talent. He says all this in a manner that seems to suggest that I should get myself to St Petersburg pronto, although we are, of course, heading in completely the opposite direction.

  His friend had also recently split from a girlfriend, a Russian to whom John was introduced. 'We got on very well actually. We went out late and I stayed at her place, where I spilt beer on her laptop.' The fact that the Russian ex-girlfriend of his friend did not object to this spillage seems to be regarded by John as a sign of her good character. His friend had been none the wiser about their brief romantic elopement: 'We had to keep it quiet.'

  Somewhat contradicting what he said earlier about the friendliness of the women he met in St Petersburg, John adds: 'People in Russia are a bit short of manners. You can't smile at a guy, or a girl. I've been told that's just the way it is.' He also feels as though he stuck out in the city: 'I noticed that people could tell that I was not from round there. They just knew: the jeans, the T-shirt.'

  After this burst of conversation, we convert the seats into beds, which we make ourselves with the sheets provided, and turn in for night number one on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

  It makes a fine old racket – the noisiest train yet. Brakes squeal, wheels judder, horns wail – almost constantly. Air howls by the window as if a gale is blowing outside. Coat hangers on hooks jiggle against the cabin wall (we later take these down). Distant firecrackers seem to emanate from close to the provodnistas' berths, as does occasional clanking reminiscent of scaffolding being dropped into a lorry; I have no idea what is responsible for these noises, perhaps it's just bumps on the track. When a freight train passes in the opposite direction, it's as though a sonic boom has struck. I close
my eyes, the sounds of the Trans-Siberian Railway fusing in a train symphony with peaks and troughs. Despite the occasional jolt – I almost leap out of bed at the arrival of one colossal freight loco – I have one of the best night's sleep I can remember.

  In bed in the morning I listen to the cacophony for a while. There's no hurry on the Trans-Siberian Railway. It's a very long journey, with plenty of opportunity simply to observe the world around you. John, I soon discover, is a late riser, rarely awake before midday – so I lie in too. It's like being a student again, though I'm still always up at least a couple of hours before my cabin mate, who seems to function at his best after 2–3 p.m. – regardless of time zone, of which there are seven on the entire Trans-Siberian route. His internal clock miraculously assesses its place on the planet and resets its late wake-up call.

  With mornings beginning in this fashion, days fall into a pattern. After the late rise, I brush teeth and wash the best I can with the use of a sink by the toilet; there is no shower cubicle. The sink has an infuriating tap that requires you to push upwards to release water. Margarita has to show me how to work this, causing me an early loss of face with the provodnistas, who appear to consider anyone who wants to take this train as a tourist quite mad. I have already got off on the wrong foot with the provodnistas by misunderstanding that the offer of a cup of tea shortly after arrival is not a kindly gesture of welcome, but a transaction to the value of 60 roubles. This was duly delivered and accepted with a curt spasiba. I begin the journey a marked man.

  When you have thousands of miles to travel on one long train ride, primary functions such as sleep and eating come to the fore. Days revolve principally around visits to the dining car. This is a few coaches along.

  The dining carriage has yellow curtains and a small red-and-white bar with an orange tea towel printed with CANARY ISLANDS and a picture of a beach hanging on a rail. Burgundy faux-leather seats are set by simple tables. Proceedings are overseen by a large, pot-bellied, bald man with a piratical countenance, who sits at the best table in the small, cordoned-off bar section. A calculator and an accounts book are laid out at all times on this table. The potbellied man pecks at the calculator almost constantly, as though attempting to solve a complicated mathematical equation. When not involved in such business affairs, he reads dog-eared romantic novels with cover pictures of voluptuous blondes and brunettes being serenaded by beaux. From time to time, he goes to the corridor by the galley and performs head swivels and energetic knee-bending exercises. Being on a train so much of the time can be pretty sedentary (as I am to find, though it suits me well enough for a lazy week).

  He is assisted by a younger waiter named Igor, who wears either a black Guinness polo shirt or a white sleeveless vest. Igor indulges me when I pathetically attempt a few words in Russian: pah-mee-dor (tomato), veet-chee-nah (ham), khlyes (bread), koh-fyeh (coffee), chai (tea), pah-zhal-stah ('please' or 'you're welcome'). These are the phonetics as I know them, though Igor usually asks me to repeat. He does not have much English so our 'conversation' is limited. He seems to have a soft spot for the provodnista with Princess-Leia-style hair who showed me on board in Moscow.

  The dining-car trio is completed by a short, smiley-faced, blondehaired woman who appears to be the wife of the bald calculatorcontroller. She is always in a good mood, and regularly makes trips for cigarettes between carriages; the faint, telltale smell of smoke enters the dining car shortly after she passes. Smoking rules are loosely observed across the train and I often come across figures having a surreptitious puff.

  The carriage is like a little principality. It is also where you get to meet other passengers, who are mainly foreign as most Russians consider the dining-car prices steep. This is where the train lovers lurk, and everyone soon gets chatting. From my very first morning, and across the vast rolling landscape to come, rail enthusiasts are to be found here, often talking trains.

