Underground

Moscow

Fourth class down here wasn't so bad, a bit like being on a bog standard bus for nine hours, only with a bar car that sold beer out of one of those ice cream fridges. It was half empty so just about bearable. On arriving at the Leningrad station I thought the train had turned round in the night because it's exactly the same as the Moscow station in St Petersburg. Nothing like Soviet central planning.

If there's one thing the Soviets got right it's the metro. Moscow's probably the first city I've seen with an underground to better the unfairly criticised Tube. Trains here come every two minutes, the palacial stations are worth visiting in themselves, and it's great fun going down to the super-deep lines (deep so they could act as bomb shelters in the event of nuclear war) on the long escalators because they whip down there a third faster than the escalators in London. You could have hours of fun going up and down, and given the difficulty in reading the cyrillic station names that's just as well because you usually have to.