A Book of Railway Journeys Read online

  “Is that why people’s noses run? Because of the milk?”

  “Yes!” she cried.

  At the time, I did not think Wendy was crazy in any important sense. But afterward, when I remembered our conversation, she seemed to me profoundly loony. And profoundly incurious. I had casually mentioned to her that I had been to Upper Burma and Africa. I had described Leopold Bloom’s love of “the faint tang of urine” in the kidneys he had for breakfast. I had shown a knowledge of Buddhism and the eating habits of Bushmen in the Kalahari and Gandhi’s early married life. I was a fairly interesting person, was I not? But not once in the entire conversation had she asked me a single question. She never asked what I did, where I had come from, or where I was going. When it was not interrogation on my part, it was monologue on hers. Uttering rosy generalities in her sweetly tremulous voice, and tugging her legs back into the lotus position when they slipped free, she was an example of total self-absorption and desperate self-advertisement. She had mistaken egotism for Buddhism. I still have a great affection for the candor of American college students, but she reminded me of how many I have known who were unteachable.

  PAUL THEROUX,

  The Old Patagonian Express

  The heart of the matter

  Paint me a small railroad station then, ten minutes before dark. Beyond the platform are the waters of the Wekonsett River, reflecting a somber afterglow. The architecture of the station is oddly informal, gloomy but unserious, and mostly resembles a pergola, cottage or summer house although this is a climate of harsh winters. The lamps along the platform burn with a nearly palpable plaintiveness. The setting seems in some way to be at the heart of the matter. We travel by plane, oftener than not, and yet the spirit of our country seems to have remained a country of railroads. You wake in a pullman bedroom at three a.m. in a city the name of which you do not know and may never discover. A man stands on the platform with a child on his shoulders. They are waving goodbye to some traveler, but what is the child doing up so late and why is the man crying? On a siding beyond the platform there is a lighted dining car where a waiter sits alone at a table, adding up his accounts. Beyond this is a water tower and beyond this a well-lighted and empty street. Then you think happily that this is your country—unique, mysterious and vast. One has no such feelings in airplanes, airports and the trains of other nations.

  JOHN CHEEVER,

  Bullet Park

  U.S.S.R

  The Trans-Siberian Express

  1. Tsar Alexander gives the go-ahead

  To the Grand Duke Czarevich...

  YOUR IMPERIAL HIGHNESS!

  Having given the order to build a continuous line of railway across Siberia, which is to unite the rich Siberian provinces with the railway system of the Interior, I entrust to you to declare My will, upon your entering the Russian dominions after your inspection of the foreign countries of the East. At the same time, I desire you to lay the first stone at Vladivostok for the construction of the Siberian Railway, which is to be carried out at the cost of the State and under direction of the Government.

  I remain your sincerely loving

  ALEXANDER

  from S. LEGG (ed.),

  The Railway Book (1952)

  2. The first train

  The great sensation of the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1900 was Nagelmackers’s Trans-Siberian International Express. He placed it on show in the Tuileries before putting it into service across Russia, to provide the first overland link between Western Europe and the Far East. It drew huge crowds and was awarded the gold medal; and no wonder. Nagelmackers’s career as creator and pioneer of the train de luxe was one of repeatedly surpassing himself in his achievements. Now came his announcement that he was to provide not only the means of travelling to Peking, Shanghai, Seoul and even Tokyo in a fortnight by rail, but the possibility of doing so in conditions “equal to the special trains reserved in Western Europe for the sole use of Royalty.”

  The Odessa-Kiev Express, 1864. The kitchen (top left) is one of the earliest pictures of cooking facilities in any train. The second-class carriage and washroom (lower left) look comfortable enough, but pale beside the luxury of the white upholstery, pile carpets, and ornate ceilings of the first class (above).

