Iron Roads of Russia

We fought through a crowd on the platform, the people pressing forward, loitering, sitting on over-stuffed suitcases; some smoked on the far-side of the platform, furthest from the train, where the people were less and thinned out. We pressed through on this side, coughing from the unwanted smoke, glancing to our left to read the numbers on the first window of each wagon: five, six, looking for number fifteen. Even knowing it was the last car, having barely managed to book our space in one of the train’s last kupe carriages, still we glanced at the train regularly as we passed by, squeezing through the crowd, anxious to find our wagon; excited, also, to find our friends, who had arrived earlier and waited for us on the platform.

Meeting our friends on the platform, late at night Moscow

What better way to see the vast Russian countryside than by train? The Russian railway network includes over 50,000 miles of track. The network, known as Rossiskye Zheleznye Dorogi, or the Russian Iron Roads, is one of the largest networks in the world, with routes not only traversing the famous east/west trans-Siberian corridor, but also north to south, and about every other direction imaginable. With Moscow as the center, the tracks spread out like a giant spider web, providing important transportation and freight links to remote regions and bringing the country closer together in its iron embrace.

Our chosen track for this trip led to the White Sea and the region of Karelia in the northwest of Russia. Karelia borders Finland and, at different times throughout history, was part of that country, a fact that has greatly influenced the character of the region, leaving behind place names and architectural styles that differ from the rest of Russia. The region is also conveniently accessible by overnight train from Moscow.

We boarded the Moscow to Murmansk train at Leningradskaya Station, intending to disembark at Kem, from there a short taxi ride to Rabocheostrovsk, a small town on the White Sea. From there we would, all things working properly, the stars aligned, and fingers firmly crossed, catch a two-hour ferry ride to the Solovetsky Islands. It all worked on paper: twenty-four hours and five minutes on a train, a short taxi ride, a late hotel check-in and early ferry departure. In the end, an arrival at a distant port, a monastery on the White Sea that was bombarded by the British during the Crimean War and later used by the Soviets as the first gulag prison camp, then and still surrounded by the majestic, otherworldly countryside of the far north: remote, rugged, beautiful. This was travelling, I thought. This would be a real Russian Railways adventure.

We boarded the train and passed down a narrow corridor to our kupe, which consisted of a small table with bunked sleeping berths, an upper and a lower on each side, the lower acting as a seat for two when not in use for sleeping. Our train wagon smelled like old clothes—we later determined this came from the bedding. From the corridor came the excited sounds of passengers getting ready for a long journey: the thud of suitcases being put away, people greeting one another and getting settled in their cabins, and moving out of the way for newly-boarded passengers who moved down the aisle pushing their bags in front of them, glancing at the numbers on the doors

Relaxing in our kupe, on the way back to Moscow

But what does a person do for twenty-four hours on a train? Surely this is a slow way to travel, uneconomical in regards to time. To get to the Solovetsky Islands, we could have flown to Arkhangelsk, and then on to the islands; but, according to our guidebook, flights can often be cancelled due to the weather, and the ferries are more reliable. Somehow, defying logic, the train, with its connection to the ferry, would get us there sooner than flying. So trains continue to be an important mode of transportation in Russia.

We slept fitfully on the train. The swaying of a train is not gentle, but more of a jerking motion, with fits and starts that are impossible to ignore. There are the occasional screeches as the metal wheels rub on the track around a sharp curve, and the squealing, and halting motion of the breaks as we slow for a stop. Yet somehow we awoke fresh in the morning, excited about the day ahead—a full day on the train, all the pressures and anxieties, the schedules and deadlines of real life cast off. There is nothing to do in the cabin but relax. Here we are cut off from the rest of that stuff. Even our cell phone reception is ever only intermittent, enough to check where we are on the map when we stop in a good-sized town, and that is all. No email or Facebook, just us and our books and games, whatever we brought with us; we are today passengers captive in our carriage, with no other cares for the world.

Time on the train, we found, passed quickly. We had breakfast in the dining car, which was mostly empty: omelets and coffee (bitter, but strong) with toast and fried potatoes. Back in our cabin, we read quietly in our bunks and watched the countryside pass by outside the window. We passed by the city of Petrozavodsk, which we would visit later on the return journey, and into the lake country with Lake Onega on our right; here beautiful views of a wide expanse of water, the starchy white trunks of birch trees, majestic green pines. Timeless Russia painting her picture for us.

Lake Onega outside our train window

The train stopped frequently along the route, and we pulled into a small town called Medvezhy Gory (Bear Mountain) where a crowd gathered awaiting the train, vendors laden with buckets of berries: small, juicy mountain blueberries; currants; and brusnika, or lingonberries, a kind of mountain cranberry that grows on a short bush. Old babushkas in headscarves with trays of pirozhnoe (pastries) and cracked, smiling faces greeted us. In our cabin, an aura of barely contained excitement; we spoke rapidly, eyeing the splendor arrayed before us on the track, the waiting feast. We sampled eagerly and returned with more than we could eat: blueberries that stained our fingers and teeth; and sweet, tangy, delicious black currents, pirozhnoe in every local flavor—blueberry, lingonberry, and tvorog, similar to cream cheese but more sour.

The train stopped at Medvezhy Gory

Buying pirozhnoe

Buckets of berries

Black and red currents

The journey continued with satisfied passengers filing back to their cabins. The train moved on: 24 hours, and that only to Kem; some passengers would continue all the way to Murmansk, in the Arctic Circle. At one stop the conductor asked us where we were from, in Russian: Kto vy? Americans. Oh. Outside the cabin we can hear: They’re Americans. So somebody asked. But everybody is nice; there is a camaraderie among the long distance travelers. One woman in a neighboring cabin tells us about the dining car, just to be sure we know. We run into another passenger from our train on the boat to Solovetsky, and she offers her seat so we can all sit together; we are fellow travelers all going to the same place, a status somehow a notch above that of total strangers. We share something.

The sun sets behind a field of young saplings. The train stops and people get off and the train starts again. I wonder: What is their story? Where are they headed? After more than twenty hours of travel, the jerks of the train seem to have mellowed to a steady rocking. Outside the window, a pale yellow moon rises above a copse of trees, birches, beautiful gleaming spires of spectral white in the gathering darkness, as I recline on my lower berth, sticky in the close cabin air. The train glides to another stop, and so we slowly make our way to Northern Russia and the White Sea.