Tran Siberian journey

This is something we wrote in Russia but didn't finish.. just trying to catch up with what we are up to so we have decided not to finish this!

Ok, boring post! We just thought we would write something about what its like to travel by train in Russia… no stories of naked khazaks screaming or wild nights of strippers and champagne.. no this is an attempt to be sensible… Russia for trainspotters if you like or just some information if you are interested…

The typical journey for us along a segment of the trans Siberian starts of course at the station, usually at night. We have passed through a real variety of stations, some as you would imagine are great big Soviet concrete blocks but others have really surprised us and have been quite impressive. The station would normally contain a ticket kassa, open 24 hours with the obligatory rude grumpy female worker, somewhere to sit and wait (usually containing at least 25-50% drunk people), a 24 hour shop or café (containing both the rude grumpy worker and a certain quantity of drunk people), a group of railway soldiers patrolling, someone with the never ending task of mopping the floor (everyones snow melts into black puddles) who coincidently is also always grumpy and then possible a few old people sleeping and hiding from the cold until the railway soldiers throws them out. The station usually has a toilet somewhere on the grounds for which you have to pay an extortionate amount for (20 rubles which is 50p… what happened to spend a penny? Its not even that much in Waterloo..), the payment if you need a number 2 is more… its quite funny trying to explain in sign language you only need a number one.. of course the comedy of this situation does nothing to thaw the ice lady you have to pay who will just try to ignore you or sigh loudly for making her work. As far as we can gather the soldiers task is to make sure that no one is using the station as a home and that everyone is waiting for a train, and then to keep trouble away. Of course in any other country the transport police or soldiers also keep drunks away, but seeing as the preferred method of killing time here is also to kill your liver, the stations are filled with people in different stages of getting hammered – no matter what time of day it is.

Stepping out of the station building towards the platforms the immediate observations would be – lack of platforms, snow everywhere, many freight trains, smell of burning coal, a huge jumble of electicity wires and pylons and trains arriving no matter what time of day. The majority of stations have a bridge to access other platforms which are useful for exercise at longer stops and to check out the lay of the land. Russians of course rarely use the bridges in all but the largest stations, they just prefer to walk across the tracks and very close to oncoming trains – one granny in Tymen was a particular daredevil!
Travelling by train in Russia really gives you a sense of how important and how much of a lifeline the railway is to people living across the country. Almost all major settlements heading east are on the trans-Siberian route and most of their goods have to be transported by rail as there is no road network. A huge amount of freight rumbles past whenever you are waiting at a station, in Kungur the trains were as little as 7 minutes apart, each train pulling between 66 and 80 trucks (sarah thinks I’m a geek for counting!). We must have seen hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil heading west and endless supplies of wood heading east, miles of coal trucks heading in all directions, we have seen trains loaded with mining trucks, helicopter bodies, diggers, cars, cranes and so many metal cargo containers. Every station has at least 5 huge freight trains waiting, some have many more, on a few occations whilst waiting for trains we have stood on the bridge and watched them coming and going. Because of the lack of long distance roads the trains are also vital to anyone who wants or needs to visit other parts of the country, the trains are often filled with workers, traders or military personel, heading to work or home. Overall a real variety of people use the trains as it’s the only other option except flying which at the moment is still cash money.
The air around the train stations is thick with coal and diesel fumes. Each passenger carriage is heating using a coal boiler and each station tends to have some kind of mini coal power station/water heating building which gives the station a very Victorian feel. Each station also has an array of loud crackling megaphones with a woman blaring demands or information no matter what the time. This really gives the station a spy thriller/cold war feel, especially at night time crackling loud Russian… its hard to explain but these sounds and smells really make the stations feel alive and vibrant places.. it all feels exactly as you would expect Russia to feel!

The thirty odd minutes before the train arrives are usually quite tense… which platform? Which carriage, what will our room mates be like? Are we going to make it onto our train ok? Our ticket states the wagon number and berth we are booked into, but we have no idea at which point along the train that will be, and some stops are as short as two minutes. Two minutes at home seems like a long time when the train pulls up, but here in the dark, in the snow with our bags it goes very quickly. Kungur was particularly bad as there was nothing on the station telling us the platform number the train was leaving from and we were the only people catching this train. Our plan was to wait on the first platform and walk towards the train if it arrived on one further from the station building. Unfortunately at the time our train was due (02.30) we could see a train coming in from both directions, one on platform one, the other on platform three… what to do? If platform 1 was a different train it could potentially cut us off from our train and at this station there was no bridge. We decided to wait where we were and hope that platform 1 was our man.. we were wrong, it was a huge 70 wagon freight train which cut us off from ours which we knew was only stopping for five minutes. We had to run in the direction the freight train was coming from, wait an eternity for the huge oil train to pass, cross the lines eventually then run back to our train which we only just made! All in all every time we caught a train things were tense.

