The Far East is, according to the navigator Johann Ritter von Krusenstern, "fantastically remote from the capitals of Russian land" both geographically and historically. The territory always demanded a huge amount of attention economically, diplomatically and militarily. Every major event here, be it the founding of a new city, building highways or maintaining relationships with China, Mongolia and Japan, is a key moment in the country's history. The Far East's romantic aura, embedded in the imaginations of the first Russian explorers, offers striking natural and climatic diversity, making travel here a series of arresting visual impressions. Residents of the European part of Russia can't imagine that Lake Baikal is only the halfway mark on the Trans-Siberian's journey to the Pacific Ocean. If fact, the Far Eastern Railroad is 5,990 km long, not including Sakhalin. The Baikal Amur Mainline to the north and the Trans-Siberian to the south, each of which was a major construction achievement for the country, stretch across the Far East. There are railroad border crossings at Grodekovo and Khasan and stations at the key seaports of Vanino, Sovietskaya Gavan, Vladivostok and Nakhodka. A unique railroad also connects the cities of Sakhalin. That railroad, built by the Japanese, has a gauge half a meter narrower than the standard Russian gauge and connects 35 stations over a distance of 804.9 km.

This lake district is often like an illustration from a national fairytale. The Northwest was formed quite recently, only some ten to fifteen thousand years ago. The Valdai Glacier came down from Scandinavia, flattening all elevations, filling in depressions with sediment and moving huge boulders, pushing stone onto ridges. Then it melted way, filling the basins of countless lakes with water. The Northwest is the cradle of the Russian state. It is home tyo Izborsk, which witnessed the Varagians' arrival, Veliky Novgorod, the western outpost of Pskov, and, finally, St. Petersburg. It is also the birthplace of the first Russian railroad, the Tsarskoselskaya that linked Petersburg to the ruling dynasty's residences outside the city. Not all passengers realize that, when travelling by train from Moscow to Petersburg, they aren't on the Moscow Railroad, but the October Railroad, with its high speed trains that link the northern capital with Moscow. The Northwest offers rail travelers some of the most interesting and exciting routes in the country, including to Moscow, Murmansk and lines to Khibiny or the wilderness of West Karelia and the unique railroad sanctuaries of Seliger and Lodeinoe Pole, where ancient equipment is preserved in working order.

The North Caucasus Railroad brings together the most colorful, multilingual, mountainous, ecologically diverse and alluring region in Russia, and is simultaneously Russia's most politically complex area. From the Azov Sea to the Caspian, from Rostovon-the-Don to the Black Sea coast, the railroad passes through a huge territory that boasts large ports at Novorossiysk, Tuapse, Taganrog and Temryuk, famous resorts in Sochi, Krasnaya Polyana and Kavkazskie Mineralnye Vody, unique natural reserves of global significance in the Kavkazsky, Teberdinsky and Severo-Osetinsky parks, and, finally, hot spots and pockets of ethnic tension where operations require particular efforts and responsibility. Despite the fact that we took three expeditions over several years and seasons, we were only able to reveal a small piece of the secret of the Caucasus. Logistics here were extremely complex because the terrain, and railroads with it, cover a vast mountain chain. We decided to travel, whenever possible, away from the main line along small branch lines, sometimes winding their way far away, past the feet of mountains and into canyons. From there we'd abandon the train and, like sailors landing on shore, went on multiday tours by foot, horse and car.

The great Volga's path has always been one of the main trade arteries in Russia, and long before the construction of the Trans-Siberian, railroad companies offered competition to the famed Volga river merchants. So it's not surprising that even today it's possible to travel the length of the great Russian river without leaving the tracks, never once going down to the water. Several railroads replace one another along the length of the great Volga's Path. The October, where the Volga begins among the Valdai lakes, leads to the Moscow Railroad that connects the Volga, Moscow and Oka rivers along the swampy forests of the Meshchera lowlands. It then links with the Gorky line, which travels down the river to the Nizhegorodsk kremlin and further to Kazan's. The Kuibishev Railroad then follows an ancient trail along the Samarskaya Luka and Zhiguli mountains. The main route of Volga Railway goes from Saratov to Volgograd, features spurs and lateral lines that were laid along the front during the battle of Stalingrad. And finally, the railroad takes the traveler along the Volga delta, past the Astrakhan Reserve's flocks of swans and pelicans that number in the thousands. Just a little to the east the rail ties are snow white from salt deposits, and the locomotive turns in toa ship, sailing along the mirrored surface of Lake Baskunchak.

A train, pulling out of Labytnangi at the beginning of May, crosses mountains in the Arctic Urals in -35°C weather, through blizzards and snowstorms. Two days later it emerges into the Russian midlands in full spring bloom. In the Arctic, reindeer herds cross the railroad tracks, while along the Gornozavodsk Railroad in the Central Urals, the train passes through stations that still bear the names of ancient iron works and mills. In the Southern Urals, herds of Bashkir horses and haystacks reminiscent of a nomad's black cap can be seen from the window of a train. The Urals are a vast phenomenon, and we had to make several trips from north to south during various times of the year in order to capture at least part of this amazing world. The Urals mountain chain stretches north to south over more than a thousand kilometers. It passes through the Russian industrial heartland, areas rich in natural resources and talented craftsmen, and acts as the symbolic border between Europe and Asia. This border, according to the great Russian geographer Peter Semnov-Tyan-Shansky, "serves both in a physical and economic sense as the division between two parts of the world that are connected by close, indestructible ties."

