beyondbrics

There are three kinds of tourists: those who have braved the Trans-Siberian , those who wouldn’t bother and those who dream of it all their lives but never get around to buying a ticket.

The Golden Eagle, Russia’s first luxury tourist train, caters for the latter group, transporting about 1,200 mainly elderly tourists on the world’s most iconic railway journey every year.

“Russia holds a huge fascination for anyone who grew up in the Cold War,” says Iain Dacre, managing director of GW Travel, the UK-based tour operator that runs the Golden Eagle. “Our average client is retired or semi-retired and independent of mind and means… Honeymooners are not our demography.”

Built in the late 19th century as Russia tried to fend off attack from Japan, the Trans-Siberian runs 9,300km from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Pacific, about a quarter of the way round the world. Nowadays the route is mainly used as a cargo corridor for Siberian natural resources and Chinese manufactured goods bound for Europe.

In Soviet times, the Trans-Siberian was one of the only ways for foreigners to venture legally into Russia’s secret interior, although passengers, mostly students on gap years, were forbidden from leaving the train to explore.

From the hermetically sealed windows of the Golden Eagle, intrepid back-packers can still be glimpsed on other trains, stacked in four-bunk carriages behind grimy curtains that never quite meet.

Golden Eagle tours kick off with a champagne reception and the chance to indulge in an electric shiatsu massage in the VIP waiting room at Moscow’s Kazan station and end in Vladivostok two weeks later.

The aim is to provide maximum comfort while retaining a sense of adventure. Along the way the train stops off for guided tours of historic cities and takes a short detour to Mongolia. Trips in winter, when Russia is blanketed in darkness almost round the clock, include dog sleigh rides on Lake Baikal in east Siberia: “the real Dr Zhivago experience,” says Dacre.

Rich Russians like adventurous holidays but have not yet been tempted by the Golden Eagle. Ticket prices of up to £20,000 are hardly a deterrent – oligarchs have been known to drop that much on dinner. It could be that one-way tickets to Siberia have morbid associations for Russians with the Gulags where millions of their fellow countrymen disappeared without trace, or that the prospect of gazing at forests and steppe for two weeks is not exotic enough.

GW Travel invested $23m to build the Golden Eagle in 2006 and struck an exclusive deal with Russian Railways to operate the train for 21 years. Carriages are decorated in a plush, old worldy style with 21st century embellishments such as flat screens, air con and showers.

However, no amount of luxury can completely cocoon passengers from the rigors of Russian railway travel. Even after copious amounts of fine food and wine, sleeping is not easy as carriages clank over jointed track. One traveller said she feared being thrown from her bed as the Golden Eagle lurched to a halt to allow a cargo train to pass.

Now in its fifth year, the Golden Eagle project has spurred Russian Railways to develop more comfortable passenger services itself, including a high-speed link between Moscow and St Petersburg and a tourist route from Moscow to the French Riviera, once the favourite playground of Imperial Russia.

So far GW Travel has no foreign competitors on the Trans-Siberian, although virtual train operators are beginning to invade the space. Google Earth recently launched a Trans-Siberian ride for armchair tourists that allows passengers to delete chunks of the journey if the going gets dull.

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