W-wa Jeziorki: The Big Red Train Ride by Eric Newby

Monday, 24 August 2026

The Big Red Train Ride by Eric Newby

My appetite whetted by Paul Theroux, I knew the next book I'd have to reach for would be The Big Red Train Ride, Eric Newby's account of a Moscow-Nakhodka journey on the Trans-Siberian Express. Why, it even name-checks Theroux on the front cover, with this quote from him under the title – “The best kind of travel book... it awakened frosty demons in me, and memories I had thought forgotten”.

Theroux travelled from east to west from Nakhodka to Moscow on the penultimate leg of his London-Tokyo-London train journey, whilst Newby focused on the Trans-Siberian alone, travelling west to east. Theroux's journey was in December 1973; Newby's in May 1977. The Soviet Union was not yet obviously on its last legs. Indeed, in geopolitical terms it was approaching the height of its power. Yet the symptoms of what would later be called the Era of Stagnation are obvious in both books – shortages, shabbiness, endemic drunkenness, petty authoritarianism and the immense gulf between official rhetoric and everyday reality.

The sheer size of Russia comes across in the distances between stations. Take Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk. One would think, you know, two neighbouring Siberian cities somewhere along the line. Yet they lie 1,088 km apart; Przemyśl by the Polish-Ukrainian border and Świnoujście on the Baltic border with Germany – diagonal opposite corners of Poland – are a mere 994 km apart by rail. Lake Baikal is 636km in length – further than the distance between Kołobrzeg and Rzeszów in a straight line. And even today, this is not a fast train, no Shinkansen or TGV. It's a week however you do it. It is worth watching a YouTube video of the Trans-Siberian Express from recent years; it retains its flagship status (the train is still called the Rossiya) but it resembles modern Polish trains inside, and the stations have had a makeover. However, Google Street View shows that away from the clean station buildings, Siberia's roads are potholed, people buy vegetables from grubby kiosks and live in wooden huts with outside toilets. [Incidentally, this post from 2019 is based on my road atlas of the USSR from the late 1980s.]

In Soviet times, Vladivostok was a closed city, so Western travellers entering or leaving the country for Japan would do so through the port of Nakhodka; this required changing trains at Khabarovsk. Today, travelling in Russia as a Westerner one runs the risk of being imprisoned on some fatuous charge and becoming a bargaining chip for Putin. This journey itself is not on my bucket list. Indeed, I don't even have a bucket list. If I want to see trees whizzing past a train window I can go from Warka on the Radom line down to Kruszyna for about 20 km of this, short enough not to get boring.

Although the two books cover much the same geographical and historical ground, they do so in completely different ways. Eric Newby offers more objective insights, whilst Theroux's book is more subjective. About the Trans-Siberian Express, the railway itself, its place in Russian and Soviet history and culture, I have learned vastly more from The Big Red Train Ride. If Theroux is an impressionist with a broad brush, Newby is very much the details man. Theroux's primarily interest is the people he encounters on trains; Newby is interested in the people, the train, the track, the stations, the landscape beyond the window and the history buried underneath it.

I read the book accompanied by three sources: Атлас железных дорог СССР (Railway Atlas of the USSR, 1988, which I bought in Stanford's brilliant map shop on Long Acre in London in the early '90s), Google Maps Street View, and a YouTube video, 164 Hours on the World's Longest Railway Journey. Eric Newby details his journey, mentioning many of the larger stations along the way; I would find them in the atlas, then jump in to Street View to see how they look today.

Eric Newby (1919-2006) had a fascinating war record. He fought with the Black Watch regiment in North Africa, then joined the fledgling Special Boat Section, and was captured by the Italians during a raid on Sicily in 1942. He escaped from a PoW camp in northern Italy and was assisted in avoiding recapture by Wanda Škof, a young Slovene woman, whom he married after the war, and who accompanied him on many of his travels.

Their journey across the Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian Express reminded me of our Polish parish youth trips to communist Poland at the same time; everything was invigilated by the Party, its people were with us, watching us, we had to visit aluminium foundries and car factories, we had to sit through propaganda films. And so it was with Newby, his wife, and Otto the photographer who snapped the journey; Misha, “the man from the Agency” was with them all the while, telling them what they couldn't photograph (most things of interest) and lining up meetings with chairmen of collective farms and boring visits to cable factories.

Below: taken from a Soviet railway atlas from 1943, the page showing the end of the Trans-Siberian Railway, with Vladivostok and Nakhodka visible. To view full size, right-click on the image to open in new window, then right-click again and use the 'enlarge' tool.