Roman Reigns, Dean Ambrose & The Usos vs. The League of Nations: SmackDown, December 10, 2015
As Eric Newby put it, “The Trans-Siberian is the big train ride. All the rest are peanuts.” If you’ve not yet booked, and need a reason to do it sooner rather than later, pencil in “centennial journey” for 2016. It was from 1916 that a route was finished that ran wholly through Russian territory, from Moscow to Vladivostok (before that, trains from Moscow to the Pacific travelled on the Chinese Eastern Railway through Manchuria).
Over seven days (the quickest you can do the journey on service trains) you’ll travel nearly 6,000 miles, through the forests and steppes of Siberia. The landscape may not always be memorable, but it’s definitely mesmerising: the ranks of silver birch, the steppe stretching away as if it might go on forever. If you think we live in a shrinking world, the Trans-Siberian will make you think again. It’ll give you time to read, too. Bryn Thomas’s Trans-Siberian Handbook will tell you what you can expect to see, Colin Thubron’s In Siberia will help you understand it, and Newby’s The Big Red Train Ride might make you think that things have improved since the Seventies, when staff rebuffed all requests “as if trained to fight off packs of wolves”.
