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  We say goodbye on the platform, and I inspect train number one of my two-train, 6,000-mile journey. The Tolstoy Night Train is red and grey, shiny and modern, with carriage attendants standing squarely by its doors in smart pale-grey uniforms with badges showing the Russian Railways symbol.

  The male attendants wear peaked caps and look as though they would be handy in a fight. The women are in pale-grey skirts (some markedly shorter than others), skin-coloured tights and high heels. Some have bleached blonde hair; others have gone for a purple-red look. They sternly regard me as I walk past on my way to coach number 11, where I ask the bottle-blonde attendant if I can take her picture.

  'Nyet! No!' she says.

  I put away my camera.

  She carefully inspects my ticket, nods, and I board a spotless carriage with burgundy carpets. My cabin has a table with a white cloth and a vase with a fake yellow rose, two cartons of grape juice, two bread rolls, a chocolate croissant, a pot of yoghurt, a sachet of jam, a teacup and a pair of slippers. That makes up the inventory of a first-class sleeper on the Tolstoy Night Train, along with a magazine in Cyrillic with pictures of BMWs and Ferraris, and a feature on 'Ram 2500 Heavy-duty' pick-up trucks. These are just about the only words in English. There is also a customs notification warning that you are not allowed to import into Russia 'rough diamonds, precious metals or gems' exceeding the value of US$25,000. No more than 50 cigars are allowed and you must not have on your person more than 250 g of sturgeon-fish roe.

  I think I'm OK on these scores.

  The train pulls away and we are soon passing a glistening lake that leads to a wide plain of emerald fields with cotton-wool clouds hanging low and still. This pastureland is followed by a silver-birch forest with ethereal light filtering between wispy tree trunks. For a while, we run alongside a road with lorries laden with logs, before cutting into arable fields with whitewashed farmhouses and barns, beyond which we enter yet more silverbirch and pine forest. There is, I soon realise, a great deal of silverbirch and pine forest in Finland.

  I'm in the mood for another beer after the one at the station, but as I venture out, the bottle-blonde attendant waves me back to stop me going to investigate the dining carriage.

  'Nyet! Nyet!' she says.

  Apparently I must wait in my cabin for a ticket inspection by a guard before I can go anywhere.

  Then she asks, 'Tea? Coffee?'

  Beer, I suppose, can wait, so I say, 'Dah, spasiba. Tea.'

  She replies, 'Meee-ilk?'

  'Dah.'

  She pours a tea with milk, says 'pozhaluysta' ('you're welcome'), and returns to the end of the carriage. That's about as deep and meaningful as it gets between us, but she seems to have lightened up after my request for a photograph.

  The guard arrives. He looks as though he has either a particularly dreadful hangover or has just risen from a deep sleep; perhaps both scenarios apply. A couple of buttons of his shirt are undone, revealing a gold chain. His greying hair is ruffled and a bump protrudes above his right eye, as though he has stumbled into a door. He glances at my passport and ticket as I ask him the whereabouts of the dining carriage. It is towards the front of the train and will open in 20 minutes, I learn. Dishes include 'fish and rice' and 'beef and potatoes', I am reliably informed. The guard shuffles away.

  Two carriages along, I find the dining carriage, where Celine Dion is, appropriately enough, singing 'All by Myself' on a television screen at one end. The carriage is garishly ornate, with red-andcream-striped seats with a zigzag pattern. Bright yellow plastic cloths cover the tables. Grainy black-and-white photographs of Leo Tolstoy are mounted in gilded frames on the walls: one of him, with his exceedingly long white beard, on a horse in a field; another of him with his family, dining at an outside table. Thick grey and red curtains frame the windows, with pelmets of the sort you might expect in a drawing room. The strip lighting has a yellowy-orange glow.

  I order a Baltika beer, a 'sandwich with caviar' starter, and a 'nobility schnitzel and fried potatoes' main course from a middle aged waiter in a lime-green shirt, opting not to try the 'tongue in creamy sauce with walnuts' (maybe next time).

