March 2014 LonelyPlanetTraveller 59 LonelyPlanetTraveller March 2014 58

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An Evenk man inTynda the
Evenk were traditionally a
nomadic people of Siberia.
uoutAmidday BAM
service departs the townof
Komsomolsk-na-Amure
March 2014 LonelyPlanetTraveller 61 LonelyPlanetTraveller March 2014 60
RI DI NG THE BAM

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It is just before dawn as train 72 crosses the Baikalsky
Mountains, and the winter snow falls thickly outside
the cabin window.
It is not the uffy snow of the Christmas-time
Coca-Cola adverts. It is bad-tempered, Russian snow
the sort that can freeze your eyelids together, turn
your skin beetroot red and leave tiny icicles dangling
inside your nostrils. It settles silently on a winter
landscape coloured pale lilac by the pre-dawn light
on endless forests of birch and pine, on mountain
streams long since frozen to a halt.
In 1888, a party of engineers set out into this
landscape, surveying for the construction of the
worlds longest railway line: the Trans-Siberian.
But upon reaching the Baikalsky Mountains, things
started to go wrong. They found themselves blocked
by mighty peaks; greeted as an all-you-can-eat buffet
by mosquitoes. Bugger this, the engineers soon
decided. Plans were revised: the Trans-Siberian
instead took a detour through easier territory to the
south, where it trundles along happily to this day.
It would take almost a century before another
railway ventured where the Trans-Siberian feared
to go a line that struck through the Baikalsky
Mountains and onward into the coldest, loneliest
landscapes ever crossed by iron rails. For train 72 has
begun its journey on the Baikal Amur Mainline the
BAM a railway with a story of triumph and tragedy
worthy of a Tolstoy novel.
Little heard of outside Russia, BAM was described
as the greatest building project in human history
when work started in 1974: a 2,700-mile line
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VLADIMIR ZAZUBRIN, 1ST SIBERIAN CONGRESS OF WRITERS, 1926
Passengers look out on
to the frozen landscape
outside Tynda. The
permafrost onwhichthe
BAM was constructed is a
relic of the last Ice Age M
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March 2014 LonelyPlanetTraveller 63
RI DI NG THE BAM
LonelyPlanetTraveller March 2014 62
running through frozen wildernesses north of the
Trans-Siberian. The Soviet Union billed BAM as the
ultimate showdown between Mother Russia and
Mother Nature at her most inhospitable: a glorious
project to open up remote corners of mineral-rich
Siberia. It was a project as ambitious as the Soviet
space programme, covering similarly vast distances.
Few tourists visit BAM today. Those who do go for
the simple, hypnotic pleasure of watching endless
landscape rolling past the window. A BAM journey
can feel more akin to a sea
voyage than a train ride.
We emerge from a tunnel,
and the landscapes the rst
BAM builders battled
against swing into view
Narnia-esque forests and
glaciers glinting in the rst
rays of morning sunshine.
The only signs of human life are the reections from
our own warm railway carriages, skimming along
the snowbanks heaped by the trackside.
In the 1970s, young volunteers from across
the USSR came to Siberia to build BAM. Soviet
propaganda promised a new utopian society in the
model towns along the line if that didnt convince
them, they also promised workers a free car. This was
the dawn of a new era. When generations in the West
had Woodstock and the Summer of Love, the young
communists would have BAM instead. In between
construction there were even music festivals
(featuring Soviet glam-rock bands).
One man who volunteered for BAM duty was
Albert Ivanovich a former bulldozer driver who
wears an impressive set of Soviet railway-building
medals on his jacket, jingling as he walks. I meet him
after our train hauls into Severobaikalsk the model
town to which he emigrated as a young man, set on
the northern shore of Lake Baikal.
When I rst came to Severobaikalsk it was August,
he recalls. The rst snow had settled on the
mountaintops, and the mountains were reected
perfectly in the lake. I knew this would be my home.
Albert shows me around the towns small BAM
museum. The exhibits stir his memories: of days long
ago clearing passes in his bulldozer, and summer
nights singing around the campre, nameless
mountains standing silent all around.
Severobaikalsk, too, looks back fondly on its BAM
past. Along the towns wide boulevards are signs
reading BAM IS THE PROJECT OF OUR YOUTH.
Others offer advice like REAL MEN BUILD TUNNELS
to passing motorists. It is a town typical of settlements
on the BAM: Soviet-era concrete tower blocks with
pufng chimneys and tangled plumbing; homes
where Virgin Mary icons hang on the walls, boots dry
by the stove and the smell of smoked sh wafts about.
In 1984, Severobaikalsk joined in the celebrations
as the Soviet Union announced the completion
of BAM. In the museum there are pictures of the
occasion: people cheering, children being hoisted up
into the air. Rumour had it US spy planes were ying
over, concerned by this miracle of engineering.
There was one small problem with this, however.
BAM hadnt been completed at all. It was all a
whopping great b.

