All aboard the Trans-Siberian...

The Trans-Siberian Railway attracts many clichés yet, in the case of the ‘Trans Sib’, well-worn phrases such as ‘epic journey’ are entirely appropriate. In fact, given the scale of the line (or lines, to be precise - the Trans-Siberian is only one of three crossing Russia, the others being the Trans-Mongolian and the Trans-Manchurian) perhaps it doesn’t do it enough justice.

The Trans-Siberian is one of the longest railway journeys in the world, built on some fearsome terrain at great cost, both in human life and roubleys. Since opening it has thrilled generations of travellers, drawing the more adventurous from across the world and challenging them to undertake the 9289 kilometre crossing, from the metropolis of Moscow to the shores of the Pacific. How many plane flights have attracted this kind of romance and mystique?

Your correspondents certainly didn’t approach this journey lightly. With four nights ahead of us before our only break (Irkutsk) on our journey to Vladivostok we stocked up with enough provisions to supply a whole troop of Cossacks.

This turned out to be a prudent decision. This country is simply massive and the railway matches that scale. In total we slept seven nights on the train, crossing seven time zones and eating goodness knows how many packets of noodles. Looking back now and tracing our route from Moscow I’ve drawn a line on my map which must be pushing two feet. On a pocket-sized map.

‘You’re crossing the Trans-Siberian?’, people asked beforehand, ‘I hope you like trees.’ And yes, there were a lot of trees, enough to sate even the most devoted tree-hugger. Huge forests of slender birches, great medieval fleets of pine and larch. This was the taiga - the deep forest that counts for 30% of the world’s trees - which acts as the world’s ‘other lung’, sucking up CO2 and releasing Oxygen (though sadly, unlike its more famous counterpart, the Amazon, its systematic and catastrophic depletion receiving little world attention).

And in between lay great swamps such as the Barbara Steppe: a haven for wildlife; a
graveyard for convicts, exiles and railway workers.

We crossed enormous rivers, from the famous Volga to great torrents I’d never heard of - the Ob, the Yenisy and the Tom (a fine name), many of them flowing thousands of miles to Russia’s far northern shores, well within the Arctic Circle.

We crossed the Urals and entered Asia, chugging through great cities with strange names such as Perm, Yekaterinburg and Omsk.

Out on the West Siberian plain the wild alternated with heavy industry, where Soviet planners prudently moved much heavy industry during ‘the Great Patriotic War’, as the Nazis advanced into Russia. Each town seemed to specialise in a particular product - in one town it was tractors, in the next space rockets.

Outside the towns, the villages clung on stubbornly, composed of stout wooden dwellings, each surrounded by delightfully overgrown gardens of food staples - beetroot, beans and prodigious quantities of potatoes - to help their occupiers see out the long, cruel winter.

Manufacturing your own products, growing your own food: echoes of a distant past back home.

We passed through lands once closed to Western eyes. Oil refineries and nuclear reprocessing centres, military airbases and secret cosmodromes.

Around Novosibirsk we were told this stretch of line is the busiest in the world. And who are we to argue - it certainly looked lively, with massive and regular freight trains passing us carrying everything from gas containers bound for Western markets (or not, as the case may be) to tanks. Didcot Parkway this is not.

Way beyond beautiful Lake Baikal , the train finally left Siberia and entered Russia’s Far Eastern Territories, a land itself two-thirds the size of the continental United States. Still with two more days to go, we passed through wide, heavily-forested river valleys, winding their way down to the mighty Amur on the Chinese border.

Towns seemed even more spaced apart, the streets empty, the houses worn and warped by the extremes of summer heat and winters where temperatures can plunge to at least 30 below.

Finally, beyond the massive kink in the map that is Manchuria we started to head south and left the permafrost zone. Trees started to grow higher.

The people looked different too, a breed apart from their compatriots we encountered leaving Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod for the weekend, escaping to their datchas to tend their cucumbers and sunflowers . More eastern faces, with Buryats alighting at Ulan Ude and, later on, Mongolians and Chinese migrant workers.

As the landscape grew kinder, the light seemed to alter. Our fellow passengers arose from their slumbers. Perhaps they smelt the salt in the air, or heard the distant cry of seagulls. Vladivostok!