“For me, as a young girl in Belarus, listening to the late-night radio broadcasts of them building this rail line in the Siberian frontier had a romance that made me want to be part of it,” said my newest train friend, Mila Kozlova, 57, as we rocked back and forth in our coupe across the Siberian wilderness. She gazed contentedly at the ocean of birch trees rolling by our window, and pulled out two jars of home-pickled vegetables from her canvas bag, adding them to the smorgasbord crowding the windowsill table. A day into our trip on the Baikal-Amur Mainline railroad— the Russians call it BAM had become a 2,500-mile all-you-can-eat buffet.
For the last three hours, we hadn’t seen a single road, village, or human in this forest wilderness. Looking out, I couldn’t imagine another place in the world that could be more pristine, and devoid of human habitation, all within sight of a transcontinental rail line. Occasionally the rail bed lifted us above the trees where we could see snow-topped mountains gleaming above the green horizon. Mila was right; there was an undeniable romance riding through Siberia’s vast wilds on this implausible, impractical, yet epically scenic railroad.
When most people consider crossing Siberia by rail, they think of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the 5,000-mile-long rail line stretching from Moscow to the Pacific, which was finished in 1916. But two-thirds of the way through the continent from Moscow, the Trans-Siberian sprouts an artery— the BAM— that inexplicably darts north through a blank spot on the map with few towns or even paved roads, a mysterious and enormous railroad loop through nowhere.
Begun under Joseph Stalin as a northern alternative to the Trans-Siberian, the BAM was finished only in 1991 though it’s still being tinkered with to meet growing Asian demand for Siberian lumber, gas and oil. “Stalin built BAM because he thought the Chinese might zip across their border and seize the Trans-Siberian, and that didn’t happen,” Mila said. “Brezhnev built more of BAM to make a pioneer utopia, and that never happened. Now,” she said, shrugging in her bulky homemade sweater, “who knows what will happen other than a beautiful trip?”
For years I had been planning to cross Russia on the Trans-Siberian with my travel mate, Yulia Dultsina, a Russian now living in New York. But then we stumbled upon florid descriptions of the BAM in old Soviet Life propaganda magazines and were intrigued. Tracing the rail line though these enormous blank spots grabbed us; here was an alternative to the tired old itineraries on the tourist-clogged Trans-Siberian.
Last spring we took a flight from Seoul, South Korea, to one of the BAM’s spur lines in Khabarovsk, a charming old trading town on Russia’s eastern reaches across the Amur River from China. Khabarovsk is also a major station along the Trans-Siberian railroad, a point of intersection where passengers can change from one train system to the other.
“This feels so European,” Yulia noted as we wandered jet-lagged around Khabarovsk’s monumental czarist-era boulevards with their candy-colored neo-Classical buildings facing the river. But the pink sky at sunset and the eyes that often appeared above the pervasive mink coats hinted that we were deep in Asia. Catching our train out of Khabarovsk’s copper-roofed station, we said goodbye to the Trans-Siberian’s Old World architecture, which we would be trading for a world of Soviet-era concrete follies for the next week until the railroad curved south to rejoin the Trans-Siberian at Tayshet, some two thousand miles west.
Our first conductor was a bottle-blond woman in a blue uniform, who scowled as we hoisted our bags up the steep steps into the train. “Pack lighter next time,” she scolded us as we wrestled our rolling suitcases over the loose carpets that seemed to cover every square inch of the train. But once she realized that I was her only foreign passenger, she became almost maternal, doling out tea bags, mineral water, and candy from her closet-size kiosk next to the bathroom. At sunset, to add to the train’s living room ambience, she hauled out curtains on long rods that she fitted over the corridor windows.
The BAM doesn’t offer all the plush comforts of the Trans-Siberian. After all, there’s hardly any tourism in the BAM region. This line was built for freight and people who have business in the wilderness. The dozen cars on the first leg of our trip were half-filled with workers and managers destined for Siberia’s lumber camps and oil and gas fields, as well as people working on the train line itself. As such, it is more of a utilitarian train, with a nothing-fancy dining car that served essentially as a round-the-clock bar, a couple of packed third-class wagons with clothes draped across bunk beds crowding dormitory-like spaces, and a few second-class cars with four comfortable berths in separate minivan-size cabins.
Once I’d unrolled my mattress on my second-class bunk and unfolded the crisp linens, I felt well taken care of as the train gently rocked me to sleep beneath the moonlit forest that cast dramatic shadows across the walls.
Even though the BAM is a populist ride, it was as punctual and rode as gently as any train I’d been on in the United States. Czarist and Soviet Russia had always been proud of its impressively sprawling yet well-managed railroad system, and the tradition survives in the immaculate uniforms of the attendants who seemed to be constantly cleaning and polishing this big wilderness machine. Despite constant stream, hill and mountain crossings we never spilled a drop from our Russian tea glasses with metal handles balanced on the table. “Amtrak should only be this smooth,” Yulia said. And yet we would be riding over two thousand bridges and some two dozen tunnels, in areas so rugged that construction material often had to be floated inland on barges. The remoteness of this country, and the limited train traffic coming through here, means that trains often run along only a single track, which, at steep curves we could see trailing behind us into the unkempt tundra like a ball of yarn.