  Each of the coaches accommodated but eight people. Each two-berth coupé had a connecting cabinet de toilette and was decorated with the opulence of the salon privé of a St Petersburg merchant. Every carriage had its own drawing room and smoking room. One was decorated with white-lacquered limewood, mirrored walls, a ceiling frescoed with figures from Greek mythology and embroidered curtains. Another was in the style of Louis XVI, with bulging furniture of gold-embellished oak; a third was French Empire, and a fourth imperial Chinese.

  The train had a library stocked with books in English, French, German and Russian, a glass-walled observation car and music room equipped with a full-sized grand piano, a hair-dressing salon in white sycamore, a bathroom in green sycamore with a novel bath specially designed so that water could not spill out while the train was in motion, a gymnasium equipped with dumb-bells, exercise bicycle and rowing machine, and—although Nagelmackers had built both Catholic and Protestant churches along the route so that passengers might worship according to their custom during breaks in their journey—a chapel car. There was also a fully equipped darkroom for amateur photographers—though it is to be doubted whether this was provided for their convenience so much as for the tsarist censors, to whom undeveloped, exposed film in the possession of foreigners was as much anathema as it is to their Soviet successors.

  MARTIN PAGE,

  Lost Pleasures of the Great Trains

  3. The beginnings of Gulag—an early passenger remembers

  At Missovaia we found another train de luxe awaiting us, and it was here, from the warmth of a saloon car, that I first saw a batch of Siberian exiles, although I had previously seen the cars with caged windows wherein they are now transported, instead of having to undergo that weary tramp of 4000 miles.

  It was already dark and the train had not yet started, when I saw a band of armed soldiers surrounding some thirty people carrying bundles, coming along the dimly-lighted platform, and then form up at one end of it, the people always being surrounded by the soldiers. What had especially attracted my attention, or I might not have noticed in the uncertain light of what the band consisted, was a little boy of about ten or twelve years of age, who was carrying a large bundle of what looked like clothing, trying to pass on the wrong side of some palings, when he was roughly seized by the ear by one of the Cossack guards and quickly brought back.

  Russian Orthodox Church car at a wayside stop

  Wishing to post some letters, I tried to pass along that end of the platform in search of the pillar-box, but was at once stopped by the guard. The steam from our engine, congealed by the sharp frost, fell in a fine snow about this luckless band, and glistened white on their clothes in the station lights, and it almost seemed to add an uncalled-for insult to the misery of their lot. I could not help wondering as to what their thoughts might be as they watched our waiting train replete with every comfort and blazing with electric light. I have never before seen the extremes of misery and captivity on the one hand, the extremes of freedom and luxury on the other, brought into such close and striking contrast, and I hope never to see it again. Subsequently, the dejected-looking throng, in which I fancied I saw women, were marched through a doorway into a darkened passage in the station, and so disappeared from sight.

  Probably they were all criminals who deserved their fate. Possibly not. Preconceived ideas and old tradition, however, stirred one’s sympathies and left an unpleasant feeling in the mind for some time. I was constrained to compare our lots, and be thankful for mine. I, free to go my way in comfort. They…?

  ANON

  Quoted in Lost Pleasures of

  the Great Trains

  4. An exchange of gifts

  Compartments in Russian sleeping cars are come-as-you-are,
and mingling of the sexes is common. My four charges have a compartment to themselves; I am the odd man out. On three other Russian trains, I was assigned lady commissars as room-mates—whether it was accident or whether it was hoped I would talk in my sleep and give away some dread secret, I do not know. Once I even accidentally got locked in a compartment with a lady commissar, but that is another story. On the Russia Express I drew two young Russian Army officers and the wife of one of them. The berths are permanent, and on a journey of this length many people don’t bother to dress, spending the day in pajamas, sandals, and a dressing gown. The routine when there are ladies present, of course, is toujours politesse—gestures meaning “I am going to bed,” “I am getting up,” “Please turn your back,” “Please leave the room.” I had no topics of conversation with the Army officers, but my Intourist girl, realizing this was a bit of a fix for me, came in and told them I was an American who had been a railroad transport officer in the last war. Well, it turned out one of the Russians was a railway transport officer, and he kindly lent me a technical Russian magazine, of which I could not understand a word.

