Ian Rambles
The train we took - known correctly as the Trans Manchurian rather than the Trans Siberian - is the longest scheduled train service in the world. Nine thousand kilometers over seven days from Beijing to Moscow.
We didn't ride all the way in one journey though, breaking the journey after three nights to disembark at Irkutsk and spend some time at Lake Baikal.
This part of the trip was one of the first sections that we planned and booked - if I was doing it again I think I would book the next lower class of sleeper - the hard sleeper - in the expectation of meeting more people.

Fiona's Journal
I have wanted to travel on the Trans-Siberian for as long as I can remember and now we have finally done it! It was both more and less of an experience than I expected.
As promised in all our guide books each carriage had its own coal-fired, stainless steel samovar from which we got boiling water to make instant coffee, hot chocolate or Chinese green tea and also to reconstitute our “Tub-Noodles” which are a larger, and infinitely superior, Asian version of Pot-Noodles.
At some of the longer station stops we were able to get off and buy bread and other supplies from kiosks or babushkas with baskets and we had stocked up with some supplies before leaving Beijing, and again in Irkutsk, so we fared pretty well during the journey.
The bunks were very comfortable with beautiful, quality cotton bed linen and we all slept well on the nights we were not disturbed. We read a great deal and played cards and I got my journal up to date and listened to music on my iPod. The days passed pleasantly but by the third day of each leg of the journey I was getting a bit stir crazy and was very glad to get off. The absence of a shower was mitigated by the fact that we had brought a washing up bowl with us (as advised by our excellent guide book) and I could lock myself in the loo at quiet times of the day and manage an all over wash.
The loos, by the way, were Western style and always clean, their only deficiency being that they flushed their contents directly out onto the track below. Not unreasonably, they were locked for 20 or 30 minutes each time we approached a station which might have been a problem for anyone with traveller's diarrhoea!
We crossed the border, from China into Russia, in the early hours of September 8th and were first woken by Chinese customs officers at Manchuria station about 3.30am. The Chinese officer, who inspected our passports and our faces with unsmiling intensity and much incomprehensible (to us) muttering to her junior side-kick, was a petite and bespectacled 4' 10 in her high heels. She wore an immaculate green, military uniform with much gleaming brass but somehow failed to inspire real fear.
Once over the border, and stopped again at the Russian station of Zabaikalsk, we faced the Russian customs officer who was a very different kettle of fish. She was a 6' blonde Amazon of a woman, in tight fitting green suit, stockings and stiletto heels. She was brusque, even by Russian standards (and Russian women have perfected the art of brusqueness), and unsmiling and made me extremely nervous. We will forever think of her as “Hot Lips” which all fans of M*A*S*H will understand.
Once the whole customs rigmarole was complete, we were turfed out onto the platform and our carriages were towed off to a siding to have their wheels changed. This, is perhaps the most bizarre feature of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Russia's rail system runs on a 10cm wider gauge track than China's and their solution to this problem is to change all 144 wheels (36 bogeys) on 18 carriages while their passengers kill time for 6 hours on a station platform (or in the bleak, Soviet-style waiting room). We were finally on our way again at 3.30pm so in total the border crossing took 12 hours. Would it not be simpler and more customer friendly just to transfer us all to another train? This is just one of many examples, of Chinese and Russian ways of doing things, that leave me perplexed.
I had expected the train to be full of back-packers of all nationalities and had envisioned meeting lots of interesting fellow travellers in the dining car for multilingual, vodka-fuelled conversations about our shared experiences. In fact, almost all the other passengers were either Russian or Chinese and were not recreational travellers like us. They were using the train as a straightforward means of transport, some for work purposes, some returning from a holiday, some visiting relatives. From Beijing to Irkutsk we were the only people speaking English apart from a group of Chinese students, heading for a University somewhere West of Moscow, who wanted to practice their English. They were lovely and we managed some limited conversations with them but other than that we talked to one another! The fact that the Russian dining car was too expensive for us to use more than once, didn't help our sociability either. Once, I tried going there and ordering just a cup of tea, rather than a full meal, and I got kicked out!
Siberia seemed to go on forever and was extraordinarily beautiful, at first rolling golden grasslands and then endless miles of stunning birch forest. I was hypnotised by the massed ranks of slim, straight, silvery-white trunks topped by clouds of pixellated green and yellow foliage, scrolling past our window and punctuated by sudden explosions of fiery autumn colours from a clump of maples.
The villages and small towns are infrequent, often 50 or 100 km apart, and most appear to be reached only by the railway and dirt roads. Once, I saw an elderly man pushing a shopping trolley along a muddy track and I hadn't seen any sign of human habitation for at least 30km and didn't see any for a further 20km!
The houses are wooden and painted in bright colours, with steep roofs of corrugated, galvanised steel. They are very pretty and each one has a good-sized, wooden-fenced garden around it – most of them beautifully cultivated with orderly rows of vegetables and fruit bushes and flowers. Most of them had a small wooden hut with a chimney (often smoking) at the bottom of the garden, which I assume was the banya such as the one we used in Listvianka, and they almost all had a huge stack of neatly chopped firewood ready for the long winter. The threat of that, all too imminent, harsh season was almost tangible in the sharp nip in the air when we alighted at a station and the way the Siberian people were already wrapping themselves in hats and shawls and fur-lined boots. To me, passing through in a warm train carriage, the homes of these people looked idyllic but I wonder what it is really like when the temperature drops to minus 30 or even 40. A minority of the houses were in a pretty dilapidated state, with overgrown gardens and a minimal supply of firewood, and some of these were definitely still inhabited. Would these people even survive a Siberian winter, I wondered?
The second leg of the journey, from Irkutsk to Moscow, was still dominated by birch forests but small towns were more frequent and reached by paved roads, cars and trucks ceased to be a rarity and there there were industrial plants of various sorts with teams of men at work. On this train the boys shared their cabin with a Rasputinesque character called Lance. He is South African and an intrepid, even compulsive, traveller who was making his way home to Cape Town but not in any great hurry. He had just been offered a six month contract on a Newspaper in Jacarta and so was about to make a major U-turn in his direction of travel! He was a very interesting man and we spent a lot of time talking to him. He was remarkably good humoured about being landed with three children whose parents were skiving in the cabin next door! The other two bunks in our cabin were occupied by a sequence of different Russian passengers doing shortish journeys, mostly just going to work.
The provodnitsas, female carriage attendants, are stern and rather scary – like the old fashioned hospital matrons – and almost universally blonde. They keep their carriage spotless and count every pillow case and towel before you leave and chastise lax parents,that's us,for not dressing their children warmly enough. Despite the considerable quantities of vodka being drunk by some of the Russian men, I cannot imagine any disorderly behaviour being tolerated for an instant!

