Sorry for the Group Email

I remember writing that the train between St Petersburg and Moscow was the picture of modernity, and that it was the best night’s sleep I’ve ever had. Serves me right, I suppose, that the train waiting for us in Moscow was thirty years old if it was a day.

The outside was filthy. The windows were covered in the brown sludge that threatens to suffocate every car on the Moscow streets, and I gained the undying disapproval of the carriage assistant when I used a useful-looking blue and white cloth to help clean the windows. The rag, with the kind of dreary predictability that seems only to apply to me and my father, was the table cloth.

The bed linen was as old as the train, and the sun failed to break through the clouds in the first afternoon. Despite this, the lights weren’t turned on, and we were left squinting in the half light.

A visit to the toilets, however, won me over totally. The tiny room was fashioned almost entirely from cast-iron and steel, complete with a sink, and a bar of soap that may have been made when Stalin was a boy. The flush on the toilet was operated by a metal foot-pedal. Pushing down the pedal swung down the base of the toilet, giving you a glimpse of the permafrost flashing by beneath, while a squirt of water made sure your deposits were deposited directly on to the track. It is (mindless pollution of the virginal Siberian countryside apart) a nice idea. The problem is that liquid freezes almost instantly when ejected from a moving train at 50 miles per hour, and the result is a terrible, thick, yellow icicle dangling from the disposal shoot. At each station, the job of the cabin attendant is to go out with a long metal spike and dislodge it, leaving frozen excrement all over the ground. I don’t know what the smell must be like in the thaw, but I think “spectacular” perhaps sums it up.

At least the train was capable of 50 miles per hour. Colin Thubrin, in In Siberia, notes that in the first few years of the trans-Siberian, the trains would move at no more than 13 miles per hour, such was the rotten and unpredictable nature of the tracks. There were reports of people picking flowers along the side of the track, before leaping back on.

The Russian lust for central heating is evident nowhere more than on the train. I should point out that I am not an attractive sweater. Some men are. They glisten manfully in the heat. I do not. I turn red in the face and sweat prodigiously. My eyes turn bloodshot, and, just to top off the appearance of escaped lunatic, my nose occasionally bleeds. So it was with some dismay that I realised I would spend the next three days tossing and turning, sweating and bleeding, because the train spent almost all its time around the 30C (86F) degree mark. If the heat showed the slightest sign of dying down, a worried-looking cabin attendant would dash to the coal boiler and hurriedly shovel on a few more spadefuls to make sure no-one approached actual comfort.

With sleep impossible, we turned to the next best thing. It’s difficult to gauge how much vodka we got through during the three days, but it was a lot. The Russians are legendary for their resistance to alcohol, so I can only assume that those on board our carriage had been going for hours. I suppose they were on a train; what else were they supposed to do?

Our attention was eventually drawn – naturally enough – to an exceptionally hammered man named Anton. He was pulling people – men and women – from the compartments and dancing wildly with them in the constrained space of the hall. He was slight but astonishingly strong. To avoid more dancing we asked him into our compartment, where we sat down and began to drink – what else – vodka. We dug deep into our phrase book and explained that we were married. He questioningly mimed cradling an imaginary baby and a pregnant belly; we got across that we had no children.

Did he? Yes, he said. Anastacia and Alexander. “No mother,” he said. Perhaps a divorce? “No mother.” Is she dead? “Yes.”

He stared disconsolately out of the window and an immense, terrible silence descended. I felt embarrassed for accidentally intruding on his grief. At length he tuts, and downs a devastating amount of vodka in a single gulp.

At this point, the carriage attendant stops at our doorway. She touches Anton’s head affectionately. “Brother,” she says. She has a child herself, she says.

The next day we saw Anton, dressed in his railway-issue greatcoat and fur hat. He looked unrecognisably militant, cleaning the snow and frost from the undercarriage of the train.

A few days later we met a man called Mr Tumur, a Mongolian, who kept stopping in our four-berth compartment. Mostly he would stand and stare at Jen, an English-Chinese student. Every time we saw him he was unbelievably drunk. He spoke English haltingly, perforating his speech with belches and soft, dreadful hiccups. “Vodka,” he said once, by way of explanation and apology. He said he was missing his daughter and grand-daughter, who live in Seoul. Jen reminds him of them, he said. The last time I saw him he was sitting, open-shirted, on the side of the carriage, mumbling drunkenly under his breath and looking glum.

Anton and Mr Tumur were nothing, however, to the multitudes of drunken soliders, sailors and policemen on board. At Omsk we were joined by a new contingent, one of whom, a fat, short forty-something, falls instantly, childishly and drunkenly in love with Nina, a German headed to China. He tugged on her coat at the next stop, before turning away and waggling his eyebrows suggestively at a comrade. We shared a few words in pidgin German at Novosibirsk; he spent his time, variously, trying to wheedle cigarettes out of me, trying to find out where Nina was sleeping, and discarding his beer cans and empty cigarette packets on the platform floor.

Eventually, life on the train became a predictable monotony of eating and sleeping. I started to steer away from things that merely needed unwrapping; there’s unlimited hot water on each carriage, and so it was we discovered that preparing instant noodles could be dragged out for ten or twenty minutes each. I also peeled a lot of fruit, until I truly tested the sharpness of my pocket-knife by placing a perfect, inch-long incision in my palm.

At quite enormous length, we arrived at Irkutsk, where it was minus 14. We said goodbye to our cabin attendants, who enterprisingly charged us 70r each (about £1.40) for our profligate use of linen while on the train. We had moved five time zones in four days; we could only hope that Irkutsk and Lake Baikal would be better than St Petersburg and Moscow.