LONG before 1984, things had started to go wrong on the BAM.
The free cars didn’t turn up (they still haven’t) and some volunteers were
disillusioned. There were reports of BAM officials disappearing with funds on ‘business
trips’ to the Philippines. Some history books paint a bleak picture of the
later days of BAM construction – a dangerous cocktail of daredevil engineering
and bathtub-brewed booze.
Meanwhile, the track itself was in a bad state. In some
parts the permafrost had warped the rails until they looked like roller-coaster
tracks; on others, train drivers instead on hanging out the doors so they could
jump if their engine crashed off the rails.
Contrary to propaganda, BAM was only completed (with
exquisite tragicomic timing ) in 1991, right after the collapse of the Soviet
Union. The mineral wealth it promised to untap has yet to materialize. Some utopian
cities along the route are now little more than ghost towns. BAM is seen by
many today as a railway to nowhere – the punch line to jokes about the USSR.
But for all the jokes, BAM remains a lifeline for those
still resident along the railway.
From Severobaikalsk, I join passengers bundling aboard a
lunchtime train eastwards; supply teachers and dentists commuting to isolated
villages, engineers on missions to set wonky rails straight. Everyone gathers
in the corridors as se skirt the shore of Lake Baikal-a vast inland sea, capped
by a six-foot-thick crust of ice during the winter months. In one doomed
episode, long ago, rails were laid on this ice-resulting in at least one steam
engine currently rusting in Baikal’s-mile deep waters. We pass fishing villages
of rickety timber cabins and frozen wharfs. In the distance are the pincprick
figures of fisherman drilling holes in the ice beside their cars.
Life on board quickly lapses into a lazy rhythm. The engineers
potter off to play cards in their compartment. A carriage attendant knits a red
scarf in her office. Day turns to night, cabin seats are converted into bunks
and clock hands are adjusted as we enter another time zone.
Living in a country of almighty distance, Russians are
accustomed to spending time on two rails. Trotsky plotted battle tactics in his
armoured train; tsars ate caviar in their palatial carriages (which housed
libraries, bathtubs and room for a cow to supply fresh milk). Space rockets,
mobile hospitals and even chapel carriages have all rattled along Russian
rails.