  The foreigners are all British and our contingent, I work out after a day or so, is made up of ten. My first companions are Jane and Tony. They are, respectively, a housing association director and a French teacher from East Anglia. She is doing the quick Daily Mail crossword and he is reading The Week. We are all drinking tea from mugs with unusual Christmas decorations: cartoon monkeys dressed like Santa Claus. We are always served tea in these mugs, as though every day is Christmas Day on the Moskva–Pekin Express.

  Jane and Tony are planning to pause for three days by Lake Baikal before travelling through Mongolia for another stop-off. They are sharing with another British couple, friends of theirs, and have had a rough night in the cramped space. Apparently, the other couple is engaged in a minor row about something or other to do with which clothes they packed. Jane and Tony are taking refuge.

  Jane and Tony had stayed a couple of nights in Moscow, where they thought the hotels were too expensive. 'We are not rich people, but the cheapest we could find was about £100,' says Jane, who is in a striped top and is the main talker of the two. Tony, who has a long, olive-shaped head and a crew-cut, tends to keep his counsel. 'We were surprised,' Jane continues. 'All those people in top-end cars. Government officials. Mafia. General corruption of the oligarch type.'

  Jane had visited Moscow 20 years before: 'I was amazed and a little bit disappointed by how Westernised it had become.'

  Such politics and social commentary does not, however, last long. Train talk quickly takes over.

  'We're trundlers,' says Jane.

  'We're not speed freaks,' says Tony, lifting his eyes from The Week.

  'We've done the overnight from Vienna to Cologne: that was the height of luxury,' says Jane. 'Bulgaria to Serbia. In Bulgaria it was supposed to be non-smoking but everyone smoked. Good-time girls wearing next to nothing were everywhere. It was shocking.'

  'Scenery, greenery,' says Tony, switching subject. He's explaining what he likes to see from train windows.

  'A glimpse of the mountains,' says Jane.

  'It's the romance of the name: the Trans-Siberian Railway. We could have done with a bit more luxury though,' says Tony.

  While I slept like a log, their longest passage of sleep was about 40 minutes.

  Interrupting us, Igor arrives in his Guinness shirt and, with a small bow, hands us our bills.

  'My plumber said that Russia is very expensive,' says Jane, looking at theirs, as though unsure how much the teas have cost.

  The tea, with breakfast, is about 300 roubles (about £3 each). This is for a decent helping of pah-mee-dor, veet-chee-nah, khlyes and chai. The Trans-Siberian Railway really is dirt cheap.

  Outside, pink and yellow flowers are in bloom by the track. Another silver-birch forest appears. It's a sun-baked day and the dining carriage, without air conditioning, is hot. A buzzard hovers above a river as we cross a rusty bridge. During the night, I learn, we passed the town of Kovrov, which is famous for an old Soviet machine-gun factory that now makes motorbikes and small arms. A factory responsible for railway rolling stocks is also somewhere thereabouts. Tower blocks are said to be decorated with murals of machinery in acknowledgement of the rich history of local manufacturing. I know all this from perusing the excellent Trans-Siberian Handbook written by Bryn Thomas, who has travelled more than 31,000 miles on trains in his lifetime. The brilliance of the handbook comes from its methodical marking of the sights in terms of their kilometres from Moscow, with detailed descriptions of destinations along the way. This 'kilometres from Moscow' measure is used on information boards on the train to explain the location of each station. We also maintain 'Moscow time', although the dining carriage somewhat confusingly, but practically, shifts its opening hours as appropriate so we are in sync with a sensible eating pattern. The clock eventually leaps forward from 'Moscow time' to 'Beijing time' upon crossing the Chinese border.

  Cities and towns flash by. I read that Leon Trotsky once travelled along these very rails in an extraordinary armoured train in which he spearheaded attacks against the counter-revolutionary forces of the Whites dur
ing the Russian Civil War. Trains seem always to take on meaning during a revolution – an unsuccessful one on this occasion. Then we come to Kirov, named after one of Joseph Stalin's right-hand men who was assassinated in 1934, quite probably by Stalin himself. From the Bible-like Trans-Siberian Handbook, I discover that the town is close to a rail track leading to Kotlas, the setting of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, describing the horrors of a gulag during the rule of Stalin.

  The connection with Solzhenitsyn is thought-provoking. While the role railways played in holding the country together in the nineteenth century is intriguing, Russia's railways have a sinister side. They were, of course, used by Stalin during his many purges, to send opponents who had not been slaughtered to the gulag, so often dying in the grim conditions of the hard-labour camps. More than 20 million people died at the hands of Stalin during his 30-year rule from 1922 to 1953. This is on top of an estimated 20 million who perished during the Second World War. Solzhenitsyn calculated that Stalin may have been responsible for the deaths of as many as 60 million altogether. Some of that number would have been coerced to construct the Soviet Union's railways and roads.