Despite this, there was no shortage of early riders, including numerous foreigners, who provided comprehensive and at times breathless accounts of their experiences. Many local people took to the trains, too, travelling between Siberian destinations, and numbers exceeded expectations. Before the bridges were completed, many sections were opened to provisional traffic, in which passengers travelled in fourth-class carriages attached to work trains and were ferried across rivers. In winter sometimes temporary tracks were laid across smaller rivers and streams, but this was recognized as risky, so passengers disembarked and trudged across the ice. Prince Khilkov was eager to open completed sections of line, despite their poor condition and in August 1898 services started operating between Moscow and Krasnoyarsk, an eight-day journey provided there were no mishaps, from where, after crossing the Yenisei by ferry, passengers could reach Irkutsk (or rather the other side of the Angara from the town) by train.
In 1896, its first full year, the West Siberian Railway carried 329,000 passengers, including 169,000 emigrants. By 1902, when most of the railway was open, a million passengers were carried and the class breakdown shows that this was very much a service used by ordinary local people. Only 8,000 took first class, while 140,000 enjoyed second and the rest were almost equally split between third and fourth.
This was railway travel at its most basic. Arnot Reid, who described his journey from Peking (now known as Beijing) to St Petersburg in a book published in 1899, complained that he had to wait for three hours in a snowstorm before the ferry crossed another bridgeless river, the Oka. He also objected that there were no timetables – a train simply left Irkutsk every other day, and ‘when it would arrive at any particular place no one seemed to know’.5 There was no first class as yet, and Reid did not realize that as there was a shortage of second class, too, there was a first come, first served system to obtain a seat in the compartments. Consequently, he was forced to spend the first twenty-four hours of the journey sitting on his luggage in the corridor. However, in many respects Reid found the journey enjoyable, particularly the opportunities to purchase food at stops: ‘At many stations there were outside stalls kept by the country people and there one could get excellent cold roast chickens, partridges, blackcock and other game.’6 Together with the French brandy and Crimean claret he had brought along, Reid ate well, which was fortunate since he reported that the train took four days to cover the distance between Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk on the Mid-Siberian, an average of less than 7 mph. At best the speed limit was twenty versts per hour (12 mph) for passenger trains, and just twelve versts per hour (8 mph) for freight, a rate that was well below the norm in European Russia and elsewhere at the time. Indeed, in many places a fit jogger would have outpaced the train, because of the further speed restrictions necessitated by the poor condition of the track.
Reid, at least, survived without mishap. The railway had been so poorly and quickly built that it was a hazard to passengers. Early travellers faced genuine danger. In 1901 some ninety-three people were killed and 500 injured in a total of 524 accidents, though most of these were just simple derailments of freight trains. The catalogue of failings was almost endless. Everything that could go wrong on a railway did – with the exception of major bridge collapses, due (as mentioned before) to the higher standards insisted upon. Smaller wooden bridges would sag under the weight of trains; rails would disappear into the mud as areas expected to be permafrost melted in the summer; the badly ballasted track, with the sleepers on straight sections at times having been laid on the mud with no stone to support them, would break under the strain; the rush to build the line cheaply meant that curves were far sharper than the standard requirement by the government and consequently trains had to reduce speed or risk careering off into the countryside; the steeper than specified gradients meant that trains of only 16 freight wagons were the maximum load for a single locomotive, rather than, as expected, twice that number; and where cuttings had been carved out of hills too parsimoniously, great lumps of earth were wont to fall on the tracks, sometimes blocking the line. In the early days there were large stretches of track with no trees to protect them, and, until the government later planted birches along the line, snow drifts were a persistent hazard in the winter and often required the train crew to dig out the locomotive with their shovels, an operation which could take many hours. There was more, too, more than can be listed, and it was surprising that any trains – let alone the three a day scheduled initially – ever got through. Breakdowns were a daily occurrence and delays of a day or two were routine. Indeed, the railway authorities warned travellers to build in contingency time to their journeys. Photographs of accidents, generally to freight trains, found their way into the European and American press, and were given ironic captions such as ‘The usual accident on the Great Siberian Railway’, increasing the undeserved contempt with which the Trans-Siberian was viewed in the West. It was not only accidents and breakdowns that caused delays. The railway had necessarily employed large numbers of unskilled men, who paid little regard to the needs of a timetable – when there was one. At every station it seemed that the driver and his mate were greeting long-lost friends and the custom was that they shook hands with all the local staff, lingering over small talk and tea. On saints’ days, it was common for the whole crew to desert the train to pray at the chapels provided at every large station.
