A train on the Trans-Siberian Railway skirts Lake Baikal. A trip on this railroad is sometimes like travelling back in time to a gentler era.

By Bastian Hamacher


It’s a memory of a past era: the rhythmic rattling of a train’s wheels on the rails is something scarcely known in today’s age of high-speed trains. When you’re on the Trans-Siberian Railway travelling through the huge expanse of Russia beyond the Urals, it’s a sound that lulls you to sleep at night and the first thing you hear when you wake in the morning.
A trip on the world’s longest single rail route reveals a steady coming and going of passengers along the way and the transport of cargo. At the rail stations there are trains kilometres long and loaded with timber from Siberia’s endless forests or coal and ore for the power plants and industrial complexes along the route. Since the start of construction in 1891 the route of the Trans-Siberian Railroad has been the main artery of the Russian empire.
The journey starts in Moscow, but the Siberian feeling only truly starts in Krasnoyarsk, the million-inhabitant city on the Yenisei River for 380 years regarded as the gateway to Siberia. It was from here that the Cossacks conquered and settled the eastern regions. The city is a mixture of Soviet-era concrete, classic-style architecture of the founding period and refurbished Russian Orthodox churches.
On the platforms of the gigantic railway station there are kiosks and market women pushing carts with food items for the journey — pickles and tomatoes, pancakes and bread, fish and meats. Early in the morning, very few train passengers disembark to buy anything.
During the trip the train will often stop at the large rail stations and the scene will be repeated. Passengers have about 45 minutes then to stretch their legs, buy things, maybe take a shower in the railway station, or simply look around the area.
But caution is advised: the train departs just as punctually as it has arrived, and not a second’s delay is allowed.
At each rail coach a blue-uniformed female attendant is waiting. She has counted the number of passengers who have gotten off and is keeping a sharp eye to assure that everyone gets back on again.
Those who show up at the very last moment will be getting a stern look and a warning from her. But the system works. Russia can’t afford to let its main artery become clogged.
Tourists boarding the train are met by the attendant who carefully checks their tickets and visas. A brief nod and a wave tells them they can proceed. Inside the coach the lighting is dim as the window-shades are still down and some guests are sleeping.
Some doors of the compartments are only partially shut and the sound of snoring can be heard. The air is stuffy. There are five compartments per rail coach. In each there are two red leather-covered couch seats, right and left, a folding table next to the window and a luggage rack over the door. Many of the coaches were built as late as the 1980s in the former East Germany.
In our compartment only the lower berths are free. Up above there’s a sound of heavy breathing. Where to put the backpack? First off, one should look around quietly at how things are arranged. At the precise second, a jolt goes through the train and it slowly starts rolling out of the huge classical-style rail station.
The station clock shows a few minutes before 7am, while the clocks on the train are set to Moscow time and the train schedule’s arrival and departure times are exactly those of the platform clocks. The trip is heading east and so there is already a further two hours’ time difference from Moscow.
The Trans-Siberian Railway is more than simply a train. It is an entire network between Moscow and Vladivostok with a number of individual train routes. One is the Baikal-Amur Magistrale that circles north of Lake Baikal from Taishet to Tynda.
There are side routes that head off into Manchuria, Mongolia, Beijing and even North Korea. And almost every major city operates its own train that operates shuttle service links to Moscow and even on to St Petersburg, Warsaw, and Cologne.
Back inside the compartment, something stirs on the top berth. A yawn, a leg suddenly dangling over the edge, a foot searching for the ladder steps. The lining of a flowery apron comes into view and then a woman of about 60 steps down, rubs the sleep from her eyes and looks around curiously.
She starts speaking rapidly in Russian. Then she takes a towel and toothbrush and leaves. When she returns she sits down on the lower berth at the table, takes some bread and sausage from a bag, and then she shoves a bread-and-sausage sandwich across to you. Your Russian dictionary is lying at the ready. In the weeks ahead it will become the most useful utensil.
Her name is Irina and she’s from the Ukraine, travelling to Tynda to visit her daughter and grandchildren. She keeps a careful eye out to assure that unknowledgeable guests don’t get things wrong. She explains how things are done on the train.
Each coach has a samovar that is heated by the coach attendant. Water for tea is free of charge. Irina pours you a cup of tea and then talks about life and travel in Russia, tells about her son who is still living with her. It is impossible not to talk with the Russians.
They always want to know about you, where you’re from, what you expect to see in the country, what you have experienced. Outside the window the outlying districts of some industrial city are gliding past: Pre-fabricated buildings and a forest of construction cranes. Even in cities in Siberia housing cannot increase fast enough. All along the route there are cities, mines, power plants, and steel and aluminium factories.
But then the concrete buildings give way to the datchas, the small wood-frame summer houses surrounded by their large vegetable gardens. Now and then there are some cattle, and always a banya, the Russian sauna, next to the datchas.
Many of the passengers are families going on vacation. Burdened with their packs and suitcases they emerge from the cities and gather on the rail route to ride to their destinations, be it the sea, or Moscow or camping on Baikal Lake.
Such a traveller is Larissa, the fourth person in the compartment who only comes at night to sleep and around noon for a brief nap. Somewhere else in the kilometre-long train her husband is sitting with their children.
The compartment door opens. The coach attendant is standing there. She wants to check the tickets once again, registers the compartment number and without a word hands a plastic bag with a packet in it containing sheets and towels.
These women are the uncontested bosses of the passenger coaches. They supply the passengers, vacuum the carpets in the corridor daily and clean the compartments with wash rags. They also rein in the youths who may be drinking a bit much and they always know the current prices for food items being sold at the train station platforms.
Outside, the temperatures are rising. In the summer, these go well beyond 30 degrees Celsius and it is no cooler inside the train. The coach is coming to life, children are running up and down the corridor, the adults are standing at the windows. “Russian air conditioning,” one man says with a grin.
Those travelling on the Trans-Siberian Railroad must at times disembark — or otherwise it is only one endlessly long train trip. After the dachas comes the countryside, and during the next three days the train will pass through the world’s largest forest region with its fir trees, redwoods and birch. In between there are a few meadows with wild herbs, and maybe some unnamed river.
The route stretches across broad plains, and further to the east, through mountains which are snow-capped even in summer. Every few hundred kilometres there is yet another imposing train station.
The train races over huge steel bridges stretched across the Yenisei, Angara and Lena rivers, and one starts to fathom the sheer size of Siberia. At 13mn sq km it is larger than Canada or the United States. With about three persons per square kilometre it is also one of the most sparsely-populated places on earth.
For the moment, the trip ends in Ust’-Nyukzha. There, two weeks of camping, fishing and hunting on the Olyokma River with a local hunter and his German wife are planned. Later, the return journey will go via Sverobaikalsk on Lake Baikal and on to Irkutsk.
Between the Urals and the Far East there is Yekaterinburg, as well as Omsk, Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk, and Ulan Bataar in Mongolia, all points along the route to Beijing and Vladivostok. Travellers may recall the names from Jules Verne’s “Courier of the Czar.” Today they are a mixture of history and industrialisation — and a journey through time. — DPA