A journey fit for heroes

Remote, cold, austere ... the BAM, deep in the heart of Siberia. Most train-travel enthusiasts know the Trans-Siberian Railway as the triple-forked monster that snakes right across Russia, linking Moscow to Beijing (one fork via Mongolia, another via Manchuria) and to Vladivostok, even further east.

Millions of Russians and Chinese, and several thousand Western tourists, travel the Trans-Siberian every year.

But there's a little-known fourth prong, too, the BAM, or Baikalo-Amurskaya Magistral (mainline), a single-track line that struggles northeast towards the central reaches of Siberia through desolate, uninhabited mountains and tundra to end on the Russian coast close to Sakhalin Island, almost 9000km east of Moscow and 1100km to the north of Vladivostok.

Largely a freight line, it has few Russian passengers let alone any tourists.

Judi and I, who have traversed and enjoyed the other three routes, rode the BAM in late (northern) winter-early spring this year.

It took 10 straight days of travel (although we cheated and "rested" after eight days for one night in a remote Siberian hotel) and two changes of train before we reached Vladivostok and could head on to China.

We shared our second-class, four-berth compartments at times with a variety of new and changing companions, all Russian.

None was in for the long haul like us; they were locals making short trips, railway staff, soldiers or other workers being transferred from one town or city to another, "engineers" moving on remote-area shifts.

It would be fully two weeks after leaving Moscow before we saw other Western tourists, in Harbin, China.

Ironically, they were a couple from Christchurch.

The BAM's main purpose is freight, not passengers.

It provides access to central Siberia's vast mineral-rich basins and forests and allows for the opening-up of previously virgin lands.

Oil, gas, coal and timber are the main riches, but there are stories of gold, diamonds and other minerals, even of huge deposits of uranium.

First mooted in the 1880s, construction of the BAM eventually began in the 1930s, helped later with Japanese and German prisoner-of-war labour.

It languished with Stalin's death, resuming only in 1974 when labelled "Hero Project of the Century" and the youth of the Soviet Union were urged to rally to the challenge.

It took more than 100,000 workers and almost 20 years of hard work in a terrible climate and through difficult terrain - swamps, seven mountain ranges, hundreds of rivers, vast swathes of permafrost - to complete the task.

The financial cost is said by the Lonely Planet travel guide to have been $US25 billion (the original Trans-Siberian line to Vladivostok, built in the 1890s, was estimated, in comparable terms, at $US500 million).

The BAM was officially opened in 1991, but the last and longest tunnel, at 15.34km, was not completed until 2003.

It has only been in the past few years that non-Russians have been permitted to use the few passenger trains on the line.

Our trip began in Moscow's cavernous Yaroslavl Station, reached by taxi through cloying midday traffic.

We had 200 teabags and six bottles of cheap French wine (a combination purchase that opened the eyes of the young girl in the tiny Moscow corner store), a dozen or so freeze-dried meals, packets of potato and gravy mix, several tins of salmon and meat, cheese slices and jam, the food all brought from home, plus two suitcases.

Even so, we were travelling light compared with many of our companions to come.

Train No 76 pulled out at 1.11pm, dead on time.

All Russian trains depart and arrive on time: the timetables are "managed" so they do, resulting in many unscheduled halts just before nominated stations and slower travel than could otherwise be achieved.

We had booked both lower berths in our compartment, thinking that would give us more chance of having it to ourselves, but the plan only worked sometimes.

We began our sharing experience at Moscow with a traditional Russian babushka, or grandmother, and her 7-year-old great-granddaughter.

They departed just seven hours later at Nizhny Novgorod (or Gorky, as it used to be called).

Other "guests" came and went during the next 10 days, none staying more than two nights, and some proving most delightful travelling companions.

We shared food, cups of tea (frequent cups of tea, Judi being a tea nut) and the occasional drink with many.

Russians, once the ice is broken, are most hospitable people, but conversations were generally stilted.

Use of a world map helped in showing where we came from, even though New Zealand was an unknown country to most.