"It is time, it is high time"

So said Tsar Alexander III commissioning the Trans-Siberian railway in the 1890s.

And as we are about to tackle our own stretch of this, one of the world’s greatest rail journeys, I have to agree that after months of planning, weeks of list-making and hours of packing it is high time we were off. The Trans-Siberian isn’t the longest train journey, or the second longest (those honours go to Moscow to Pyongyang and Kiev to Vladivostock respectively) and we’re not even doing the longest route (diverting off the line which ends in Vladivostock at Lake Baikal to go through Mongolia before hopping over to Beijing), but we are taking the train the whole way from London so with over 10,000 km to cover it is high time we got going.