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Long before 1984, things had started to go wrong
on the BAM. The free cars didnt turn up (they still
havent) and some volunteers were disillusioned.
Albert Ivanovich is one of
the most decorated of the
BAM volunteers. In his
spare time he writes
poetry about the landscapes
around Severobaikalsk
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nsovrThe village
of Baikalskoe near
Severobaikalsk.
Bears are oftenfound
around Baikalskoe,
and attacks continue
to be a problem for
BAM workers
nsovr uout
Aretired BAM
volunteer shows
her paperwork
from her time
workingonthe
railway. Likemany,
she was promised
acar whichwas
never delivered
March 2014 LonelyPlanetTraveller 65 LonelyPlanetTraveller March 2014 64
RI DI NG THE BAM
There were reports of BAM ofcials disappearing
with funds on business trips to the Philippines.
Some history books paint a bleak picture of the later
days of BAM construction a dangerous cocktail of
daredevil engineering and bathtub-brewed booze.
Meanwhile, the track itself was in a bad state. In
some parts the permafrost had warped the rails until
they looked like roller-coaster tracks; on others, train
drivers insisted on hanging out the doors so they
could jump if their engine crashed off the rails.
Contrary to propaganda, BAM was only completed
(with exquisite tragicomic timing) in 1991, right after
the collapse of the Soviet Union. The mineral wealth
it promised to untap has yet to materialise. Some
utopian cities along the route are now little more than
ghost towns. BAM is seen by many today as a railway
to nowhere the punchline to jokes about the USSR.
But, for all the jokes, BAM remains a lifeline for
those still resident along the railway.
From Severobaikalsk, I join passengers bundling
aboard a lunchtime train eastwards: supply teachers
and dentists commuting to isolated villages,
engineers on missions to set wonky rails straight.
Everyone gathers in the corridor as we skirt the
shore of Lake Baikal a vast inland sea, capped by
a six-foot-thick crust of ice during the winter months.
In one doomed episode, long ago, rails were laid
on this ice resulting in at least one steam engine
currently rusting in Baikals mile-deep waters. We
pass shing villages of rickety timber cabins and
frozen wharfs. In the distance are the pinprick gures
of sherman drilling holes in the ice beside their cars.
Life on board quickly lapses into a lazy rhythm.
The engineers potter off to play cards in their
compartment. A carriage attendant knits a red scarf
in her ofce. Day turns to night, cabin seats are
converted into bunks and clock hands are adjusted
as we enter another time zone.
Living in a country of almighty distances, Russians
are accustomed to spending time on two rails. Trotsky
plotted battle tactics in his armoured train; tsars
ate caviar in their palatial carriages (which housed
libraries, bathtubs and room for a cow to supply fresh
milk). Space rockets, mobile hospitals and even
chapel carriages have all rattled along Russian rails.

