SIBERIA

By StanleySobari

# A Soviet steam engine settles down to retirement in Komsomolsk-na-Amure

TAKING a trip on the BAM can be challenging: tourism infrastructure is minimal. That said, the railway is one of the Soviet Union’s greatest legacies, and all comrades are warmly welcomed.

Irkutsk or Khabarovsk are good starting points to reach the Bam. Aeroflot is among the airlines offering flights from the UK via Moscow (London Heathrow to Irkutsk; Aeroflot.com). Trains then run from both towns into the BAM zone.

Passengers choose from a baffling range of rail classes – seat61.com offers a good explanation. Tickets can be booked online (Irkutsk to Severobaikalsk compartment ticket; rzd.ru).

Christopher Ward’s Brezhnev’s Folly  offers a history of the railway (university of Pittsburgh press).

Start you BAM journey among the old timber frontier houses of Irkustsk – from here it’s also easy to take a day trip to Lake Baikal’s southern shores (baikalmystery.com). Direct trains run daily to Severobaikalsk from Irkutsk (the train joins Bam at Tayshet).

Positioned on the mountainous northern shore of Lake Baikal, Severobaikalsk commands the best setting of any BAM town. Pay a visit to the small but interesting BAM Museum, which – in addition to lots of railway memorabilia – also has a few mammoth bones.

Stay at the friendly Hotel Olymp in Severobaikalsk, a short walk from the station. In the basement you’ll find the town’s best eatery – staff don’t speak English, although dishes can usually be ordered by doing impersonations of the animal you wish to eat.

Before leaving for Tynda, visit the little village of Baikalskoe -  cluster of higgledy-piggledy buildings on cliffs overlooking Lake Baikal, presided over by a handsome wooden church. To get there, morning and afternoon buses take around 45 minutes from Servrobaikalsk station.

Though little visited, Tynda is the biggest town on the BAM. Guides Ekaterina and Vladim Lukovksi show visitors around – their tour includes a BAM museum, and a village of the Evenki people, where reindeer-hide tents are pitched (Ekaterina_lukovs@mail.ru).

Housed in a typically fierce-looking tower block, Hotel Yunost is the only hotel of any sive in Tynda. Functional rooms face out on to a cheery park, while a decent breakfast is served in the small, colourful café. Be wary of expensive wi-fi charges ( ul Krasnaya Presnaya).

The last major stop, and the most architecturally interesting town, on the BAM is Komsomolks-na-Amure. It’s notable for its Soviet era mosaics – don’t miss the WWII mosaic on the Palace of Culture, and the electric-worker mosaic on the TETs electric station.

The Hotel Voskhod has compact rooms set around a classic Soviet era block in Komsomolsk, with a good restaurant on site. It’s worth wandering over the road to look at the town’s Polytechnical Institute, decorated with an impressive ‘science’ mosaic ( hotel-voskhod.ru).

Say goodbye to the BAM at Komsomolsk by catching a train south to Khabarovsk, a pleasant city of wide boulevards and promenades, at  the confluence of the Amur and Ussuri rivers. Stay at the Boutique Hotel, which has bright spacious rooms (boutique-hotel.ru).

NOVY URGAL to KOMSOMOLSK-NA-AMURE

By StanleySobari

#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.

TYNDA to NOVYURGAL

By StanleySobari

ON Tuesday, 30 June, 1908, an extraordinary thing occurred a short distance north of today’s BAM line. Just after breakfast time, a huge asteroid entered the Earth’s atmosphere, triggering an explosion a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Known as the Tunguska Event, it burned millions of trees to a crisp, turning an area about the size of Herefordshire to scorched earth. And the end result? Almost nothing whatsoever. No-one was killed. Indeed, few people noticed. By all accounts, no-one bothered to investigate what had happened at Tunguska until almost a declare later.

This has nothing directly to do with the BAM, but it is indicative of the near-cosmic vastness of Siberia; how its emptiness can somehow make even apocalyptic explosions mute and irrelevant.

From Tynda, the most desolate leg of the railway stretches eastwards. On a line of latitude between the Arctic Sea and the settled belt of countryside along Russia’s Chinese border, there are almost no roads. BAM is the only way of getting overland from east to west: a single corridor about as  wide as your arms span across some 1,500 miles of otherwise uninterrupted emptiness. From space, BAM appears as a trail of faint lights across a sea of darkness.

We depart from Tynda, and the landscape outside the window slips by with the repetitiveness of a broken record: birch forests, rivers, meadows, a station where an old steam engine is parked (icicles growing in its boiler)-and then more forests.

It wasn’t always this empty. These lands once heard the footfalls of passing woolly mammoths, whose tusks are still regularly found across the taiga. Before the Russians settled Siberia, nomadic tribes like the Evenk roamed here, sleeping in birch-bark using twigs as markers. These days, however, most Evenk people live in towns. Russia’s last woolly mammoth toppled over with a thud more than 4,000 years ago-soon after the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Every so often our train stops to let a freight services pass by. There’s a rumble, a streak of bright lights, a cloud of powder-fine snow suspended in the air – and then silence. Before long we are on our way again.

In the Russian imagination, Siberia was a void that encouraged horror stories. Legends spoke of tigers so bloodthirsty that they would devour corpses in graveyards; of Siberian bears that would wet their fur in rivers so they could extinguish campfires and gobble up pioneers in the dark. It was said there were earthquakes so fierce they could make the earth split open and the church bells ring of their own accord. But, in truth, nothing is quite as frightening as Siberia’s emptiness: the idea of being lost in the taiga with no sign of civilization, and no company but the vapour trails of planes crossing the sky.

The afternoon sun lingers on the horizon as our train nears the town of Novy Urgal – catching the underbelly of the clouds with pink light-before the moon swings high into a star-flecked sky, lighting th landscape with a phosphorescent glow. Before long the muffled snores from nearby compartments blend with the arthritic creaking of the carriages. The line speed on the BAM is slow, and trains clatter noisily over the rails throughout the night. It is a sound that is easy to fall asleep to, perhaps because it closely matches the tempo of a human heartbeat.

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