The trains themselves are huge. As there are no raised platforms at the stations the trains tower above us and each one has a minimum of 15 passenger cars. When everything stops moving a Provodnik from each carriage will lower one set of stairs and stand alongside the train ready to give the third degree to anyone who should want to board their train. Once you have passed the mini interrigation and inspection of ‘Dokument’ you are free to climb on up.

The Provodniks (m) or Provodnitsa (f) are workers assigned to your carriage to keep everything working exactly how the rail company wants it. They are the conductors, the cleaners, the security guard and all over general busy bodies, and aside from your cabin buddies the provodnik will be the greatest influence of how your journey pans out. Each carriage carries two who seem to work in 12 hour shifts. They are always typically stern faced and, well moody, but sometimes warm to us. They may warm to us but no matter how nice we are they are never friendly. Having a bad or lazy Provodnik would mean things like dirty toilets, people in you carriage who shouldn’t be and dirty linen, not massive problems but not things you really want on a three day journey. They also sell a varaity of foods for the journey such as pot noodles, instant mashed potato, chocolate, soft drinks, tea etc and we are not sure why, but the prices never seemed to be consistent.
When you board the train there is a time table in the vestibule area giving you a list of all the station stops and how long the train will stop at each. The stations tend to be about 2-3 hours apart sometimes we could go up to five hours without stopping, especially the further east we travelled. As mentioned before the stops varied in length, some were only two minutes long but others were up to 40 minutes, you would have at least a 20 minute stop approx every 7 hours. At the longer stops a whole army of people would set to work preparing the train for its next stint - people would refill via a hose and standpipe the water in each carriage, more coal would be loaded for the water heaters and people would walk up and down tapping the wheels and breaking off all the ice. We are not entirely sure what the wheel tapping was about but people with hammers would walk up and down the train banging the middle of the wheel and listening to the sound it made, presumably to find a fault of some kind. With the driving snow and arctic conditions huge amounts of ice would build up on the underside of the train and between carriages so people spent the twenty minutes bashing is all off, we were shocked one day to see our Provodnitsa using a huge two handed axe to do this job.. she was not a woman to be messed with.
During these longer stops you could get off the train and walk about by checking the timetable you would know what time the train was due to leave, we would often walk up onto the bridge or up and down the platform to stretch our legs.
At the longer stops, no matter what time of day there were also large groups of women selling a variety of goods for your journey. Usually these were similar to what the Provodnick was selling, but at some stops we saw some outrageous things such as fish a meter long and huge dolls. I’m sure in the summer it would be possible to buy a large variety of fresh produce which would have made the journey slightly more healthy as in the winter we were living off pot noodles and instant mash.
The toilets in the trains were fine, we were expecting them to be horrible and filthy, but as there is a cleaner on board they were cleaned regularly. The flush was a foot pedal which just opened a flap sending your bits onto the tracks, this also allowed freezing air into the toilet creating a small cloud of fog which was quite good fun. The train from the Ukraine was different though… they had fitted their toilet with an absorbing plywood seat which meant the toilet didn’t need cleaning, everything was soaked up…
Restaurant car was a disapointment. The food was overpriced and crap so we only went once.
The other worry injected into us by other people was that as soon as we turned our backs all out goods would be stolen which could not have been further from the truth. In both the Kupe and Platz carriages our main bags we put into lockers underneath the bottom bunk, the only way to get to them was to lift up the bottom bed so if someone wanted to steal our bags they would have had to lift the bottom bunk and whoever was sleeping on it. Our cabin could also be locked from the inside so it could not be opened at all from the outside, and if we wanted to leave our cabin unattended we could ask the Provodnik to lock our door.
The scenery.
The scenery was amazing but all in all very similar. The best part of the journey was by lake Baikal when there were some hills and good views of the lake, otherwise we mainly passed by flat snowy forested land for hours and hours. Because the train line is the life line for the country you are constantly passing signs of human activity, towns, villages, decaying factories and other industrial sights containing all kinds of huge machinery, the sort that would have Fred Dibnah wet his pants.