To the Edge of the World: The Story of the Trans-Siberian Express, the World's Greatest Railroad
Christian Wolmar
Trains, travel, history
There are books about trains that aren't meant mainly to appeal to train fanatics. It's just that there aren't that many of them. To the Edge of the World, while perfectly decent, doesn't add to their number.
Christian Wolmar really knows his stuff. His stuff is trains. Train transportation, train travel, train infrastructure, train history, train politics, train finance . . . it's all here. He's got a lot of scope, too. The construction of the Trans-Siberian touches everything from the abolition of Russian serfdom to the Russo-Japanese War to the settling of Siberia. All of it finds its way into To the Edge of the World.
There are some writers--John McPhee; Simon Winchester, on his better days; Stephen Johnson, maybe--who could take that material and run with it. They could maybe turn the Trans-Siberian Railway, which is already the spine of a nation, into the spine of a wide-ranging book. That's not Christian Wolmar's way. He sticks to his tracks.
Nor will the writing seduce you; Wolmar's prose is more stately than sparkling. He has a habit, too, of serving up substantial helpings of other authors' writing. Sometimes this works. He's unearthed some accounts from contemporary travelers which are eye-poppingly vivid, for example, and he knows how to use them. All too often, though, he lapses into "As was so ably pointed out by Schmendrickhausenstimpfel, in his classic Geschicte der Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften . . . " Who's writing this book, anyway?
The thing is, the railway itself really was an astounding achievement. We American train nuts get all het up about our own first transcontinental railroad (completed in 1869). Well, the Trans-Siberian is almost three times as long, and built by a less-developed nation over a much harsher and emptier landscape--using mainly muscle power. It's probably fair to say (and Wolmar says it well) that everything about Russia would be different without the railway. As a book about trains, then, To the Edge of the World is worthy. As a book about anything else, it's a good book about how anything else was affected by trains.
Glorious Misadventures is set well before To the Edge of the World gets underway, but nothing much about the looking-glass world of Russian imperial politics seems to have changed in the meantime.
As Wolmar points out, the best comparison for the Trans-Siberian Railway isn't the United States, but Canada. The Impossible Railway, by Pierre Berton, is an excellent book about the building of the Canadian Pacific. At least, it's excellent for us train fanatics. It's probably very good for the rest of you, too.
Effects of the Fall of the Tsar on the Railway Schedules
ReplyDeleteThe Train That Took the White Army Leaders Into Exile
Types of Railway Tracks Lad By Various Gangs of Gulag Prisoners
You are pleased to jest, but in fact:
ReplyDelete* The western military intervention in Archangel was doomed, in part, because the railway more or less fell apart. A coal mine in Tomsk sent out fifteen extra trains a day, clogging the line, and a vast store of supplies built up at the eastern end but couldn't be shipped.
* Trotsky spent the Russian Civil War traveling up and down the line in an armored train, and the White-aligned Czech Legion used the railroad to fight their way entirely across the country and escape.
* Prisoners formed the core of the workforce in the eastern segment of the line. They were the only stable workforce. It was considered a good gig, too: they were paid the same as free workers, and for every eight months they worked a year was knocked off their sentence. The quality of the line they built was highly variable, but that was mainly the result of immense pressure from above to get everything finished as fast as possible.
I never said I didn't think the book was really interesting!