Arthur's Log:
Most of the first day was spent writing my log, gazing out the window and talking to the occasional passer-by. Outside the window pillars every 100m count down 10-1 then there is a big sign showing how many km it is to Moscow. It started at 9001 when we left. It was 7885 by the time I went to bed.

Today we only did 29 km between waking up and going to sleep. I woke up and we were stopped. By the time I got up customs had got to our carriage. This very very petite chinese girl tried to look all serious and intimidating - but to be honest, I have been more intimidated by hamsters.
So that was all smooth. We then we crossed the border into Russia and stopped again. Russian customs got to our carriage, there stood a 6'7" (in her stilletoes anyway) striking bottle blond with a look that would make babies cry. (slight overstatment towards the end) She did get us all the way through customs by the end but with out losing her stern look. We were stopped in the station for near 6 hours in total because the Russians run on a different width of track. The train disapeared in two halves as they changed the wheels.
The small town we stopped in was totally surreal. It looked like a bombed out set of war time flats but there was clearly people living there. The only people we saw also looked like they had stepped out of a black and white movie. No one was wearing slobby track suits or base ball caps, they were all dressed up like they were going to a wedding. By the time we got back on the train they were still coupling up the last carrages so it was 6 by the time we left and we barely went far at all before Iwent to sleep.

We are back on the Trans Siberian after a while in Irkutsk. We're living off bread and cheese. The food in the dining car is good but in small portions and rather expensive meaning you have to go 3 times a day to be properly fed. Again the day was spent gazing out the window, writing diary, typing diary and reading up on Russian history.

At 1777 km we crossed from asia into europe and there is a big monument showing it. At the last second before I got a shot of it a train came past going the other way, when it had left I got the crappest of crap shots ever, which was somehow worse than not getting one at all.

There was a stone dead drunk in the dining carrage, swaying, retching and eventually collapsing on the floor.

Its been good reading and watching the kilometers slowly wind down out of the window. We stopped at a station and I saw the drunk from last night on the platform. He was as white as a ghost but I just found it unbelievable that he could be awake at 11am the next day! Mind you, they do say Russian vodka leaves you with a clear head the next day.

We arrived in Moscow and got a ride to the hotel.