48 hours from Irkutsk to Ekaterinburg

This post has photos of our two days on the train between Irkutsk and Ekaterinburg. 

Being summer, there are lots of flowers in bloom.  This meadow is full of a small purple flower.  The cow in the front was just good timing!

Often enough, the Siberian landscape is interrupted by large industrial sites, including this power station.  Many of the sites are in disrepair or are derelict.

This is a typical village that the train passes.  It only stops at bigger towns, although we saw locals waiting on small station platforms for local trains.

This was a nice meadow that we passed.

Then we were back to more industry in the middle of nowhere.  Those Soviets never let aesthetics get in the way of things.

This is a small shop in one of the villages that we passed.

Siberia has some very larger rivers, with some very large girder bridges crossing them.  I think that this is the Yenisey River when we were arriving into Krasnoyarsk, a large Siberian city.  The Yenisey flows all the way to the Arctic Ocean, and is one of the world’s longer rivers.

Our carriage’s air-conditioning was not working, and inside was quite hot.  There were some Australians in another group traveling from Beijing to St Petersburg via Mongolia who forgot where they were for a few moments, and cracked the royal shits at the train crew.  It was a bit cringeworthy, but the crew were good enough to remove the windows in the doorway to try to let some airflow through.  It let us take some photos of the train from a new perspective.

This photo is taken in the restaurant car.  I’m with “Tony Boom Boom”, the major and the policeman, drinking vodka shots.

Some of the stations are very grand buildings.  This is at Novosibirsk, a major city in mid-Siberia with over 1 million residents.  We stopped for about 20 minutes.

This is dad on the platform at one of our station breaks with our fellow travelers Margaret “Margarita” and Patrick from NZ.

The compartments might be cosy, but if you bring your own bottles of red wine and close the door so that the train policeman doesn’t discover you drinking unauthorised alcohol, you can have quite a party.