A day later, the train will head to Omsk, Novosibirsk, the most populous city in Siberia. Next up is the towering mountains of Krasnoyarsk and the eastern Siberian city of Angarsk.

There may have been a point, somewhere back in the middle of the last century, where the train seemed to have lost the remainder of whatever swagger it once had. The aircraft had entered stage-left as ...