To Siberia by rail
The new super-deluxe Trans-Siberian left Moscow at the weekend, but is the train worth it for £6,800 one-way?
A ride on the Trans-Siberian Railway is a permanent fixture on lists of Things to Do Before You Die. It runs from Russia’s moody capital, Moscow, to its most distant Pacific outpost, Vladivostok, covering 6,000 miles, taking seven days, crossing eight time zones and sweeping through vast pine forests and endless Siberian steppe en route. It sounds decidedly Doctor Zhivago, doesn’t it?
Yes, well, most of that was filmed in Spain; the Trans-Siberian might not live up to your soft-focus image of it. A romantic myth has grown up around this epic journey, but the reality is somewhat less rosy. Most of the sleeper compartments of the main train, the Rossiya, accommodate four, so you’re forced to share with strangers. They’re usually Boris Yeltsin lookie-likies, determined to drink their own body weight in vodka every hour; or worse: Aussie backpackers. Cabins are so cramped that even an estate agent would blush to call them cosy, and the food is simply vile. There are just two loos per 36 people, and no showers.
If all this sounds like a little more adventure than you want from a well-earned holiday, I have just the ticket – the Golden Eagle Trans-Siberian Express.
This new, £12.8m, all-suite service pulled out of Moscow’s elegantly imposing Kazansky station on its inaugural journey this morning, with its 132 passengers quaffing champagne from cut-glass flutes. But I climbed on board last week for a preview to see if it’s worth the money.
Ah yes, there’s always a catch, isn’t there? In this case, it’s a considerable financial one. The Rossiya costs about £160pp one-way, but the Golden Eagle weighs in at £5,495pp in silver class and £6,795pp for gold (excluding flights). Though, to turn it into the voyage of a lifetime, it does extend the passage to 15 days.
At about a pound a mile, the Golden Eagle is roughly in line with competitors such as the Orient-Express and South Africa’s Blue Train. How does it compare? Its cabins are certainly among the most spacious: “gold” cabins are 77 sq ft, “silver” a still relatively generous 60 sq ft. Facilities are ahead of the pack, too, with flatscreen TVs, DVD and CD players and WiFi connections.
There’s a sofa that your coach attendant can open in minutes to form a 4ft 6in bed. (On Asia’s Eastern & Oriental Express, for example, you’ll probably be sleeping in bunks.) The gold cabins even have underfloor heating. But the big plus is its ensuite bathrooms: they are fitted with power showers. Compare that to the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, which doesn’t even have ensuite lavatories, let alone showers – which means that on its most famous trip to Istanbul, passengers have to disembark to overnight in hotels so they can wash properly. Several five-star trains do offer showers, but on most you shiver under a drip of tepid water.
So, from a comfort level, the Golden Eagle scores highly. But that’s not all passengers want from this sort of once-in-a-lifetime travel experience. They want to recapture the romance of another age, and here the Golden Eagle falls down badly. Cabins are conservatively decorated in magnolia and royal blue, with gold trimmings, serviceable fabrics and the odd lace doily. It can’t hold a candle to the exquisite marquetry, elaborate brass fittings and exotic patina of the restored original carriages of rivals.
The public areas offer more of a sense of occasion and that bygone era of glamour that trainspotters hanker after. The two dining cars are pretty: one veers to the Frenchified and feminine, with distressed wood panelling; the other is more stately, with swags and swirls. It’s a pity, then, that the food is so Soviet. Lunch was Russkiy salat (watery tomato topped with a Dairylea-like cheese), solyanka miasnaya (a chemical-tasting pickle soup), zrazy (a lump of stuffed pork with thrice-boiled vegetables), followed by a baked apple that looked like a slowly deflating balloon – which, I suspect, might have been tastier.
Several meals are taken off the train, although as the Federation hardly has a reputation for haute cuisine, I doubt they’ll be much better. There’s a decent selection of wine, though – as you would expect given that Tim Littler, the driving force behind the train’s creation and president of GW Travel, is a former wine merchant. In 1989, he sold a 1787 Château Margaux for £125,000 – it still holds the world record for the most expensive bottle. How? “It was originally offered at £75,000 but nobody wants to buy the second most expensive bottle,” he explained.
The bar better captures a mood of nostalgia, with atmospheric nicotine-yellow walls, plenty of stained glass, vampish red velvet banquettes and a tinkling piano. And it also upholds a fine Russian tradition: it doesn’t close until the last person staggers off. A potential problem is that it’s not very large (a second bar car will be added next year). When I mentioned this to Littler, he assured me that while journalists are always concerned that trains’ bar cars aren’t big enough, passengers rarely linger in them.
Whatever the truth, none of the sofas or seats is so comfortable that you’ll mind getting off for tours. These include Yekaterinburg, the site of the Romanov execution, Irkutsk, the so-called Paris of Siberia, and the amazing Lake Baikal, the world’s largest freshwater lake by volume, which covers an area bigger than Belgium. There will also be on-board lectures by the likes of the BBC world-affairs editor John Simpson.
But you’ll mainly be looking at the landscape, which brings me to the train’s serious disappointment – the lack of an observation area. I’d have liked a wonderful open-air veranda such as the Royal Scotsman’s, or the glass-domed viewing decks you get on the Canadian Rocky Mountain trains.
Service is also a stumbling block. Staff have nowhere near the slickness of, say, the could-be-on-casters butlers on Africa’s Rovos Rail. They’re not surly, but nor are they overly enthusiastic.
It’s a shame the train’s owners didn’t celebrate its newness by opting for a sleeker, more modern interior and abandoning the attempt at authentic cuisine in favour of a contemporary fusion menu that would better suit the understandable limitations of sourcing fresh foods along the way. That said, the Golden Eagle does open up the possibility of travelling the world’s most famous railway in some style, and that’s no bad thing.
Noble Caledonia (020 7752 0000, www.noble-caledonia.co.uk), offers a 15-day, silver-class Golden Eagle tour from £6,695pp, including all meals with drinks, tours, flights from Heathrow to Moscow and back from Vladivostok (or vice versa), and overnight accommodation in each. Or try GW Travel (0161 928 9410, www.gwtravel.co.uk) or Railbookers (0870 458 9080, www.railbookers.com). She stayed at Moscow’s Hotel Baltschug Kempinski (00 800 426 313 55, www.kempinski.com), which has doubles from £205

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