A Merry Dance Around The World With Eric Newby (1995) - Plot & Excerpts
It was New Year’s Eve 1964. At 11.30 p.m., having entrusted a two-kilo tin of the finest procurable caviar to the engine driver who stuck it on the front of his steam locomotive in order to keep it cool, I boarded the Krasnaya Strela (the Red Arrow), and after disposing of my baggage took a seat in the restaurant car. The Krasnaya Strela is one of the Soviet Union’s most famous trains. It covers the 410 almost dead straight and completely bumpless miles to Moscow in eight hours and thirty minutes, arriving at the Leningrad Station on Komsomolskaya Square at 8.25 the following morning, on the dot. The line has a sentimental place in the hearts of Russian rail-waymen as it was the first major line to be built entirely within the frontiers of Russia; it took 50,000 serfs working from sunrise to sunset – and who were flogged for the privilege of doing so – eight years to complete. Thousands of them died. Almost everything about the Krasnaya Strela was good. It was warm, even too warm, and the dark blue brass-buttoned greatcoats and fur hats worn by the conductresses who sometimes smiled, sometimes scowled, sometimes were inscrutable – Russian officials of either sex are as unpredictable as fruit machines – were of the finest quality.
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