The railroad is perhaps the single most life-changing innovation of the last 200 years, since it enabled demographic mobility on a previously unthinkable scale. In Russia, the problems associated with the construction of a railroad were magnified by the vast distances, harsh climate and poor maintenance of highways. In Alexander Pushkin's novel in poetry, "Yevgeny Onegin," the Larin family takes seven days to cover a distance of about 500 kilometers!

Pushkin was killed in 1837, the same year that Russia's first railroad was constructed between St. Petersburg and Tsarskoye Selo. The reactions of contemporary poets to the new form of transport were uniformly ecstatic: "Pillars of smoke, the steamer's boiling, everyone in eager anticipation, all our Orthodox people are joyous and triumphant," Nikolai Kukolnik wrote in his 1840 "Traveling Song."

A couple of decades later, when the novelty had somewhat worn off, poet Nikolai Nekrasov took a harsher stance. In a long poem from 1864 titled "Railroad," he described the inhumane conditions during the construction of the Moscow to St. Petersburg line, which was completed in 1851. Nekrasov is often scoffed at as a "social poet," but even when he preached a social message, such as in "Railroad," he produced texts of striking poetic power.

Leo Tolstoy made the train a symbol of brutal and inhuman force which ultimately crushes Anna Karenina, the heroine of his eponymous novel, which was completed in 1877. Likewise, Sergei Yesenin contrasted soulless trains and tractors with foals and calves in his poems.

Railroads were a favorite subject of Soviet poetry after World War II, when their association with transportation to gulag camps weakened. Poems about the romanticism of youth and the tilling of the virgin lands often depicted groups of young specialists traveling by train, singing to a guitar. Even one of the botched grandiose projects of the late Soviet era, BAM -- a railroad connecting Lake Baikal and the Amur River via Eastern Siberia -- inspired some decent lyrics.

The significance of the railroad was not lost on Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who returned to Russia from exile in 1994, crossing the country by train from east to west. I would like to hope that in the future, railroads will continue to serve as sources of literary inspiration, rather than of mortal danger.