Crossing the Volga, near Kazan

Sunday morning, thirteen hours out, and more than two full days still to go. The train is comfortable, and my travelling companions (in a four-berth coupe) are friendly.

RZhD, the Russian railway system, is one of the best things in Russia, which has always seemed to me to be a natural railway country. With rivers flowing to the unnavigable Arctic and warm water sea ports thousands of miles away, Siberia (still five hundred miles away) was not part of the world in any meaningful sense until the construction of the Trans-Siberian railway in the 1890s.

In 1826 it took the convicted Decembrists nearly a year to walk (in leg-irons) from St Petersburg to their place of imprisonment, at Chita, in eastern Siberia. Even there, they were still a thousand miles from the Pacific.