Elektrichkaland Reloaded

I've been thinking today about how this project originated. If you like what were the ur-texts and the epiphanal moments?  I suppose I could psychoanlayse a certain fascination for trains all the way back to pre-birth (having travelled by train from the UK to Italy once in my mother's womb). A little more seriously, I may look back at a period when I was about 13 or 14 when I had an obsession with trains (which I then replaced with an interest in French literature after starting reading Sartre and Camus at the age of 15). But no the interest in elektrichka 's and peripheral locations surely developed in me much later. My fascination was always urban and even urban capitals (or, at least, highly significant cultural locations). Trieste, Lisbon, Buenos Aires, Salamanca, Barcelona, Odessa, and then Moscow and St. Petersburg in my late twenties.  Perhaps, I should start again. I remember certain sensations of a trip from Palermo to Messina (I think) and once catching a train fr...

  Last September I decided to take some trips on my local elektrichka away from Moscow and further into the depths of the Pod Moskovian hinterland. My first trip was the town of Noginsk. On a rather wet afternoon I took the train and set off to walk around the town. My first stop was the local history (kraevedchesky) museum. It seemed to have had quite a makeover and they were keen for me to watch this classy video specially projected onto the walls before I walked around the museum - they'd obviously spent a great deal on making the museum 'contemporary'. I then walked through the rooms of the museum. It had a fair deal to look at but I realised that there was nothing about the revolutionary period of Russia's history. I was curious about the reason why. The custodian told me that nothing much happened - in Noginsk (or what was then called Bogorodsk) there was a peaceful handover of power. I left only half satisfied and then made my way through the town. The writer Bor...