After our second night, our train stopped at the hamlet of Novy Uoyan, where for fifteen minutes, we stepped out into the brisk Siberian air and bought a bag of dried omul— local troutlike fish— and a jar of garden-grown raspberry jam from a scrum of kerchiefed women huddled around the station gate. The building was a block-size behemoth with a sculptural roof that dwarfed the half-dozen concrete buildings that made up the rest of Novy Uoyan.
I asked a station attendant if there were many bears here. “All over,” he said. “During the spring you can see them from the track all the time. Sometimes we get calls from railroad workers along the tracks to help rescue them when they get cornered.” He smiled tightly. “Occasionally we get there and find nothing but blood.”
There's a certain smug joy to looking at the perils of a rugged, lonely wild country from the comfort of a train; here we are, linked directly to Moscow on a double stream of metal, a windowpane away from the Heart of Darkness. Our days became a pleasant routine of wildness streaming by outside and an intimate, ever-shifting community of travelers in comfortable, tight, yet strollable conditions inside.
We rolled along, we chatted long into the night with fellow passengers, we watched the pale sun rise and fall through the trees and the distant mountains, we darted back and forth for boiling water to the omnipresent samovar installed at the end of the car, we toasted each other with endless cups of tea and hourly glasses of vodka (out here the stuff seemed to be drunk at a pace more medicinal than inebriating), and we dozed off, rocked gently to sleep.
Thanks to the dozen passengers who rotated into our coupe during the weeklong journey— among them an engineer heading to the oil fields north of Lake Baikal, a navy officer on leave, and a college student who didn’t say a word— our table was a perpetual buffet of pirogi, boiled chicken, pickles, hams, and lots of tasty things I couldn’t pronounce. Our contribution was whatever local snack we could buy from the babushkas during the ten- to fifteen-minute stops the train made at various stations, and the omnipresent, daily replaced bottle of vodka. We bothered going into the restaurant car only once for a well-fried breakfast served by a woman sporting goth makeup and elaborate shawls who was also busy pouring morning beer and vodka to an increasingly festive group of young guys in track suits. “Gopniks,” Yulia whispered: the Russian term for the uniformly clad groups of youths one finds partying at all times of day seemingly in every public space in the country.
But most of the surreal sights were outside; on the second night we stopped at 2 am in a clearing at the incongruously elegant, Soviet-Deco station of Chilchi, where two stunning women in long sable coats tottered on board in high heels. A moment later, we were back in the woods wondering if Chilchi had been some sort of glamorous vision conjured up by the Siberian taiga.
More strange visions flashed by our window; a stainless steel bust in the forest; curving concrete abstract sculptures; a giant red star affixed to a hilltop, and other apparitions of a utopian Soviet future. In the ’60s and ’70s under Leonid Brezhnev, the BAM inspired a nationwide movement of students, engineers, workers and artists to lend a hand in opening the wilderness, a sort of Russian Works Progress Administration. “I was up there for a summer with my art school and a million mosquitoes building a monument,” said Julia Guelman, a Moscow art gallery owner. “I never met anyone who saw it; it’s in the middle of nowhere.”
I used to dismiss Soviet futuristic design as totalitarian kitsch. But experiencing the utopian vision expressed in these fantastical structures, I was struck by how Soviet design, now stripped of its sinister political context, is often individualistic, imaginative and even admirably exuberant. The city of Tynda, where BAM’s headquarters are located, features a train station with a control tower jutting out of its double-columned neck that could have come from a George Jetson cartoon but, in fact, came from the imagination of a team of builders from Moscow. The train line was built by sponsoring cities throughout the Soviet Union that sent dedicated work crews, designers and architects to set their imprint in the opening wilderness. Hence the stations are a parade of Constructionist abstractions, stylized log cabins, sleek neo-Classical monoliths and other architectural surprises staring out at diminutive concrete villages— monumental anchors to unbuilt cities.
Other buildings told darker tales. “These are where the political prisoners lived when Stalin was building BAM,” Anatoly Stepanovich, 69, told us, nodding toward a block of long log barracks lining the road above the station. He had come to pick up one of our cabin mates at Tynda’s station, and when he heard she was with an American traveler who was interested in the BAM, he offered to take us on a tour of the city, built as BAM’s administrative headquarters. Though time had left deep creases on Anatoly’s round face, his obvious pride in the railroad seemed to melt a few decades away as he drove us around the town he had come to forty years ago when it was still a group of wooden buildings and tents inhabited by BAM’s first builders.