  The menu warns that alcohol will not be served to 'drunk people', and it is easy to see how you could become quickly inebriated with all the shots of vodka, brandies and bottles of champagne on sale. I drink my beer and relax. Let the train take the strain, I think, as British Rail's old slogan used to go. The Wi-fi is not working. Who cares? I can't do anything about it. Why worry? I am heading through Finnish forest to Moscow in a happily mad dining carriage, eating caviar on toast.

  Songs on the video channel echo across the stripy seats: 'Your love is like a river, baby. Please don't ever leave… You look so beautiful tonight, oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah… Take my hand, let's dance the night away, sweetheart, oh my darling, darling love.' I seem to be listening to a particularly cheesy love ballad special. Why not? I click open another Baltika beer and watch as the light fades above the tunnel of pines. The thin blue sky turns lilac, then indigo. A milky three-quarter moon gleams in the darkening Nordic night.

  A Finnish immigration official enters the carriage. He regards me for a moment. I'm tucking into the excellent nobility schnitzel (unspecified meat, possibly pork, covered in breadcrumbs), with two cans of Baltika on my table. He approaches with a machine hanging around his neck, looking as though he wants to give me a parking ticket. I am still the only diner. Jennifer Rush is howling on the television about the power of love. The immigration official asks to see my passport. He enquires about my journey and questions why I do not have a Mongolian visa; I explain that I'm taking the Manchurian route to Beijing that misses the country. He seems satisfied and informs me that we are 100 kilometres from the Russian border, currently in the Finnish region of Kouvola. We will stop later at Vyborg station in Russia for a further passport inspection.

  A new, ginger-haired, younger waiter brings me a shot of Russian Standard vodka. I might as well toast the journey. He is from Ulyanovsk. 'The birthplace of Lenin! The Volga river!' he says. The name 'Lenin' was adopted by the revolutionary while he was involved in underground communist party work; his original name was Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, the waiter says.

  'Why is there no one else in the dining carriage?' I ask.

  'Maybe it is the financial crisis,' he says. 'The rooo-bull is down.'

  I go back to my cabin and lie on the sofa in darkness, watching the shadowy outlines of trees shoot by. The people in the cabin next to me seem to have been hitting the vodka too. 'Stretch-ka! Orka! Petratska! Stretska! Nilka! One million grand! Britoko! Orka!' their conversation booms. I wish I could understand what was going on. Every now and then, as in 'one million grand', a few words of English sneak in. 'Ah, Americans! Americans! Ah! Ah! Americans!' They are playing tinny music on some sort of portable stereo. At the mention of Americans, they both burst into laughter and the sound of clinking glass can be heard through the wall.

  We draw to a halt and an announcement is made to remain in our cabins. A clatter of boots in the corridor is followed by a rap on the door. A short blonde woman with ice-blue eyes, a green uniform and black patent shoes peers in. I hand her my passport and remain standing, as though to attention. This irritates her and she gestures to sit down. She scans my passport into a machine. She's with a tall man in black with a crew cut.

  'Is that your bag?' he asks, pointing to what is obviously my bag.

  I say it is.

  'What's in it?'

  'Clothes.'

  'Open it.'

  I do and he pokes about a bit.

  The woman returns my passport. All seems fine (again I'm travelling as a tourist, not as a journalist, so I'm relieved not to have been questioned about the purpose of my travels).

  In a fit of gratitude, I say, 'Next time, I will sit down.'

  She fixes her ice-blue eyes on me and says, 'So now you know.' She moves down the corridor.

  The tall man farts and to accompany this, incomprehe
nsibly, says, 'It's on the money!' He smirks and leaves.

  I shut my door and listen to the officials having a long conversation with the noisy duo next door. There is some sort of complication. Then the boots move away down the corridor.

  One of the men next door says in English, 'I have forty-five-euro fine!'

  His companion says, 'Crazy! Crazy!'

  One of them farts loudly.

  The other breaks into a fit of laughter and says: 'Oh-at-ah! Oh-at-ah! Oh-at-ah!' At a guess, this probably means something along the lines of 'Oh boy, that was a bad one'.

