A chaotic journey across half the planet by train — where bad planning collides with blind luck and sheer stubbornness keeps the story moving.
Chapter Nine: Cold War Shagging
The last two trains in our epic journey could not have provided a better contrast between old & new, black & white, tradition & modernity or technology & antiquity. The Russian Railway Federation dusted off its oldest most classic carriage for our last overnight jaunt between Ekaterinburg and Moscow. And we thank them. We can tell it was coupled to this train just for us. It’s the only 1st class car and it doesn’t even match the rest of the rusty train. We had 27 hours to spend in this museum. From Moscow to St Petersburg we took the 250kph Bullet Train. It took 3.5 hours. Here is how they stack up against each other:
Comfort Factor: Hands down winner: the Old Train.
This old thing was built for a different era of travel. Like the 1880’s. I feel like I should be wearing a waist coat and checking time on a pocket watch attached with a gold fob. If the trip lasted a few more days I would grow mutton chops and exchange my Nike baseball cap for a stove-pipe top hat. I’d pick up a parasol and corset for Odile at the next stop. We should have huge leather cases that weigh almost as much empty as they do packed. One of them will open to reveal a full tea set in priceless, fragile porcelain from Samarkand. We will have to ask the conductor to call all available porters and a mule cart to get our baggage to the hotel. On this train, we stretch out across the upholstered bench-beds and open our newspapers as wide we like when turning pages. The bullet train seating, by contrast, is cramped. We fight over the armrest between our seats and try to guess the rule of foot placement etiquette. Our seats face two old guys from Australia with whom we share a table. Conversation is unavoidable. Dez and John are interesting characters. It’s the second time they have done the trans-siberian. The first time was in 1979. Dez was even able to look up an inter-tour guide he shagged in Novosibirsk back in the day when you could barter a pair of Levis and a Bee-Gees album for a small car. We notice that they pack even lighter than us for their 9 week trip. We are impressed, especially compared to my imaginary circa 1880s baggage for an entourage.
Design detail: The Old Train, by a narrow margin.
Weight conservation was not an issue when this carriage was built. Composite materials weren’t available anyway. The fittings and fixtures are all brass and mahogany. They have a well-worn patina that adds to the ancient luster. The carriage is so old that it still has the imperial double headed eagle coat of arms riveted to the outside panel. Even the letters naming the car are made from heavy chunks of brass. The somehow look like they were installed using a bold, all caps option for metal smiths before the end of the 19th century. The whole car was probably mothballed for the 70 years of the Soviet era as a politically incorrect artifact. The Bullet train isn’t bad. It’s cool in a totally different way. It’s futuristic and of the highest order of German industrial design. Little Siemen’s logo’s surreptitiously etched into double glazed, two inch thick windows give this away. Except for the seating, it’s rather spacious, more so than an airplane at least. Automatic sliding doors open as you approach the next car. The connecting passageway is nearly seamless and soundproofed. You can easily loose a toe in the connecting passages of the Old Train. Huge steel overlapping plates grind against each other. Every tenth rail tie produces a jolt strong enough open a steel trap between the plates that would take off the leg of a bear. And it’s loud. All the time.
Speed: The New Train, of course, but who cares?
Okay, the businessmen we see on the train probably care about the speed but we don’t. We’d much rather take our time on the slow train, read a few books, write a novel, play Chinese checkers, whatever… We can’t play our music except on headphones on the bullet train. It’s far too public for our discerning tastes. Worst of all, there are no power outlets on the new train. Actually there aren’t any in our cabin on Old train either but there are several in the corridor. If we are quick and sly we can plug in there, run the laptop cable under the runner carpet (fastened with little brass posts, of course) and into our cabin for a re-charge. So I can’t update the blog posts on the bullet train or watch stupid podcasts from Rocketboom. Speed is over-rated, we think. Even the photos say so. They are blurry, crappy photos.
Food: The Old Train.