Some of the incidents were indeed spectacular. According to one early traveller, Richard Jefferson, the very first locomotive to run between Martinsk and Achinsk on the Mid-Siberian fell into a river when the tracks collapsed under it, necessitating months of repair. For Jefferson, who travelled along the line in the winter of 1896/7 when the Western section had just been completed apart from some bridges, the journey was not short of adventure. Jefferson was hoping to make his fortune from the gold mines in central Siberia and travelled the whole length of the completed section. The high point came when he reached the Chulim river, relatively small by Siberian standards, but still wide enough, as he described it, to ‘make two of the River Thames at London Bridge’.7 The bridge to the town of Achinsk was not yet complete, but in the eagerness to open the railway a temporary arrangement had been made: ‘A quarter of a mile from the river, the rails diverted from the main road [alignment], and continued down the slope and so on across the ice to the Achinsk side.’ Jefferson was rather relieved when the train stopped and ‘the conductor came up and requested us to descend and walk to the other side – cheerfully remarking that if the train went through [the ice] only he, his fellow conductors and the engine drivers would be drowned.’ Jefferson doubted whether the ice was solid enough to take the weight of the locomotive and the fifteen heavy carriages that made up his train, and trudged happily across ‘a cheerless waste of ice’ from where, ‘over the river, we could see the glint of the sun on the brazen dome of a church in Achinsk, with the twilight gathering in its greyness behind. The half-finished bridge stood out on our right, gaunt and spidery, and nothing around us but the eternal white of the snow.’ One can almost feel the cold.
Followed by the crowd of passengers wrapped up in furs that made them look like ‘gigantic bales of wool’, Jefferson watched the train crossing the ice. The locomotive slowly descended the incline towards the river, whistling and snorting, where, ingenuously, the local trackworkers had secured the sleepers to the ice by freezing them on with water obtained from a hole they had carved into the frozen river. When the first carriage clattered on to the ice, there was another crunch, but the ice held firm, watched with casual nonchalance by the passengers, and within five minutes the train rolled into Achinsk.
At least the river did not amount to an insuperable obstacle for Jefferson and his companions. In the late spring, when enough ice had melted to prevent trains from going over it, the ferry boats could not cross either, because of the danger from huge ice floes, and consequently passengers could be held up for weeks. Similarly, until the ice was strong enough in the late autumn, there was a p
eriod when crossing proved impossible, too. Even when they were functioning, the ferries that operated in the summer were a source of great delay, as they had been before the line was built, since all the passengers had to pile on them with their baggage and the little boats invariably had to make several trips across these wide expanses of water.
As a measure of the slowness of travel in the early days the journey of 120 miles between Achinsk and Krasnoyarsk, which was at the time the end of the line, took Jefferson’s train all night and part of the morning: ‘Through the night we went, toiling over mountain passes, through deep glens or in and out of gigantic forest glades, but with that eternal snow everywhere, with nothing which was inspiring or inspiriting.’ The bridge over the Yenisei was not yet completed – it took three years and at its peak 94,000 workers to build – and therefore Jefferson and his companions had to take a sledge into town and continue their way towards Irkutsk in a tarantass. Jefferson also had a brilliant and not entirely unconvincing explanation for why the line was built in such poor condition. He talked to an engineer who had worked on the line, who explained that in effect it was a sophisticated job-creation scheme: ‘We are engaged to lay this railway. It is to be finished all the way in about three years’ time; after that what are we going to do?’ As it turns out, Jefferson’s interlocutor was spot on. For the first decade or so, the line was in a constant state of repair and improvement, especially after its inadequacies were highlighted by the Russo-Japanese War (outlined in the next chapter).