  A few minutes later, we begin to move. My phone is sent a text welcoming me to Russia and saying that calls will cost £1.40 a minute. I read the first page of Tolstoy's War and Peace, enjoying his description of a pompous nineteenth-century prince: 'Dressed in his embroidered court uniform with knee breeches, shoes and stars across his chest, he looked at her with a flat face of undisturbed serenity.' I put the book on the table and pull out the fold-down bed: only 1,357 pages to go, but you have to start somewhere. My aim is to finish the novel of all novels by Beijing.

  Heroes, ballet and Nicholas II's folly

  Moscow and the Moscow Metro

  Morning on the Tolstoy Night Train reveals tower blocks and scrapyards beneath lead-grey clouds. Yeleyana, for that is our carriage attendant's name, brings me very good coffee, bread and a platter of salami, cheese, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers (all included in the price). The scenery is uninspiring: warehouses, electricity pylons, skateboard parks with graffiti saying FIZZ and BROKE, spaghetti-junction road systems and damp tower block after damp tower block. Louis-Armstrong-style jazz plays over the speaker system, followed by rousing patriotic Russian songs. A tall rocket-like telecommunications tower shoots upwards, then the train slows at a station. Yeleyana comes to my cabin and points at a sign. It says: MOSKVA. We appear to have arrived.

  It is 08:24, precisely on time. We are at the Leningradsky terminal.

  I wheel my bag to the front of the train and attempt to ask the driver, whose name is Vladimir Dmitriev (at least, he writes this in my notebook), what kind of locomotive is used on the night train. Vladimir seems to say that the loco and carriages date from 2014 and are Russian built with a top speed of 200 kmph. The gauge of the track in Russia, and Finland, is 4 feet 11 inches and a bit (almost, but not quite, 5 feet). This is as much as I learn, train-wise.

  The station is cavernous and consists of a network of halls with displays depicting soldier heroes, stalls selling chocolate, a Costa Coffee and a TGI Friday's restaurant. In one corner, there's a lifesize picture of a burly soldier holding an assault rifle. A hole is in the place where the face should be so you can have your picture taken as a burly Russian soldier with an assault rifle. Real-life thuggish guards with batons and guns stand nearby. A shop offers I LOVE MOSCOW T-shirts and colourful Russian dolls.

  With all the confusing Cyrillic signs, I am at a loss for a while. I had assumed – wrongly, it seems – that I would be leaving from the same station. But the ticket clearly says that I'm going from Yaroslavsky station, and this is Leningradsky. Where is Yaroslavsky, then?

  It's next door. I go out onto a pavement facing a broad street filled with yellow taxis and cars with tinted windows, moving fast. I turn to take in the front of Leningradsky, which is all Corinthian pilasters and neoclassical arches, with a clock tower at the top. It clearly dates from the days of the tsars (completed in 1851 under the instructions of Emperor Nicholas I). About a hundred yards away, I notice another grand, station-like building. So I go over to take a look. This is the Yaroslavsky terminal.

  And it's quite a sight to behold, built in what is known as Russian Revival style, harking back to ancient Russian castles and mansions, but carried out on a much grander scale (it opened in 1904). The departure point of the Trans-Siberian Railway – with its massive barn-style roof, vast columns, turrets, carved-stone hammer and sickle, and murals of peasants and horse-drawn carts – is a tourist attraction in its own right.

  What with Helsinki's Central Railway Station and these two Moscow stations, architectural rail buffs on the Tolstoy Night Train can have a field day.

  I'm aiming to leave my bags during the day and return an hour before my train at around 22:45. Through a throng I find a baggage storage room, where it costs almost nothing to drop off the luggage. There is also, here, one of the most unusual railway notices I have ever seen. It is in English and is entitled: LIST OF PRIORITY PASSENGERS FOR SERVICING IN LUGGAGE OFFICES. A total of 18 categories of people are on this list beginning with Full Cavaliers of the Order of Glory, followed by Heroes of Socialist Labor [sic] and persons awarded the Order of Labor Glory of three degrees, and those recognised For Service to the Motherland in the Armed Forces of the USSR of three degrees. And so on and so on, for 15 further types of Russian citizen. Former minor prisoners of fascism come in at number nine, with Residents of blockaded Leningrad at number 12, and Persons suffered from the radiation as a consequence of the catastrophe at Chernobyl NPP, and as a consequence of nuclear tests at Semipalatinsk shooting grounds and equated categories of citizens at 17. How on earth this pecking order could be observed by passengers seeking their rightful place in the luggagestorage queue is quite beyond me – I have visions of elderly men with chests drooping with medals arguing with one another and waving documents with proof of their level of 'glory'. All of this is disappointingly academic on my visit, as I am the only one there.

