long red lines across a map

Seventy-nine kilometres out of Tomsk is the junction where the branch line we are on rejoins the main east-west route.  In a classic piece of short sighted lobbying the Tomsk city administrators of the time wanted to protect their own transportation monopolies and so got bypassed by the railway.  Then their town got bypassed by progress.  Thick taiga surrounds us as we cover in a couple of hours what took a year to construct.  At the obviously named Tayga we are only a couple of hundred kilometers away from the halfway point between Moscow and Beijing.  This train is almost perfectly timed, leaving in the late evening and by crossing yet another time zone, thus gaining an hour, we should arrive in Krasnoyarsk just before lunch.  The published arrival times are actually quite reliable as the drivers get bonuses for pulling into the stations at the advertised time.  A side effect of this can be long periods in the middle of the night where the train is stationary so as not to get too far ahead of schedule.  The whole time zone thing has become quite confusing.  All schedules are on Moscow time and so you are constantly adding and subtracting hours to work out when you actually are.  For example the printed arrival time to Novosibirsk was 3am which would be a terrible time but when three hours get added to this it actually works nicely.  Tomsk was a bit confusing however as it was not particularly clear which time zone we were in.  According to all our maps and the inside the station clock it was four hours ahead of the capital.  But on the main clock it was still the three that Novosibirsk had been.  In the end it hardly mattered.  We had been checked out of the hotel since midday anyway and had spent most of the afternoon just hanging out waiting for the departure time to roll around.  Getting there early also allowed me to run across to the supermarket next to the station and restock our supplies and grab a couple of mystery pastries for dinner.  One meat one cheese. [read on]

  While I freely admit to having a bit of a boner over trains, being forced to take a bus really makes you realise why.  My poor cycled out knees ache when forced to stay in one position for too long and with seats this tight I cannot even get into my usual sleep sitting up position.  Maybe this love of the locomotive stems back to when I was a kid and our family won a trip in the cab of a steam train.  Or that there are so few trains back home which is such a shame as they really are the best form of transport.  It just feels so much more civilised than being herded into some metal tube.  Another advantage that trains have is that once you board at a usually central station it just goes.  None of this tedious getting out of town through traffic and intersections just two rails pointing in the direction you want to go.  Even just boarding is fun.  Stand on the platform as a mighty piece of engineering pulls in.  The immaculately presented providnista’s stand ready to welcome everyone aboard.  Once underway there is so much more freedom to move around and looking out the window is far more accessible than a bus and more interesting than a plane. [read on]

Being in a city for only a few days you are really only trying to build a slight impression of the place.  For Yekaterinburg that would be unfinished buildings.  Most strikingly was what I assume was supposed to be a ... [Continue reading this entry]

All I can recall of Tuesday through to mid afternoon is lying of my top bunk wishing the world would stop trying to force its way into my head in quite so insistent a manner.  With a pressing list of ... [Continue reading this entry]

This is a lesson in how to forget a city.  With Russia dominating the planning and preparation, the regionalism of the Baltic being the first stop, the only thought that had gone into Helsinki was that there is a ferry ... [Continue reading this entry]