Reuters: Train trip shows up changes: “The trip gives a vivid glimpse of the changes taking hold here as international oil companies like Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell pour billions of dollars into Sakhalin to develop its vast oil and gas potential.”: Posted 25 October 2005

By Andrew Hurst

YUZHNO-SAKHALINSK, Russia (Reuters) - For generations there have been few better ways to get to know Russia than by traveling across it by train.

The trans-Siberian railway, which was the only reliable means of land transport linking the country's European and Asian halves, has drawn many foreigners on a five-day trip across Russia's bleak and breathtaking steppe.

What is less well known is that Sakhalin, an island off Russia's Far East coast, has its own railway and you can spend a whole night journeying more than 500 miles across this sparsely populated land of lakes and forests.

The trip gives a vivid glimpse of the changes taking hold here as international oil companies like Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell pour billions of dollars into Sakhalin to develop its vast oil and gas potential.

Russia has always had a grim fascination with steel wheels.

Anna Karenina, heroine of Leo Tolstoy's literary masterpiece, met Count Vronsky, her future lover, in a railway station. In the novel's dramatic climax, with her life by now in ruins, Anna throws herself under a moving train.

Trains are associated with some of the most tumultuous moments in the country's history.

Vladimir Lenin returned by train to Russia in April 1917 to start the Russian revolution and a celebrated joke about the evolution of the Soviet leadership takes place on a train.

"LET'S PRETEND WE ARE MOVING"

Josef Stalin and two of his successors, Nikita Krushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, are sitting together in a compartment when their train grinds to a halt.

In a vain attempt to get things moving, Stalin marches to the head of the train and shoots the driver. Krushchev then declares that the hapless man has been rehabilitated, but the train still fails to budge.

Finally, Brezhnev draws the curtains of the compartment, turns to his fellow travelers and says: "Comrades, let's just pretend we are moving."

The joke was a metaphor for the stagnation of communist Russia under Brezhnev in the 1970s, now light years away as hard-edged capitalism transforms the country.

But not everything has changed in today's Russia and trains -- slow, uncomfortable, but seemingly indestructible -- remain a constant.

You do not have to pull shut the curtains of the Sakhalin train in order to conjure up a sense of movement, but it helps.

The train moves in fits and starts across the long, thin island in a journey that can take up to 17 hours, with lengthy stops at remote railway stations.

The track runs along the shoreline for some miles after leaving Sakhalin's capital of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk before heading inland past woods turned rusty brown as the leaves fade in the autumn sun.

Two hours outside the capital, the landscape is scarred by the huge hulks of abandoned paper mills built by the Japanese, a reminder of one of the cornerstones of the island's economy.

The most striking changes are on view in Nogliki, the train journey's northern destination, where on the approach to the station hundreds of neatly stacked pipes lie alongside the railway track, ready for shipment up to the oilfields.

SMALL DRAMA

The island may have changed, but the train is still widely used for the journey between its northern and southern ends because fog and winter storms can make flying hazardous.

The railway was originally designed to serve a now vanished timber and paper pulp industry. It was built to a narrow gauge in the 1920s by the Japanese, who occupied the southern portion of Sakhalin for 40 years until the end of World War Two in 1945.

In the 1950s, Russian engineers extended the line north of the 50th parallel, which divided the Russian and Japanese parts of the island.

Each night a small drama is played out as uniformed women who guard each railway car fight a losing battle against the gently anarchic instincts of many travelers who drink themselves slowly into a state of inebriation.

But the guards never fail in their task of gruffly shepherding their charges back on to the train at each stop when scores descend onto the platform to smoke, converse with fellow travelers and stock up at local shops with beer and vodka.

Travelers delight in complaining loudly about the rudeness of the guards who then get their revenge, locking the lavatories for half an hour after the train leaves each station.

As dawn approaches and the train finally reaches its destination, order is slowly restored, bed-linen cleared away and steaming cups of tea served to bleary eyed passengers. 

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