Story: One Rail, Two Continents: From Europe to Asia on the Trans-Siberian

It is a simple but little considered truth that Asia and Europe share a single landmass. In most minds the East and West are divorced in time and space (after all they are two continents), split at some vague point in the vastness of Siberia - or is it Turkey? - but most definitely exclusive. If you ask a Russian geographer, Asia’s backdoor lies just east of the Urals, a low mountain range about 900 miles and a day’s train journey east from Moscow. More precisely, at kilometer marker 1777 along the Trans-Siberian railway near the city of Yekaterinburg, where the last Romanov Czar along with his family and household servants were murdered on a summer's night in 1918. Here, they would say, is where East and West touch. To prove it a white obelisk marks the spot - “Europe” written on one face, “Asia” on the opposite.
Of course geography, like so much else, defies such human categorization. The reality is subtler and more drawn out. You cannot witness the place where West and East change places but you can experience it. The real miracle of the Trans-Siberian Railway is not how it traverses such vastness but in so doing how it draws together Europe and Asia gradually and before the traveler’s eyes, and on his tongue. Proceeding without break it makes Red Square contiguous with reds of the Forbidden City and connects the Baltic and Yellow Seas as if they had suddenly become neighbors. The line of track may be likened to a line of iron stitch, sewing Europe with Asia with the patient steadfastness that belongs to nature itself.
In this day and age we may think the railway a quaint relic, a lucrative tourist attraction at best. In fact the Trans-Siberian remains the most viable artery for many Russian and Chinese traders plying the markets between Russia’s eight time zones and the markets of China and Korea. In a region still short on roads, and where rivers tend to run almost exclusively north-south, the Trans-Siberian is a lifeline to the Russian Far East. And for a Russian Far East just beginning (after three centuries!) to exploit its vast natural resources, the Trans-Siberian can be certain of its valued role for years to come. The rail is as vital a link in the jet age as it was when completed in the age of steam and carriage.

All Trans-Siberian trains depart from Moscow’s Yaroslavl Station, one pulling out on any given night of the week. My departure date in the warmth of an August evening meant the expectant travelers had spilled out of the station’s stuffy halls to wait it out on and around their luggage. The area around the station gave the appearance of a refugee camp, an assortment of brightly colored backpacks, weathered suitcases, cumbersome packages secured with rope, and boxes of foodstuffs bought in gross vying for space. The passengers were an eclectic group as well - Russians, Chinese, Koreans, and the various ethnicities that fill the space between the Volga and the Ussuri rivers, along with a sprinkling of slightly intimidated looking tourists, giveaways with their ever attendant guidebooks and liters of bottled water. The general air of expectation was almost palpable.
It is a seven-day rail journey from Moscow to Beijing on the Trans-Mongolian, made slightly longer by the necessity of changing the train wheels (or “bogies”) at the Mongolian-Chinese border. With an eye towards defense considerations the Chinese have made their tracks a little less wide than the Russian (once a Soviet satellite, the Mongolian line mimics the Russian one).

How does one prepare for seven days on rolling stock? Frankly, I had no idea. Besides buying two rolls of toilet paper, several more of film, and the longest English language book I could find in Moscow there was nothing else to do. For money on board I was told dollars were always appreciated but Russian roubles would also be tolerated, at least as far as the Mongolian border, after which they would be as useless as my toilet paper, or rather less so. Except in the first class compartments toilet paper is a commodity entirely lacking on board.

