ninme

The Sunday Times – To Siberia by rail<br/> The new super-deluxe Trans-Siberian left Moscow at the weekend, but is the train worth it for £6,800 one-way?

A ride on the Trans-Siberian Railway is a permanent fixture on lists of Things to Do Before You Die. It runs from Russia’s moody capital, Moscow, to its most distant Pacific outpost, Vladivostok, covering 6,000 miles, taking seven days, crossing eight time zones and sweeping through vast pine forests and endless Siberian steppe en route. It sounds decidedly Doctor Zhivago, doesn’t it?

Yes, well, most of that was filmed in Spain; the Trans-Siberian might not live up to your soft-focus image of it. A romantic myth has grown up around this epic journey, but the reality is somewhat less rosy. Most of the sleeper compartments of the main train, the Rossiya, accommodate four, so you’re forced to share with strangers. They’re usually Boris Yeltsin lookie-likies, determined to drink their own body weight in vodka every hour; or worse: Aussie backpackers. Cabins are so cramped that even an estate agent would blush to call them cosy, and the food is simply vile. There are just two loos per 36 people, and no showers.

These two little old German brothers who live on a farm bordering a bit of land my aunt and uncle bought in middle-of-nowhere-side-of-a-mountain British Columbia, one of whom literally has no teeth (or very few) because of a logging accident (a lot of Germans came to Canada after the war and worked as loggers before buying their little plots upon which they built the prettiest farms in Western Canada) flew to Moscow a couple summers ago whence they caught the Trans-Siberian to Vladivostok then back to Canada. Both are married, but it was just a trip for the brothers. It was the greatest I’d ever heard of.

If all this sounds like a little more adventure than you want from a well-earned holiday, I have just the ticket – the Golden Eagle Trans-Siberian Express.

This new, £12.8m, all-suite service pulled out of Moscow’s elegantly imposing Kazansky station on its inaugural journey this morning, with its 132 passengers quaffing champagne from cut-glass flutes. But I climbed on board last week for a preview to see if it’s worth the money.

Bitch.

At about a pound a mile, the Golden Eagle is roughly in line with competitors such as the Orient-Express and South Africa’s Blue Train.

ninme swoons

There’s a sofa that your coach attendant can open in minutes to form a 4ft 6in bed. (On Asia’s Eastern & Oriental Express, for example, you’ll probably be sleeping in bunks.) The gold cabins even have underfloor heating. But the big plus is its ensuite bathrooms: they are fitted with power showers. …

So, from a comfort level, the Golden Eagle scores highly. But that’s not all passengers want from this sort of once-in-a-lifetime travel experience. They want to recapture the romance of another age, and here the Golden Eagle falls down badly. Cabins are conservatively decorated in magnolia and royal blue, with gold trimmings, serviceable fabrics and the odd lace doily. It can’t hold a candle to the exquisite marquetry, elaborate brass fittings and exotic patina of the restored original carriages of rivals.

Damn.

The bar better captures a mood of nostalgia, with atmospheric nicotine-yellow walls, plenty of stained glass, vampish red velvet banquettes and a tinkling piano. And it also upholds a fine Russian tradition: it doesn’t close until the last person staggers off. A potential problem is that it’s not very large (a second bar car will be added next year). When I mentioned this to Littler, he assured me that while journalists are always concerned that trains’ bar cars aren’t big enough, passengers rarely linger in them.

Heh.

Whatever the truth, none of the sofas or seats is so comfortable that you’ll mind getting off for tours. These include Yekaterinburg, the site of the Romanov execution, Irkutsk, the so-called Paris of Siberia, and the amazing Lake Baikal, the world’s largest freshwater lake by volume, which covers an area bigger than Belgium. There will also be on-board lectures by the likes of the BBC world-affairs editor John Simpson.

But you’ll mainly be looking at the landscape, which brings me to the train’s serious disappointment – the lack of an observation area. I’d have liked a wonderful open-air veranda such as the Royal Scotsman’s, or the glass-domed viewing decks you get on the Canadian Rocky Mountain trains.

Ah, someday!