Vladivostok

city · earth

The Pacific terminus, and the reason the Trans-Siberian exists in the shape it does — a naval port that had to be reachable overland from European Russia. Construction of the eastern end was inaugurated here in May 1891 by the Tsarevich Nicholas, who laid the foundation stone of the station; the station opened on 2 November 1893 and the present building dates from 1912, in a deliberate seventeenth-century Russian revival style that answers Yaroslavsky station at the Moscow end. On the platform stands a stele marking 9288, the kilometre distance to Moscow, installed in 1996. The city is on the Sea of Japan, not in Siberia proper: the Journey's two great regions are the ground crossed, not the destination.