#Sunrise over Tynda –
many model towns on the BAM were twinned with cities in Western Russia: Tynda’s
sister city is Moscow
FROM the town of Novy Urgal our train enters the final leg
of the BAM, crossing broad rivers on their way to the Pacific. In doing so, it
enters into a region with a dark history.
In 1974, BAM workers on this part of the line happened
across a surreal sight: an abandoned railway tunnel. Further inspection
revealed rusting tools, human corpses, a candlestick holder made out of a human
skull and a bust of Joseph Stalin. What they had uncovered were relics of a
secret railway from the 1930s – one built by slave labour from Stalin’s gulags.
They were reminders from a time when millions perished in camps right along
Russia’s Pacific coast – prisoners of war, political dissidents-imprisoned not
so much by walls but by vast, unbridgeable distances. By the time the BAM
workers arrived, the so-called Dusse-Alin tunnel had long become jammed solid
with ice.
In an extraordinary undertaking, the railway engineers
mounted jet engines on wheels, using the back-blast to melt their way through
the tunnel so it could be reused. We pass trough the Dusse-Alin tunnel, and some
hours later arrive at the station of Komsomolsk-na-Amure-the last major stop on
the BAM, and a town also built by gulag labour.
Like the line itself, the story of the BAM does not end in a
happy place – its bold utopian experiment was recently described as a mistake
by President Putin himself. But there are hopeful voices: old pioneers echo a
Soviet dream that one day the railway will extend north to the Bering Strait
and cross to Alaska-the first railway to link Eurasia with the Americas, and a
feat to vindicate the first-pumping statues still standing in the towns along
the BAM.
In the meantime, train 963 is ready for its noon departure back to Tynda
from Konsomolsk staton. Passengers shuffle about the platform: grandmas and
grandpas off to meet new grandchildren; students heading home for the holidays.
People wave farewell the platform as the wheels begin to turn, keeping pace
until the train accelerates into a fog of snow and out across the mountains and
time zones of Siberia.
In a strange way, it seems the young BAM pioneers who first
set eyes on Siberia’s virgin territory found something far more precious than
minerals and gold; achieved something more remarkable than the utopia once
promised to them. BAM had plunged deep into one of the last and greatest empty
spces left on Earth and here, it had made a home.
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