  The Russian etiquette toward strangers goes like this: the afternoon we leave Moscow, my Intourist guide introduces me to the Army officers. All right. I go off to dinner, go to bed, and in the morning, when I come back from my very early shaving, I see two cucumbers and a tomato sitting on my pillow. Large smiles from the Army officers, and waving, indicating that this is a present from them and the one wife to me. I twig to this, so at the next long stop—there is one several times every day; the engine takes on water and fuel and there is a general embarking and disembarking—I discover on the station platform a long line of women with all sorts of things to sell (this is more like Mexico or Peru or Bolivia, where people seem to make their living by selling things to eat at railway stations, than it is like Europe). I see an old lady selling huge boxes of cookies (I had noticed that my Army-officer companions didn’t use the dining car—perhaps it was too expensive for them?), and I buy a box, and then when my companions are out of the compartment, I put the box on one of their pillows. When I come back after lunch—ah! Great greetings, smiles, bowings, and so forth, and so forth. The next morning, other vegetables on my pillow—and some black bread and a bit of cheese. At the next stop I spot some likely looking vegetables and buy a sack of cucumbers (Russians are extremely fond of cucumbers), and when my companions are out of the way, I lay six cukes, in little oval patterns, on each pillow. Great delight!

  ROGERS E. M. WHITAKER and

  ANTHONY HISS,

  All Aboard with E. M. Frimbo

  5. The dining-car

  The dining-car was certainly unchanged. On each table there still ceremoniously stood two opulent black bottles of some unthinkable wine, false pledges of conviviality. They were never opened, and rarely dusted. They may contain ink, they may contain the elixir of life. I do not know. I doubt if anyone does.

  Lavish but faded paper frills still clustered coyly round the pots of paper flowers, from whose sad petals the dust of two continents perpetually threatened the specific gravity of the soup. The lengthy and trilingual menu had not been revised; 75 per cent of the dishes were still apocryphal, all the prices were exorbitant. The cruet, as before, was of interest rather to the geologist than to the gourmet. Coal dust from the Donetz Basin, tiny flakes of granite from the Urals, sand whipped by the wind all the way from the Gobi Desert—what a fascinating story that salt-cellar could have told under the microscope! Nor was there anything different about the attendants. They still sat in huddled cabal at the far end of the car, conversing in low and disillusioned tones, while the chef du train, a potent gnome-like man, played on his abacus a slow significant tattoo. Their surliness went no deeper than the grime upon their faces; they were always ready to be amused by one’s struggles with the language or the cooking. Sign-language they interpreted with more eagerness than apprehension: as when my desire for a hard-boiled egg—no easy request, when you come to think of it, to make in pantomime—was fulfilled, three-quarters of an hour after it had been expressed, by the appearance of a whole roast fowl.

  PETER FLEMING,

  One’s Company

  Next there is the matter of food, the other great event of the day. You can with success visit the restaurant of Rossiya—if you have a telepathic sense of timing—and the journey will take you across a devil’s leap: the barely insulated connecting platform between the cars where you cling to frosty rails at the point of the train’s greatest mechanical turbulence; the cold wind shouts, and the blast reminds you of the real scale of what is being done here. The rapidshooter’s reward is a Czarist salon in dark polished wood and cream of the kind presumed to be left behind on the Nakhodka sleeper, operated by motherly mujiks swathed from head to foot in what look like single great sweatrags. They tot on an abacus governed by an impenetrable system, and work from a twelve-page menu printed in four languages which boasts every conceivable national delicacy from blinis to redcurrant vodka; a point which should by no means distract you from the fact that the choice is always limited to beefsteak and cheese. However, you are not allowed to order until you have studied the menu attentively. Actually to be fair, this is to ignore the excellent black bread, robust and tangy, the rich jam and the excellent tea. Chekov, implacable in these matters, found Siberian tea to have the flavour of sage and beetles, but I find it sweet and light. Delicious. Also, there is suspicious milk and gallons of bottled plums and sherry-type wine; and comfortable meat and vegetable soups crop up more often now that the whole new consignment of provisions taken on at Irkutsk is seen to repair the ravages on the system of not only feeding the travellers for some days but also of acting as local grocery store to forty-odd towns on the way. There is also the occasional blast of canned peas that arrives on the plate frozen as the landscape of Siberia, reminding you of how much worse it could be.