When in Siberia, a traveler feels as though he's falling into another dimension. The scale of distances jumps by a matter of degree: if in European Russia cities are dozens of kilometers from each other. As possible to travel three or four hundred kilometers without seeing any sign of people. From time to time, a railway station or the silhouette of an old building that used to service the Trans-Siberian will sail by, but the rest of the landscape is deceptively monolithic. Siberia is a territory of ten million square kilometers, bigger than Canada, the world's second largest country after Russia. Typically, it's imagined as an endless land of taiga. But Siberia is a colossally diverse landscape. As the knocking wheels fly and the traveler adjusts to the Siberian scale, sublime and lazy vistas open. There are valleys and swamps in the West Siberian plains, the mountain ranges of Sayan, Altai and Kuznetsky Alatau, taiga blanketing the mountains and lowlands of Krasnoyarsk territory and East Siberia. Along the endless steppe of Khakassy and southern Siberia, once upon a time the Irtyshsk line of Cossack fortresses defended the country from nomadic Kyrgyz tribes along the Russian empire's edge. Siberia was considered the end of the earth for many ages, and the history of this area's development, starting with Yermak opening the path for Russians across the Urals, is connected with the colonization of nomadic tribes.

The Baikal-Amur Mainline is one of the world's most contradictory railroads and simultaneously one of its most exciting adventures. Its history is well known to all of us in one way or another: the Komsomol shock workers are familiar heroes, while the no less heroic prisoners and forced laborers are much less widely known. During several trips along the Far East and East Siberian railroads, local administrations didn't understand our desire to visit the BAM. Voices full of doubt asked, "What will you do there? There's nothing to see. It's just a pair of rails in a frozen wasteland." But this pair of rails shattered all our expectations. We traveled the length of the BAM from Vanino on the Pacific coast to Taishet, where the railroad joins the Trans-Siberian. There are few places where it's possible to see such a significant, piercing testament to the force of human will as with this pair of rails stretching 4,324 km. The BAM passes across seven mountain ranges, 11 large rivers, 2,230 large and small bridges and through 200 stations, including over 60 cities and towns. Eight tunnels were dug for this railroad, including the North Muisky tunnel, which is Russia's longest. To this day it's deb ted whether the effort was worth it and if the country really needs the BAM. After traveling along the Baikal-Amur Mainline, this question seems no less absurd than the question of whether the country needs the richly endowed and still underutilized spaces of East Siberia and the Far East.

Lake Baikal is one of the most famous Russian brands, a symbol of far-flung travel that reflects not only Russia, but nature's pristine beauty. Baikal holds 20% of the world's fresh water, is clear enough to drink, and offers hundreds of kilometers of coastline untouched by human hands. Any of its cliffs, bays, stones and forests taken alone would be a landmark and place of pilgrimage anywhere in the world. Every step near Baikal gives travelers a mass of grand impressions.

Transbaikal is perhaps one of the most mysterious regions in the country, equally distant from the west and east, from the familiar spaces of Siberia and Russia's outposts on the Pacific. This area was and remains one of the most unfamiliar and intriguing destinations in the world. Transbaikal's unbelievable "ultra-continental" climate, wealth, low population density and the wild virgin territory of its taiga, mountains and steppes made it an irresistible attraction to newcomers, scientists, industrialists and adventurers, challenging them with virtually insurmountable difficulties. Arguably, the advance into the Wild East is comparable to the taming of the Wild West in America. The Transbaikal section of the Trans-Siberian, formerly known as the Amur Railroad, was the most difficult section to build on the line. Not coincidentally, it was the last section to be finished, on the eve of the revolution. To this day, the Trans-Siberian preserves some archaic features in the Transbaikal region: the railroad here hasn't been leveled and follows the bends of the rivers, making vertigo-inspiring loops. Bridges and other infrastructure made of hewn stone continue to serve as they have for almost one hundred years. And if the Trans-Siberian can be called a miracle of human performance, then it is the Transbaikal where this miracle is presented in all its glory. An expedition through Transbaikal could only be done on the railroad, and therefore this section of the exhibit is the most authentic, a true hymn to the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

Railroads spread from Moscow like rays of light, continuing the radial layout of the capital. Historically, Moscow was not only the hub of all possible lines of communication, but also the border of important geographic and climatic zones. Travelling by railroad through the central region is a fascinating pastime. The traveler easily passes from taiga forests north of the capital to the vast swampy meadows of Meshchera to the border of the forest steppe south of Moscow and further west, to the dense remains of a great forest belt. Five rail lines - the Moscow, October, Gorky, Northern and Southeastern - form the spokes on this region transportation hub. Travelers can use high-speed trains on the most popular routes, from Moscow to St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Tula, Yaroslavl or Smolensk. Improbably, it's also possible to journey just a little way from the capital and find an isolated rail line such as Kuvshinovo-Ostashkov in Seliger or Vladimir-Gus-Khrstalnyi in Meshchera. Everywhere amazing discoveries await - old estates, springs of Russian culture, and national parks and reserves, arresting in their authenticity and dishevelment despite their proximity to the capital megalopolis.