  A day in Moscow, about 15 hours in all: what to do? First things first, I take the Moscow Metro to Red Square. It's not far from Komsomolskaya station to Lubyanka station, about a five-minute ride. I head down an escalator, admiring murals depicting scenes that must date from the Soviet period: men and women holding picks and spades, united in comradeship, mining the land. Chandeliers and elaborate cornicing – swirls of flowers and classical figures – are further on. Moscow's underground stations are another good 'train reason' to take the Trans-Siberian Railway.

  From Lubyanka, I follow a sunny street with more tintedwindow cars to Red Square, where a checklist quality to my day begins. St Basil's Cathedral? Done it, got the picture (lovely onionshaped domes). The Kremlin? Bought the ticket, seen the brass band and guards marching in the square. GUM department store? Rather wonderful, cavernous place (full of international shops these days).

  I take a rest on a bench by the Moskva river, watching a performance artist dressed as Lenin. He's fooling about kicking a ball attached to a cord that hangs round his neck. 'Stalin' sits on a plastic chair, smoking a pipe and waiting for his turn to take the stage. They make a peculiar duo.

  After this, I go to the Museum of Contemporary History, where I'm surprised that there is already a display on the troubles in Ukraine, with information panels in English and a pro-Russian bias, naturally: With the participation of the Russian side there have been achieved the ceasefire agreement and the gradual de-escalation of the armed conflict.

  And to top off my day, I'm lucky to pick up a ticket (£40) to watch a performance of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, set to the music of Tchaikovsky, sitting in a splendid gilded box at the Bolshoi. At the interval, I drink champagne in a side room with a chandelier, feeling scruffy in jeans as most theatregoers are dressed to the nines. Applause and many bravos break out after the dramatic, sad finale (Onegin does not get his girl).

  Then I catch the Metro from Okhotny Ryad to Komsomolskaya station… my 23rd train on my journeys round the globe so far.

  My 24th is waiting on the platform at the Yaroslavsky terminal, where crowds of travellers are slumped in just about every available space on the concourse. Around 160 ethnic groups make up Russia's population of 143 million, and many of them can be seen at this key transit point. The trains from Yaroslavsky act as a vital connection to remote regions of the largest country in the world. The station has a frontier feel: we are on the edge of a continent; many thousands of miles and strange lands stretch ahead.

  Sadly, no Full Cavaliers of the Order
of Glory are at the luggage storeroom when I go to fetch my backpack and pull-along bag. I still have an hour to kill, so I go for a beer at a bar with a low ceiling and shaky floorboards, sitting at a table near a furtive, heavy-set soldier in a black beret, who has bundled his possessions into a black bin liner and seems agitated. Trying not to attract the attention of my neighbour, I sip fizzy lager and munch on doughy pretzels, while reading up about trains in Russia and their place in the country's history. Yet again, as I've been finding so often, they seem to have played a pivotal role.

  The first railway in Russia was built in 1837. This was a 15-mile line out of St Petersburg to Tsarskoe Selo, the location of the tsar's summer residence at Alexander Palace, and it proved extremely popular with both royals and the public alike. The first long-distance railway, spanning 400 miles between St Petersburg and Moscow, was completed in 1851. This was known as the Nikolayev Railway, after Nicholas I, and the journey took 20 hours, with plush carriages for the gentry and basic third class for the majority of passengers: peasants (or serfs) from the countryside, many of whom bought tickets to seek a new life in the city. In the 1860s the Moscow–St Petersburg line was extended to Helsinki and other lines went to Warsaw, yet it was not until 1916, under Nicholas II, that the Trans-Siberian track from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean opened, a distance of 5,752 miles.