The Bullet Train service is no different from airline food. Plasticy, compartmentalized, bland. And like any airline, they have run out of the best main course options when the serving trolley gets to us. We are given whatever is left. The Old Train food isn’t especially good but it comes on a proper plate and has all the major food groups. It’s like a home cooked meal and the lady who brings it looks and acts like the hostess of a small B&B. We can also decide what time we want the meal delivered. On the Bullet Train we miss the archaic coal burning hot water dispenser found at the head of the car in all the older trains. They are wondrous contraptions with immensely complex operating instructions etched into metal plates that are riveted to a bulkhead nearby. Even if we could understand Russian, we would need a mechanical engineering degree to decipher these instructions. We use this scalding water to make instant coffee or clean out our plastic cups when it’s time to start filling them with vodka and whatever our mixer of the day happens to be.
Elitism: Clearly the Old Train.
First class won’t be confused with any other class of service on this Old Train. Even from the exterior, the car stands out from the rest. Inside, the carpets are thicker, the cabins are bigger, food is delivered. On the Bullet Train, we think someone made a mistake with the tickets. This can’t be 1st class, we say. The seats look the same in the other cars. There is nothing special about the passengers in our cabin (Dez and his cold war shagging stories, excepted of course). We think we have been ripped off. Where is the fun in buying 1st class tickets if we can’t enjoy a bit of elitism, look down our noses at the masses and feel a totally false sense of superiority? These seats don’t even recline. On closer investigation we figure out the difference between 1st and 2nd class on this modern train. We get the plastic meals. The others can only buy snacks and drinks. Our seats are covered in some synthetic leather material. The others are covered in some durable fabric material. That’s it! Definitely not worth the 25% premium on the tickets.
Cleanliness: The New Train
Some things get so old they just can’t be cleaned up or at least those responsible decide it’s a hopeless endeavor. To be fair, the cabin is fine on the Old Train but the bathrooms are something from a horror movie. It’s best not to touch anything at all in there with any part of your body, especially not your soft undersides. Also to be fair, this is the only train where we have seen this. All the other trains since Beijing have been perfectly acceptable and regularly cleaned during the journey. The Bullet train is immaculate. In an emergency I wouldn’t worry about hygiene even if I had to undergo an emergency appendectomy on the floors between cars. The toilets are spacious bright and clean. They flush with some sort of vacuum mechanism. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Germans have designed them to turn waste into harmless compacted pellets that are then used as fertilizer on organic sprout farms in Bavaria. On the Old train (and every other one we have been on so far) flushing involves stepping on a pedal mechanism that just opens a flap at the bottom of the bowl. If it is light out, you can watch whatever deposits you have made splat on to the rail ties below. Remember this the next time you are walking along a railway line.
Service: Sad to say: the New Train
The attendants on the New Train were perfectly professional, helpful and pleasant. They get the nice uniforms and, I am sure, better pay. They take pride in their work it seems. I imagine that this is what cabin service was like when US airlines first began flying, before unions and seniority rights turned flight attendants into the grumpy, overbearing, middle-aged hall monitors with a god-complex that they often are today. On the Old Train we had the only encounter with ‘The Rude & Scary Russian Authority’ we expected to suffer under for our whole trip. As we both nodded off into a comfortable, partly vodka induced siesta after lunch, some old lady in a uniform stuck her head in our cabin and started reprimanding us for something. She barked at us for ten minutes, gave us look of such disgust that I thought she was certainly going to spit on us and then promptly marched up the halfway. If it weren’t for the uniform we would have thought she was some nutty bag lady that somehow got on the train. We have no idea what we did wrong. Maybe she was telling us it’s dangerous to sleep with the door open and we are idiots. Maybe Odile was snoring too loud and disturbing other passengers. Who knows.