The ghosts of former Soviet gulags pepper Siberia, and Stalin’s plan for the construction of the BAM had initially relied on the toil of prisoners exiled to barracks like this. Once Brezhnev came to power in 1964, he announced that henceforth the line was to be constructed “with clean hands”— untainted by slave labor— and a call was sent out across the Soviet Union for citizens to come develop the wilderness. When Anatoly and his comrades heeded that call, they built Tynda into a Soviet showpiece that in the 1970s boasted rows of sixteen-story reinforced concrete apartment blocks, a community center and a population of 74,000. But with the lack of jobs, Tynda is now down to 35,000. “BAM might have been a disappointment, but life is still good here,” Anatoly told us. “We even have our first church.” He brought us to an enormous onion-domed church right on Tynda’s main drag. Inside, gold-painted icons glimmered in the light of hundreds of candles. A crowded, multigeneration congregation sang in voices deep enough to make one believe that the wilderness soul of Siberia had arisen to consecrate this new addition to town. And yes, it was hard not to like Tynda just then.
But the best was yet to come. Two days later, on the overnight train from Tynda to Lake Baikal, we ascended via switchbacks into the Kodar Mountains, “the Siberian Alps,” which peaked above the dense forests with a lonely quality that made them seem much taller than their nine thousand feet.
As the landscape got increasingly dramatic, books and computers throughout our train car were put aside, conversations hushed, and the narrow hallway filled with people leaning against the windows to absorb the scenery until we were engulfed in the darkness of the ten-mile-long Severomuyskiy Tunnel. We emerged into the blinding brightness of a vast mountain valley desolate save for our train’s lonely track as it descended onto Lake Baikal’s northern shore.
Most visitors see Lake Baikal only from its populated and developed southern shore, where the Trans-Siberian runs. But, from our side of the lake, four hundred miles north of there, Baikal emerged as something primordial: an inland sea of cobalt waters the size of Maryland, ringed by mountains without a road or house in sight along the shores that disappeared into the horizon.
We rolled into the BAM-spawned city of Severobaikalsk, nestled between the bare rolling hills overlooking Baikal. We thought that we had become inured to architectural eccentricities, but Severobaikalsk’s station, which appeared to have a giant concrete ski-jump on its roof, surprised us. It turns out that the roof is meant to represent sails, symbolizing the station’s sponsoring city, the sea-oriented metropolis of St. Petersburg.
Our train-rattled bones and our desire to linger in the BAM’s wilderness a bit more before the rail line rejoined the Trans-Siberian a day’s journey west compelled us to debark and try one of the legendary hot springs surrounding Severobaikalsk. We hired a driver to take us forty minutes up the little road to Dzelinda spring, nestled on a hillside amid a half-dozen pleasant little resort cabins.
Immersing ourselves, very slowly, into the 110-degree pool, we perked up as we heard a BAM train rolling through the forest on its way to the Tran-Siberian line and, three days later, Moscow.
“BAM might still see a glorious future,” Anatoly had told us back at Tynda, pointing to enormous stacks of lumber next to the station bound for East Asian markets. For us, bubbling in this wilderness haven within earshot of our smooth ride back to Europe, the BAM’s current state looked pretty glorious, too.
All aboard the Proletarian ExpressOn land:Riding the entire length of the BAM train takes roughly five days, with layovers at Tynda and Severobaikalsk. Bratsk, a five-hour flight from Moscow, is a convenient town for accessing the BAM near its western terminus. The eastern end of the BAM is easily reached via Khabarovsk, a two-hour flight from Seoul, South Korea, on Asiana and Aeroflot.
BAM fares change according to season and routing. Mine averaged $110 a day for a second-class berth that I bought at the ticket window at the Khabarovsk train station. In the United States, Travel All Russia, in Arlington, Virginia (800-884-1721; russiantrains.com), and Sokol Tours in Bradford Woods, Pennsylvania (724-935-5373; sokoltours.com), are among travel companies that arrange BAM journeys.
Tynda and Severobaikalsk are popular stopping-off points on the route. Dzelinda hot springs near Severobaikalsk offers comfortable cabins starting at 1,470 rubles, about $46 at 32 rubles to the dollar, a night. Hotel reservations and a driver to the springs can be booked through Youry Namirovsky (travel@angara.ru; 7-9148-951-961).
On the water:For an epic start or conclusion to the BAM trip, you can make the connection between the BAM and the Trans-Siberian Railway across Lake Baikal via a hydrofoil service between Irkutsk and Severobaikalsk from June to August (42,000 rubles; 7-3952-358-860; vsrp.ru). The hydrofoil is a breathtaking twelve-hour ride across one of the world’s deepest lakes, usually with a stopover on the surreally landscaped island of Olkhon, a sacred spot for the local Buryat people.
If you are feeling especially adventurous, you can cross between the rail stations on Baikal during the winter with hired drivers who will take SUVs across the frozen lake, stopping along the way to drill holes for ice fishing.
The Baikal Complex tour agency in Irkutsk (7-9148-951-961; baikalcomplex.com) can arrange for summer and winter crossings of Lake Baikal, along with tickets, accommodations and tours on BAM.
Rico says one of the nice side-effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union is seeing parts of the world you used to have to be arrested for...
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