The second day on the train was, sorry to say it, suspiciously similar to the first.
We decided things needed to be kept sensible by disallowing beer before midday and vodka before 6pm, and the daylight hours weren’t too far out of kilter with official moscow time yet, so we were still in party mode, and very much enjoying the regular stops for Babushka-brand pancakes or mashed potato and leek pastries, or rolled up wafers filled with caramel (for 25 roubles).
A slight dampener came when we discovered that the rumour filtering through was true; that there had a been a plane crash in our vicinity, but not a crash a train station in Moscow as we had heard. Rather, a plane taking off from Moscow had crashed into a part of train line on approach to Perm. A 737-800 can carry 180 people; this one had 88 plus crew (according to Simon) and none of them survived.
In the excitement and general flurry of people calling or SMSing to say ‘No I’m not dead’, I mistakenly thought Perm was the place we had stopped last night for half an hour. Not being sure of when the crash had happened I was thinking we might have had a fairly close call. But in fact Danilov was the long stop the previous night, and Perm was the one we were rolling into at the present moment (14.20 Moscow time).
There’s nothing specific I can remember to say about the avalanche of jokes and laughter that came along with our card games on the train; but probably the funniest thing was trying to fit as many people as we could into the lower benches in whichever room we were playing cards in. Turns out 5 people on each side, with pillows in the middle for a card table, is physically possible.
The scenery out the windows was consistently soothing; leaving Moscow you slide through dense birch forest, followed later on by more birch forest, interrupted by the occasional gritty town, while on the second day there was more birch forest, with the occasional pine or cleared field popping up. Everyone made sure to devote at least an hour each day to just looking out the window, falling asleep for a bit, and then looking out the window. The windows were amazingly grimy, and the cabin next to us resorted to washing their window with wet wipes, to no avail as the diesel smoke and dust soon restored the original condition.
We didn’t see or hear anything unusual, but somehow on the afternoon or the night of the second day (almost certainly due to the plane crash), we ended up getting delayed. So while we all waiting around to arrive at Sverdlovsk (the Soviet name for what was before and is now called Yekaterinburg), where there is a big marker to say ‘Europe this side, Asia that side’, it gradually dawned on us that we were later, later, and then very late, and so we just went to bed instead, at what equated to maybe 1am Moscow time.
Greg