Everyone else on this train was pleasant and helpful including the car’s main attendant and the lady who brought our food. We had such low expectations for encounters with authority and service. Maybe we had watched too many movies or heard too many stories. Even the guide books are fear mongers in this regard. But the only other grumpy person we have met was the guy issuing visas at the Ho Chi Minh City consulate. The paperwork for a visa is horrendous and we had to visit at least four times. The guy had that ‘morning after’ irritable attitude of someone who had been in a fight after drinking two quarts of vodka and came home to find his wife in bed with his brother. Even if we hadn’t been set up with such low expectations, we’d have to say that we have been very pleased with the general helpfulness we have found along the way. This is always difficult when the language barriers are so high. Only Americans are worse with foreign languages than Russians. Not many people speak English, even just basics. They share one endearing quality with Americans (and most English speaking nations). Once it’s firmly established that we don’t speak Russian and our new friend speaks no English, he or she will launch straight into a detailed description of whatever was understood as a question. This could be 16 step directions to some monument on the map, an explanation of a bill, a recipe for Borscht, the historic significance of Krushchev’s shoe slamming speech in the UN, family folklore handed down from the narrators ancestors, maybe even the secret to renewable energy he just discovered or the meaning of life. It doesn’t matter. Everyone involved realizes that no-one understands each other but he just goes on and on and on…. Sometimes he will seem to enunciate a bit more and speak a bit louder as if he is talking to his slightly retarded cousin. Haven’t you seen someone do this at home? Haven’t you ever caught yourself doing this? It’s quite amusing to experience it from the other side.
We can, however, understand how a nasty service could justifiably evolve these days. We have observed some appalling behavior by Russian nouveau-riche towards staff. In one trendy roof-top wine bar where we were drinking unnecessarily pricy Pinot Grigio, Odile spied and over-perfumed Russian fashionista come breezing in and immediately start a loud conversation with her friend waiting four tables away. A waiter was in her path. Without even acknowledging him as a sentient being she brushed him aside as she would a cob web, cackling away to her friend the whole time. I hope he spit in the fizzy umbrella drink she ordered. Later we saw a 7-foot giant dressed in $1,800 Prada boat shoes, an Armani jacket and some expensive brand of watch I can’t even pronounce arguing with a hunchbacked old lady outside another posh restaurant in St Petersburg. He had parked his Bentley on the sidewalk and she was quite rightly offended. He actually argued with her for a while before giving up and driving away.
But the best one was the bout between two soldiers and our friendly carriage attendant in the Old Train. Russian men have an odd habit of taking off their shirts soon after boarding a train. It’s not just young bucks showing off their biceps and abs. It’s a fairly universal habit and some men who participate probably shouldn’t even do this at home when the lights are out. These two guys were seriously buffed: the kind of muscle work that comes from steroids and hours a day in a Long Island gym or a few years in a Russian platoon of non-conscripted soldiers. These two must have been coming back from the ‘Military Police Action’ Chechnya. They were happily spending most of the trip shirtless, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes in the passageway between our car and the restaurant car behind us. They may have also been partly responsible for the foul conditions in our car’s toilet which was at that end of the car.
At one point our small, round cabin attendant was making another valiant but utterly hopeless attempt to clean the toilet area. She was even mopping the small passageway just inside the connecting door. One of the soldiers started to push open the windowless door which our rotund babushka held shut with a shoulder to finish her mopping. He figured it was stuck on a carpet so gave it a good solid army shove, knocking into the babushka and toppling the mop bucket. He stuck his head through the gap in the doorway and was greeted with toilet cleaning gloved fist straight to the face. The fist came on fast and hard. It was powered but all the weight and anger of a 5 foot nothing, 180 pound very pissed off, hard working babushka. A huge and loud argument ensued. Doors were being slammed, dirty water was running down the corridor, backs were up against the wall, the soldier’s comrade tried to come to his aid. It was frightening. So I hid in my cabin until I saw the Babushka marching towards the front of the train, still fuming but with a mischievous glint in her eyes. Although she was gone, the soldiers were still bitching loudly about something. I took and innocent walk towards the restaurant car and there they were: mop and sponges in hand, cleaning the passageway and toilet.