Earlier in the journey, a couple of days out of Tomsk, Jefferson’s train had broken down and he learnt that it would take at least several hours to repair. Instead of waiting, along with a companion, he walked the fifteen versts (ten miles) to the nearest station, and was rewarded by being the first passenger to tuck in to the buffet which the stationmaster had prepared in anticipation of the train’s arrival; like an overfed cat, he fell asleep in the waiting room, which proved far more comfortable than the rattling train.
These repasts, copious at times and wholly inadequate at others, were essential given the absence of dining cars in the years before the line was fully open. If there were no local sellers, as could happen in winter, then travellers without provisions would go hungry. On one trip, Annette Meakin, an English gentlewoman (as she termed herself) and her mother, travelling on the Transbaikal section just before it opened fully to the public, was horrified to find only fourth-class accommodation available. To escape the peasants who had crowded into their carriage, they were reallocated by a French-speaking guard to a luggage van with some kindly soldiers, but found only milk, tea and bread to satisfy their hunger during the four-day trip.
At other times the military, notably the top brass, were less helpful to casual travellers. Another early adventurer, William Oliver Greener, travelled in a train on which the army officers bought everything in sight at the stations; on one occasion a greedy general appropriated forty eggs and seven bottles of milk, leaving nothing but salt fish for the mothers on the train with babies to feed.
Jefferson had booked first class, but found that not all the trains provided it, so he spent several nights on the hard boards of third. Many early foreign travellers, like the Meakins, had the same experience and therefore, unusually, they ended up in third or fourth class, which was rarely a happy experience. The Reverend Dr Francis Clark, a New England congregational pastor, travelled from Sretensk eastwards to Lake Baikal at around the same time as Ms Meakin and her mother, in the summer of 1900, when it was still not fully open to regular services. He was lucky, travelling in what was a third-class compartment with hard, unupholstered seats and three tiers of wooden sleeping shelves, only five feet long. In fact, he was fortunate again: on a visit to the Novosibirsk Railway Museum in 2012 I saw gloomy carriages from the 1900s that had three layers of hard metal shelves for sleeping on and cell-like grille doors. Clark found accommodation at the back of the train, which was far worse than the coaches he was travelling in: ‘Others, which might be termed fifth class are simply boxcars with no seats, and marked on the outside to carry twelve horses or forty-three men.8 (Usually, in fact, they said simply forty men.) Clark describes the wide range of different people using these carriages in a manner somewhat bereft of Christian charity: ‘If these were fifth-class cars, there were plenty of sixth- and seventh-class people – some in rags, and many in tags, but few in velvet gowns.’ He describes them as having ‘unmentionable parasites’ and that ‘odours indescribably offensive made the air thick and almost murky’, which grew ever worse as the journey continued.
In 1900, to attract more passengers like Clark, the government launched a de luxe first-class service through to Vladivostok, operated by a combination of private and public enterprise. Prince Khilkov announced ambitious plans to run these luxury trains between Moscow and both Vladivostok and Port Arthur, the deepwater port on the Liaotung peninsula in Manchuria that had been leased controversially from China, and oddly named after a Royal Navy officer who docked there to repair a frigate and now called Lüshun, for tourists and travellers to the Far East. These were intended to be even better than the similar luxury trains that had become commonplace in Europe over the past couple of decades such as the famous Orient Express. In fact, to create the service Khilkov entered into a partnership with Georges Nagelmackers, the man who had created the Orient Express and other similar services around Europe, and who was charged with providing some of the trains, while others were operated directly by the Russian government. Nagelmackers, a brilliant self-publicist and genuine pioneering railway entrepreneur, used the Paris Exposition Universelle (a world fair held in 1900 to celebrate the achievements of the previous century, notably the construction of the Eiffel Tower) to give visitors a foretaste of a luxury journey along the Trans-Siberian.
Nagelmackers did not just plonk a few carriages into the exhibition area, but rather visitors to the Universelle were treated to a ‘railway experience’. They could purchase a meal in the restaurant car for a mere five shillings (25p), but the real treat was the exhibit devised by Pawel Pyasetsky, who was specially commissioned by the railway to demonstrate the ‘experience’ of travelling on the Trans-Siberian. To give a sense of movement to the ‘passengers’ tucking in to their three-course meals, the artist devised an elaborate arrangement outside the windows of the dining car to give the feeling of a virtual train ride. A moving panorama was created by means of an elaborate series of belts moving along at varying speeds. The front one travelled rapidly, carrying mundane features such as sand and rocks, while the next, slightly slower, had plants such as shrubs and brush. Behind that, there was a third, again somewhat slower, showing distant scenery while the fourth, which rolled along slowest of all, was Pyasetsky’s masterpiece, a set of watercolours on lengthy scrolls, with scenes that he had sketched on trips along sections of the railway that had been completed early.
