THE SIBERIAN RAILWAY.

Greymouth Evening Star, Volume XXXI, 14 November 1901, Page 4

THE SIBERIAN RAILWAY.

A most interesting account of railway travelling through Russia and Siberia is given by a special correspondent of the London Daily News. His description of the great Trans-Siberian Railway, the first engineering wonder of the world, pictures “ a little strip of railway line, a single track, not very well laid, stretching like a crooked thread for 8000 versts over bleak prairie and sandy plain, and along seamed mountain side.” The first impression of the railway, in fact, is somewhat contemptuous, but “you go riding over it for one day, two days, a week, two weeks, three weeks, and still those two threads of steel stretch further and further. The things begin to fascinate on the third day. You stand for hours on the rear car and watch the rail spin from under your feet—miles, miles, thousands of miles 1” The passengers on the ordinary daily train to Irkutsk are a motley throng. The Russian men wear the conventional pancake topped and peaked caps, and all without exception top boots, while in regard to shirts the costume varies according to the social status of the traveller. The better class Russian affects a grey or puce-colored shirt, sometimes a white one, and he wears it in the conventional English fashion. The poorer Russian, on the other hand, persistently wears his glaring red shirt “hanging outside his trousers as though it were an embryo kilt.” The train makes frequent stoppages, not on account of the engine breaking down, but to give the passengers an opportunity for eating. Instead of having any fixed meal time the Russian “eats when he is hungry, which is often.” He has about six square meals a day, and at least a dozen lunches, washed down with a nip of fiery “vodki.” At every station he has “a glass of tea, marvellous tea, with a slice of lemon floating in it.” The table manners of the Russian emigrant are not pleasing. He “gets his mouth down to his food rather than raise the food to his mouth. He makes objectionable noises in his mouth,” and has a habit of rinsing his mouth and then squirting the water back into the finger bowl. Siberia, seen from the railway spans its vast tracts, impresses the traveller as “the Canada of the eastern world.” The are millions of miles of corn growing land, great tracts of country still to be populated. Mushroom towns have sprung up all along the railway, radiating trade and opening up now markets for English, American, and German manufacturers. The writer of the article concludes with the word-picture of the impressiveness of the great lonely plains of Siberia, which is well worth quoting: “There is the sadness of the sea on a plain that has no break in the horizon. As night closes a cold wind soughs over the land. The railway lino stretches endlessly behind it; it stretches endlessly in front. The train if like a fly trailing across a hemisphere .... The tram creaks and groans and growls. On the engine front are three great lights, as it it would search a path through the wilderness. 8s wo crawl into night on our way to Siberia.”