World's weirdest railtour?

[Steamport Southport]

25 minutes ago, HonestTom said:

I'd love to visit Pyongyang out of morbid curiosity. Trouble is, I think I'd have trouble resisting the urge to stir things up. "Hey, there's that guy again, do you think he's following us?" "How come there are no photos of Kim Il-Sung's other side?" "So, Kim Yo-Jong, hot or not?" Either I'd "disappear" or my guide would get sent to re-education camp. Or both.

 

Erm.

 

I'll just leave this here....

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Warmbier

[Tony_S]

Just before the Covid outbreak a friend was due to set off on a similar tour but omitting the Korean bit. He was going to leave his job before departing. Fortunately he hadn’t resigned before Covid travel restrictions were in place. If he had gone earlier he could have been stranded somewhere. He seemed quite excited about the places he was planning to visit and the various train services. He was starting from London not Wigan though. 

[HonestTom]

A friend of mine went to China some years back to photograph the dying embers of industrial steam there. Which isn't strange for us, but the locals thought this Westerner photographing what they considered obsolete industrial plant machinery was very suspicious. And since neither party spoke the other's language, it was very difficult to convey the nature of the situation.

[Chops]

In 1964, at the hottest part of the Cold War, our dear father, a professor of Russian History, working towards his tenure, gathered my brother, sister, wife, and me, for a week's holiday in Moscow. We traveled under Canadian passports. Why he chose to bring along the entire family to this Prison State? I can only retrospectively guess that either he was very naive, or used us as a sort of human shield. It would be one thing to imprison one Canadian, (American by birth, who served as a translator in the Pentagon in and around the time the Rosenbergs were getting fried), but another to imprison an entire family, one supposes. Ostensibly, he was collecting information for a book on the Cossacks, which he eventually published in 1982, and, well, let's just say that it didn't set any sales records. 

 

Even at the tender age of four, I have numerous and distinct memories of our brief sojourn. Such as the time when mother and the children were shaken down by a couple of Moscow cops wondering what the Hell a foreigner was strolling about their fair city, in 1964? After that, we stayed in the hotel while Dad went to the library. Also, a commotion when my brother sneezed while visiting Lenin's Tomb. That was a sacrilege. 

 

But most of all, was taking the train out of the USSR to Helsinki. There were two classes, a "hard" and a "soft." We traveled by "soft," which consisted of this iron like fabric with little no-slip designs, and all of it the color of mud. But whilst boarding, in the central train station, looking up at this enormous beast of a locomotive, that imprinted on my young four year old mind, and the awe stayed with me ever since. 

 

Model railroading is folk art. We take a memory, typically embedded with steel rail, and we go about recreating a three dimensional experience of a time, a place, a memory, or even a feeling that we might communicate that experience with others. This is mine:

 

The locomotives are of Italian heritage, but closely resemble the blurry images of memory. Nothing here resembles much of anything, except water color memories of a youth in England, feeling both strangely displaced, also feeling strangely at home. All my descendants migrated from Greater Britain in the 1800's. 

 

The next video I have in mind is to create a series of plain cardboard boxes which will simply cover the existing structures. They will be painted gray, to simulate the poured concrete popular in Soviet architecture, and have various Orwellian signs such as "Big Brother is Watching You," and "The Ministry of Love," and what not. Might be fun. Lucky to live in a country where this can be done, although given the current state of affairs, it is not certain this will last another two hundred years. 

 

The observations of some of the other posters in this thread, about Syria, and so on, are most interesting. The average guy is frequently just a hardworking stiff trying to keep hearth and home together, while living under breathtaking oppression. It is the history of the world that most common folk are pleasant enough, but a few sociopaths skillfully rise to power and keep the rest of the people struggling not to be seen or heard. 

[AndyB]

I'm assuming it's a one way trip as most people would be so bowled over by seeing these workers' paradises that they'd want to stay for good.