The gauge of history
A train journey north shows how Russia has evolved—and regressed
AT TWILIGHT on a clear early-autumn evening, Moscow’s Yaroslavsky railway station is an alluring place: all floodlit modernist turrets, gaudy tiles, folkloric decorations and a fairy-tale castle gate, like a triumphal arch, opening the way to the north. The playful station (vokzal in Russian) reflects the sparkling origin of the word in London’s Vauxhall, the 17th-century amusement gardens beside the Thames. Russia’s first railway line, built in 1837 by Franz von Gerstner, a Bohemian engineer, started in St Petersburg and ended in Pavlovsk, an English-style summer retreat for the Russian aristocracy.
This article appeared in the Christmas Specials section of the print edition under the headline “The gauge of history”
From the December 19th 2015 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents
Explore the editionDiscover more
Inside the last true political machine in America
What a town is like when one family runs everything
AI is stalking the last lions of Hollywood
The first actors to lose their jobs to artificial intelligence are four-legged
The truth about the passenger jet Putin’s men shot down
Investigating MH17, the crime that presaged the war in Ukraine
Meet the boffins and buccaneers drilling for hydrogen
The search is on for a clean fuel that could one day replace oil
The best sailors in the world
Why the vaka, vehicle for the extraordinary story of the peopling of Oceania, is enjoying a revival
Oceania’s wayfinding skills
The art of getting a vessel and its occupants from one place on a vast ocean to another