Across the Volga

At dawn, we cross the Volga river on the way out of Nizhny Novgorod, having so far travelled 461 of the total 6,266 kilometres. The river is around a kilometre wide at this point and about one quarter of the length of its way towards its terminus in the Caspian Sea.  While most of the travellers are still asleep, a reflection perhaps of their familiarity with the Volga, the prospect of seeing Europe’s largest river had woken me early. I have to wake up the wagon attendant to turn on the hot water urn.

The train moves slowly (one publication gives the average speed over the whole journey as around 70 kilometres an hour). Every now and then, a freight train rumbles past. Further down the line, among the natural resource basins of Siberia, lies much more traffic. The landscape is mostly wooded, although the big trees were clearly felled long ago.

The Soviet penchant for pre-fabricated concrete is evident along the way, with everything from houses to factories to fences erected using it. I wonder whether this approach was sometimes an easy way of circumventing a lack of the requisite artisan skills, perpetuated by the absence of a free market as quality controller. Indeed, apart from vast distance, the other overriding sense from this part of the journey is of residential and commercial delapidation. Admittedly, we are fleeting spectators from a moving train.

The train stops at Kirov, Glazov, Balezino and Perm, each as nondescript as the next. At each station, the wagon attendants descend in their number ones and line the platform. At Kirov (population of 483,000), the train crosses the still-frozen Vyatka River, where people are fishing through holes in the ice. At this point, my internet signal vanishes, never to reappear for the duration.

Yekaterinburg – Russia’s fourth largest city, with a population of 1.4 million – comes and goes at about 4 o'clock the next morning. It has been immortalised as the final, fateful destination of the imperial family almost a century ago, in April 1918. When told of the upcoming relocation to Yekaterinburg, then a hotbed of revolutionary activity, Nicholas II famously replied: ”I'm not going anywhere.”

I walk down the train to investigate the food and drink options in the buffet car. On these journeys, the railway operator of the country being transited provides the dining car, so for now it’s Russian cuisine. The ambience is unappealing and one can smell as much as read the menu.

Balezino (pop. 16,000) is the last daylight stop today. The vendors have locked their mobile kiosks and gone home. There is a surprising lack of them in general; perhaps the Mongolian passengers offer little custom, and it is difficult to gauge whether there might be more in the summer tourist season. So far, I seem to be the only foreigner from beyond the region on board. By now, the line is heading mostly in a southerly direction, and the train beats a rhythm into the darkness and towards the Urals.