  Food-sellers at a Siberian country station

  MICHAEL PENNINGTON,

  Rossiya

  Afterwards, whenever I thought of the Trans-Siberian Express, I saw stainless steel bowls of borscht spilling in the dining car of the Rossiya as it rounded a bend on its way to Moscow, and at the curve a clear sight from the window of our green and black steam locomotive—from Skovorodino onwards its eruptions of steamy smoke diffused the sunlight and drifted into the forest so that the birches smouldered and the magpies made for the sky. I saw the gold-tipped pines at sunset and the snow lying softly around clumps of brown grass like cream poured over the ground; the yachtlike snowploughs at Zima; the ochreous flare of the floodlit factory chimneys at Irkutsk; the sight of Marinsk in early morning, black cranes and black buildings and escaping figures casting long shadows on the tracks as they ran towards the lighted station—something terrible in that combination of cold, dark, and little people tripping over Siberian tracks; the ice-chest of frost between the cars; the protrusion of Lenin’s white forehead at every stop; and the passengers imprisoned in Hard Class: fur hats, fur leggings, blue gym suits, crying children, and such a powerful smell of sardines, body odour, cabbage, and stale tobacco that even at the five-minute stops the Russians jumped on to the snowy platform to risk pneumonia for a breath of fresh air; the bad food; the stupid economies; and the men and women (“No distinction is made with regard to sex in assigning compartments”—Intourist brochure), strangers to each other, who shared the same compartment and sat on opposite bunks, moustached male mirroring moustached female from their grubby nightcaps and the blankets they wore as shawls, down to their hefty ankles stuck in crushed slippers. Most of all, I thought of it as an experience in which time had the trick distortions of a dream: the Rossiya ran on Moscow time, and after a lunch of cold yellow potatoes, a soup of fat lumps called solyanka, and a carafe of port that tasted like cough syrup, I would ask the time and be told it was four o’clock in the morning.

  PAUL THEROUX,

  The Great Railway Bazaar

  6. Some secret bridges

  “W
hat I want to know,” I said to Mischa (never one to let sleeping dogs lie), “is why your government gets so steamed up about bridges. This book I’ve got describes every bridge on the Trans-Siberian Railway in detail, and there are photographs of all the really big ones. I know we’re not in Siberia yet; but I bet there’s another book with pictures of all the bridges on the way to the Urals. Anyway, what difference does it make? They all get photographed from satellites.”

  “I have never seen such a book,” he said.

  “Well, would you like to look at it? Here!”

  “I do not want to look at it.”

  “Well, just listen to this then: ‘At the 1328 verst the line crosses the river...’”

  “Which river?”

  “The Ob. Would you mind if I get on with it, as it’s rather long?

  The line crosses the river by a bridge 372.50 sahzens long having seven spans. The I and VI openings are 46.325 sahzens, the II, IV, 53.65 sahzens, and III and V, 53.15 sahzens. The upper girders of the bridge are on the Herber’s system.

  “I’m going to cut it short:

  The stone abutments of the bridge are laid on granite rocks, the right pier, No. 1, near the bank is not supported on a caisson, the other piers, Nos. 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 are laid on caissons sunk to a depth of 1.81 to 3.40 sahzens below the lowest water level. The minimum elevation of the trusses above the low water mark is 8.23 sahzens and 4.42 above its highest level…

  Look, there’s an awful lot more: you don’t want me to go on do you? It’s terribly boring.”