These watercolours included scenes from the cities of Moscow, Omsk, Irkutsk and Beijing and the idea was to give viewers the impression that they had journeyed along the whole railway. The show actually lasted forty-five minutes and there were nine separate scrolls with a total length of around 900 metres (almost 3,000 feet).9 The exhibit and the panorama won a gold medal at the Universelle, as did the Eiffel Tower and, rather more prosaically, Campbell’s soup.
The de luxe services were not intended to make money for the railway, but were a means of influencing European opinion and to counter the criticism in Western circles that the Trans-Siberian was a white elephant and an inadequate, ramshackle railway. The construction of the Trans-Siberian had always been seen by Witte as a way of putting Russia on a par with its European counterparts, and impressing those rich enough to travel on luxury trains was a key part of that strategy. Yet at first the inadequacies of the railway meant it had quite the opposite effect. Therefore, to induce Europeans to travel its full length – as an alternative, for example, to the sea route to China – the trains were not only to have all the required faciliti
es, but also they were to be relatively inexpensive. The promotional material produced for the Paris Universelle had, in fact, suggested a remarkably cheap price of just £12 for the first-class sleeper express fare between Moscow and Vladivostok.
And what luxury was on offer! Nagelmackers had four carriages specially built for the exhibition, which, he boasted, provided facilities ‘equal to the special trains reserved in Western Europe for the sole use of royalty’. It was not an entirely idle boast. The coaches each accommodated just eight people in four two-berth compartments, which all had an en suite bathroom, and decorated in the manner of a private St Petersburg salon. Every carriage had a drawing room and a smoking room, and was fitted out in a different period style: ‘one was decorated with white-lacquered limewood, mirrored walls, a ceiling frescoed with figures from Greek mythology and embroidered curtains. Another was in the style of Louis XVI, with bulging furniture of gold-embellished oak; a third was French Empire, and a fourth imperial Chinese.’10 Every conceivable facility which had ever been put on luxury trains in Europe and America was promised. There was to be a library stocked with books in four languages, a music room with a full-sized grand piano, a hairdressing salon and even an exercise room complete with static bicycle and a rowing machine. For photographers, there was to be a darkroom, though that was probably intended to be as much for the convenience of the censors as the passengers, since tsarist Russia remained very much a police state. And for worshippers, there was the church carriage, an ‘ambulatory basilica’, complete with icons, curved windows and an ornate altar.
The journey was advertised as enabling passengers to get to Beijing in two weeks, but this was highly optimistic in the early days, given the frequency of breakdowns and overall slowness of the track. A series of early improvements had been made by the time these luxury trains started operating, thanks to an improvement programme promoted by Prince Khilkov, who had realized that the inadequacies of the line were a potential source of international embarrassment. Almost as soon as each section of the line was completed, improvements had to be made to ensure it was functioning properly. This was particularly true of the difficult Transbaikal section, which for much of its route was effectively a mountain railway carved into the sides of valleys on a narrow roadbed. Khilkov had managed to persuade the Committee for the Siberian Railway to invest a further eighty million roubles (£8 million) to make these immediate improvements and these funds enabled the worst of the defects to be remedied. It was not only the condition of the railway that was problematic, but also the lack of capacity caused by insufficient passing loops and sidings. Inevitably, the extra money took time to be sanctioned, but by early 1899 Khilkov had ordered the construction of new marshalling yards and passing loops, as well as an increase in the number of carriages and the improvement of the track so that the maximum speed on better sections was raised to 23 mph, rather than the original 13 mph. As a safety measure, many of the wooden bridges used for fording small rivers and streams, were replaced by far hardier steel structures and the light rails on sections where a break could prove fatal, such as curves, were removed in favour of heavier track, though still lighter than the norm in Europe.
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