It was the morning of my first Russian domestic voyage. I was starting small: Moscow to St Petersburg, but how to do it?
It’s a short hop on a plane. When we did it on the school trip in 2002 we took the overnight train. But my mum, already delirious with panic over the idea of me in Russia for nearly three weeks, would have died if I’d done an overnight train and I was extremely wary of the idea too. In 2002, we spent months going over the train issues, to the exclusion of almost all else. It instilled a sense of dread in Russian sleeper trains that I still carry today.
It turns out trains run in daylight as well. Some of them don’t take all day. I found one that left Moscow at the very decent hour of 9.30am and arrived in St Petersburg at about 1.30pm. How perfect!
It wasn’t until I got to Moscow that I discovered I was going on the bullet train. France has the TGV, Germany has ICE, Spain AVE and Russia has Sapsan. It means peregrine falcon, although that’s only bullet-speed in a dive and this train absolutely would not be diving anywhere. Most Sapsans depart Moscow from Leningradsky terminal, so I painstakingly looked it up, figured out how to get there, read about arriving an hour early for airport-style security. All the while looking at my ticket that definitely said Kurskaya terminal on it. It turns out that literally just one or two Sapsan services run from there and mine happened to be it/one of them.
“Airport-style security” meant dumping bags through an x-ray machine and walking through a metal detector, exactly the same as at the Kremlin and exactly the same as at every metro station in Ekaterinburg, although I didn’t know that yet. Once to go inside the station and a second time to get access to the Sapsan end of the platform. No need whatsoever to allow an hour for that. The train wasn’t even there. This isn’t like a plane, where it sits and waits. This train was on its way from Nizhny Novgorod and would arrive in Moscow precisely on time.
I was somewhat thrown that no one wanted to see my ticket. Instead my passport was checked. Had I entered my passport details when I’d bought it online? I must have done. I needed the last four digits of my passport number to connect to the wifi too.
My idea of Russian railways was a little topsy-turvy right now. I dimly remembered the sleeper train of seventeen years ago. The Aeroexpress train that had brought me to the city centre had been exactly the same double-decker Stadler electric train that does the same job in Rome and basically the same as all the double-deckers I’m familiar with from Switzerland. I was expecting something more Soviet today but what I got was, true enough, a modern European-style high speed Siemens Velaro train, as used in Germany and on the Eurostar.
I had a selection of magazines and brochures with some English text. A trolley went past and delivered snacks. I could have helped myself to a pair of complementary headphones if I’d realised it in time (but I’d already acquired one pair on the plane and a second on the tourist bus and had no need for another, on top of the two pairs I’d accidentally brought with me anyway).
Comfy seats. Footrest. Not as much window as I’d have liked. Decent wifi.
I spent the journey trying to watch the view, watching the LCD display and making sarcastic observations on Facebook.
On the Sapsan bullet train to St Petersburg. The view from seat 33 could be better…
Just as I thought we were going into a huge raincloud, the weather’s improved. Yes, you’re probably getting live commentary all the way to St Petersburg.
There’s an info board at the front of the carriage (bit hard to see because the seats are too big) and so far it’s told me it’s 22C outside, please keep the noise down and that we’re travelling at 199km/h which is 123.6mph and not quite the bullet train speed I was expecting.
Only about another forty minutes on the train. This four hour journey seems to going faster than the train is (max speed seen so far: 219km/h)
We’re just arriving in St Petersburg.
The bullet train didn’t go quite as fast as I expected. It’s not exactly a speeding bullet. It’s more of a bullet lying on a coffee table, to mutilate a comedy routine I’ve been enjoying lately. It’s not quite as slow as the sleeper train would have been but it doesn’t get up much more speed than the South Western Railway train between Southampton and London. Well, Wikipedia says those get up to about 160km/h so the Sapsan is faster but it doesn’t feel like it.
Four hours on the plane from London to Moscow felt like a lifetime. Four hours on the train, not going as fast I expected, I thought it was going to take forever and yet all of a sudden we were in the outskirts of St Petersburg. It had been a comfortable journey, if a tedious not-a-speeding-bullet one, far easier than the plane would have been and less phobia-triggering (not of planes. I like planes. Just other passengers make me very jumpy). I got to bring as many bags as I could carry, I brought food and drink and then put them away in the luggage rack where I couldn’t reach them without disturbing my neighbour and so arrive in St Petersburg starving hungry. But in theory I could have eaten as much as I could carry so points over the plane.
My boring-easy-international-chain hotel was just a little bit further down the road; nice and easy to find. I dumped all my luggage there, charged the phone that I’d abused all the way from Moscow and then went out for food.
Next on the Russia 2019 blogs: either the Peter & Paul Fortress or Russian chocolate vs Swiss chocolate. Honestly, I’m not sure what’s due next.