Unlike the other Trans-Siberian trains, the Trans-Mongolian is Chinese owned and operated. In a deal struck up with the Russians some years ago the Chinese now have a share in the Trans-Siberian railway market. The Chinese train, to my slight disappointment, was run with somewhat more care than I had anticipated. Fed upon visions of political refugees, escaped convicts, shady adventurers, and unscrupulous merchants, I half-expected the train to be a rickety remnant of the last century filled with vodka-swilling drifters of various sorts that would spend their days playing drunken rounds of dice in the dining car. The Chinese staff, however, was scrupulous about keeping the relatively new train mopped and swept, and though the train itself was filled with local travelers and merchants the foreign tourists were relegated to certain cars, whether for the comfort of the passengers or the authorities I could not be sure.
The dining car was Russian however, and presided over by an elderly female provodnik, who, when not smoking her heavy Russian cigarettes, was fond of dozing off to the sounds of a scratchy tape deck. If the mood struck her she might supply me with a menu, though its contents were soon memorized - noodles with beef, chicken and onion, or an omelet. Despite its slim offerings I found the dining car the ideal place to linger for hours over strong tea, a bottle of Russian beer served up in a spotty glass, or a lukewarm cup of what was ostensibly coffee, and I soon missed its stained tablecloths after it was replaced at the Chinese border with the more efficient if less colorful Chinese dining car. While traversing Russia the Chinese attendants preferred their own cooking (and who could blame them?). I watched in admiration as they skillfully cooked up restaurant quality meals using only the coal-fed hot water furnace as a makeshift stovetop. Whiffs of fried cabbage or dumplings would drift down the corridor at regular hours.
Rolling out into the dead of a Russian summer night, the morning had us fast approaching the Urals - the end of European Russia, and Europe in general. I soon found that the punctuated stops at towns along the way became the yardstick by which to measure our progress across the imposing mass that appeared on my map. I was not alone. The ten-minute stops, which occurred with a regularity every two or three hours of the journey, were a time for the passengers to stretch their legs along the platform, air their lungs, gauge the change in climate, and for the brave to sample the local produce invariably brought trainside by a host of hawkers. Food itself became an intriguing, and usually tasty, barometer of cultural and geographic change. In western Siberia it was wild raspberries and blueberries piled high in cones fashioned of old newsprint. In the more remote provinces of central Siberia it became homemade pickles with dill and parsley, or fried bread stuffed with potatoes and onion, and usually sold by weathered Russian women that waited docilely for your few roubles. Around Lake Baikal it was fried fish, again flavored with dill and garlic, the heavy grease staining their newspaper wrappings but their tender white flesh mixing well with beer. The day-long dash across Mongolia saw the appearance of fried sweet bread and yak’s milk tea served up warm in old plastic water bottles, and in China came dumplings and bao - the Chinese manapua. But it was notably in the abjectly poor stations of central and western Siberia that saw the platforms crowded with small time merchants, in fact outnumbering their potential customers. Children with dirty faces, middle-aged men, and lame elderly women competed to sell small offerings of cucumbers, bags of small tomatoes from backyard gardens, boiled potatoes, or even army surplus of the Soviet era. I watched one of our Chinese attendants haggle over a Soviet military watch.
Lake Baikal marks the halfway point across Siberia, but for the Trans-Mongolian passenger it is nearly the end of Russia. Soon after skirting this awesome body of fresh water the train detours south into Mongolia. Besides the journey’s final destination, Lake Baikal is undoubtedly the route’s most anticipated site. For years it sat like a divine obstacle, blocking the ultimate completion of the Trans-Siberian. It could be neither traversed nor sidestepped, the abruptness of the Primorskiy Range that jealously surrounds it assured that. An early attempt was made to steam across the frozen lake in winter and tracks were accordingly laid down. The results still rest somewhere on Baikal’s lifeless bottom. Then for years passengers would have to disembark near Irkutsk, cross Baikal by ferry (along with the entire train) and recommence their journey on the far shore. In winter this could only be accomplished with special ice-breaking ferries. Not until 1900 was a path finally blasted through the mountains and rails laid to circumvent the lake.
Baikal is the largest, deepest, and oldest freshwater lake on earth and an imposing sight; even on the calm summer afternoon I saw it. Families of locals bathed on the lake’s narrow beach, throwing us waves as the train rolled by. I regretted not having bought a ticket allowing me to disembark at nearby Irkutsk. A city existing in the wilderness on the edge of such a lake, maybe it was only natural that it should have served for decades as the home of exiled Russian revolutionaries. Siberia, I realized, was a land of extremities and hyperbole. Even in summer, bathed in almost overwhelming greenery, the sense of the extreme does not leave it. One senses it in the small towns built entirely of timber, eking out an existence on the edge of a staggering wilderness that seems at any moment willing and eager to consume them without a trace. One feels it also in the region’s mammoth rivers, so unknown to the outside world they might as well be nameless, yet each one as imposing as the Mississippi or the Missouri as I have seen them in spring swollen with runoff. I tried to imagine such views in the dead of winter and could think only of Kurosawa’s film Dersu Uzala, and a land fraught with unimagined menace and beauty.
Day five saw us crossing the open grasslands of Mongolia. The dining car was changed in the night and breakfast was served in the Mongolian dining car, which enjoys a brief day of service while the train traverses Mongolia. With ideas of Mongolian yurts and nomadic horseriders in my head, I was surprised, and not a little disappointed, to find the Mongolian capital of Ulan Bataar like a vast junkyard nestled in a grassy valley. Rolling in from the north, the city came into view out of smoggy haze, the horizon pierced by tall smokestacks and the occasional cone of a nuclear power plant. During the final approach to the city’s main station the landscape was a wasteland of scattered rusty engine parts and random slabs of concrete looking like bleached dinosaur bones.
Nevertheless, I was sure Ulan Bataar had much to offer given time to explore it. I had to settle for exploring the city’s main train station, where we enjoyed an extended stop. Slipping all too conspicuously into the rambunctious crowd of Mongolian travelers and merchants thronging the platform, I exchanged five dollars cash into 1000 Mongolian togrogs (the local currency) from a friendly old lady from whom I then bought a bag of sugary bread rolls. Talking to a fellow traveler back on the train – a Mongolian off to study in Beijing – I discovered five dollars could purchase 5000 togrogs.
In a final display of hyperbole the Trans-Mongolian passed between the Great Wall of China before rolling into Beijing and the end of the line. Beneath the Great Wall the train halted for thirty minutes to allow eager tourists to debark one last time and take photos, while the bored regulars gazed curiously out the window, more intent upon the tourists than the wall. Seven showerless days were enough to make Beijing a welcome prospect, though I have never been one for large cities (though ‘large’ may be an understatement for Beijing).
There remained several more days of rail travel ahead of me in order to get north into Manchuria and from there regain the Trans-Siberian to Vladivostok, but first came a needed break from the rails. It is an arresting thought to gaze upon the red bricks of the Forbidden City knowing you had gazed upon the Kremlin only a week earlier, and traversed every inch between the two.
Two weeks later and I was standing at the edge of the Pacific and the terminus of the rail line at Vladivostok. As it turned out, nobody in Vladivostok had heard of any ship to Korea. My only choice was a weekly passenger ship to Japan, now only 600 miles across the Sea of Japan. It was in Vladivostok that the Czarevich Nicholas (later Czar Nicholas II) broke ground for the Trans-Siberian’s construction in 1891. I gazed with a mixture of fatigue and admiration upon the train as it slept on the tracks near the port, resting for its imminent departure, yet again, across two continents that are really one.