FKM@J ." M>CK V?IJA
OPP/"<(,8 ^[Q'#1+,T
On Tuesday, 30 June, 1908, an extraordinary thing
occurred a short distance north of todays BAM line.
Just after breakfast time, a huge asteroid entered
the Earths atmosphere, triggering an explosion a
thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb
dropped on Hiroshima. Known as the Tunguska
Event, it burned millions of trees to a crisp, turning an
area about the size of Herefordshire to scorched earth.
And the end result? Almost nothing whatsoever.
No-one was killed. Indeed, few people noticed. By all
accounts, no-one bothered to investigate what had
happened at Tunguska until almost a decade later.
This has nothing directly to do with the BAM, but
it is indicative of the near-cosmic vastness of Siberia;
how its emptiness can somehow make even
apocalyptic explosions mute and irrelevant.
From Tynda, the most desolate leg of the railway
stretches eastwards. On a line of latitude between the
Arctic Sea and the settled belt of countryside along
Russias Chinese border, there are almost no roads.
BAM is the only way of getting overland from east to
west: a single corridor about as wide as your arm span
across some 1,500 miles of otherwise uninterrupted
emptiness. From space, BAM appears as a trail of faint
lights across a sea of darkness.
We depart from Tynda, and the landscape outside
the window slips by with the repetitiveness of a
broken record: birch forests, rivers, meadows, a
station where an old steam engine is parked (icicles
growing in its boiler) and then more forests.
It wasnt always this empty. These lands once heard
the footfalls of passing woolly mammoths, whose
tusks are still regularly found across the taiga. Before
the Russians settled Siberia, nomadic tribes like the
Evenk roamed here, sleeping in birch-bark tents,
nding their way around the landscape using twigs
as markers. These days, however, most Evenk people
live in towns. Russias last woolly mammoth
toppled over with a thud more than 4,000 years
ago soon after the last stones were hauled into
place on the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Every so often our train stops to let a freight
service pass by. Theres a rumble, a streak of
bright lights, a cloud of powder-ne snow
suspended in the air and then silence. Before
long we are on our way again.
In the Russian imagination, Siberia was a
void that encouraged horror stories. Legends
spoke of tigers so bloodthirsty that they would
devour corpses in graveyards; of Siberian bears
that would wet their fur in rivers so they could
extinguish campres and gobble up pioneers in
the dark. It was said there were earthquakes so
erce they could make the earth split open and
the church bells ring of their own accord. But, in
truth, nothing is quite as frightening as Siberias
emptiness: the idea of being lost in the taiga
with no sign of civilisation, and no company
but the vapour trails of planes crossing the sky.
The afternoon sun lingers on the horizon as
our train nears the town of Novy Urgal catching the
underbelly of the clouds with pink light before the
moon swings high into a star-ecked sky, lighting the
landscape with a phosphorescent glow. Before long
the mufed snores from nearby compartments blend
with the arthritic creaking of the carriages. The line
speed on the BAM is slow, and trains clatter noisily
over the rails throughout the night. It is a sound that
is easy to fall asleep to, perhaps because it closely
matches the tempo of a human heartbeat.
Residents of Severobaikalsk
out onthe frozen surface
of Lake Baikal, including
an ice sherman packing
up after a longdays shing
RI DI NG THE BAM
tunnel, and some hours later arrive at the station of
Komsomolsk-na-Amure the last major stop on the
BAM, and a town also built by gulag labour.
Like the line itself, the story of the BAM does not
end in a happy place its bold utopian experiment
was recently described as a mistake by President
Putin himself. But there are hopeful voices: old
pioneers echo a Soviet dream that one day the railway
will extend north to the Bering Strait and cross to
Alaska the rst railway to link Eurasia with the
Americas, and a feat to vindicate the st-pumping
statues still standing in the towns along the BAM.
In the meantime, train 963 is ready for its noon
departure back to Tynda from Komsomolsk station.
Passengers shufe about the platform: grandmas and
grandpas off to meet new grandchildren; students
heading home for the holidays. People wave farewell
to loved ones, following the moving carriages along
the platform as the wheels begin to turn, keeping pace
until the train accelerates into a fog of snow and out
across the mountains and time zones of Siberia.
In a strange way, it seems the young BAM pioneers
who rst set eyes on Siberias virgin territory found
something far more precious than minerals and gold;
achieved something more remarkable than the utopia
once promised to them. BAM had plunged deep into
one of the last and greatest empty spaces left on Earth.
And here, it had made a home.
O S is Lonely PlanetTraveller's staff writer.
He also builds railways in his spare time (model ones).

--
M>CK V?IJA ." N>E6>E>A6NX
MJXJEV?D OS_/"<(,8 _P`'#1+,T
From the town of Novy Urgal our train enters the
nal leg of the BAM, crossing broad rivers on their
way to the Pacic. In doing so, it enters into a region
with a dark history.
In 1974, BAM workers on this part of the line
happened across a surreal sight: an abandoned
railway tunnel. Further inspection revealed rusting
tools, human corpses, a candlestick holder made out
of a human skull and a bust of Joseph Stalin. What
they had uncovered were
relics of a secret railway
from the 1930s one built
by slave labour from
Stalins gulags. They were
reminders from a time when
millions perished in camps
right along Russias Pacic
coast prisoners of war,
political dissidents imprisoned not so much by
walls but by vast, unbridgeable distances. By the time
the BAM workers arrived, the so-called Dusse-Alin
tunnel had long become jammed solid with ice.
In an extraordinary undertaking, the railway
engineers mounted jet engines on wheels, using the
back-blast to melt their way through the tunnel so it
could be reused. We pass through the Dusse-Alin
Sunrise over Tynda many
model towns onthe BAM
were twinned withcities in
Western Russia: Tyndas
sister city is Moscow
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AsovrAsleeper
cabinonthe BAM
service to Tynda.
While temperatures
outside can sink
below-45C, it is
always very warm
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Orrostr Lrrt
Astatue of a BAM
worker inTynda,
standing about
three storeys high.
Orrostr Rout
Soviet-era murals
in Komsomolsk-
na-Amure