But once she realized that I was her only foreign passenger she became almost maternal, doling out tea bags, mineral water and candy from her closet-size kiosk next to the bathroom. At sunset, to add to the train’s living room ambience, she hauled out curtains on long rods that she fitted over the corridor windows.

THE BAM doesn’t offer all the plush comforts of the Trans-Siberian. After all, there’s hardly any tourism in the BAM region. This line was built for freight and people who have business in the wilderness. The dozen cars on the first leg of our trip were half-filled with workers and managers destined for Siberia’s lumber camps and oil and gas fields, as well as people working on the train line itself. As such, it is more of a utilitarian train, with a nothing-fancy dining car that served essentially as a round-the-clock bar, a couple of packed third-class wagons with clothes draped across bunk beds crowding dormitory-like spaces, and a few second-class cars with four comfortable berths in separate minivan-size cabins.

Once I’d unrolled my mattress on my second-class bunk and unfolded the crisp linens, I felt well taken care of as the train gently rocked me to sleep beneath the moonlit forest that cast dramatic shadows across the walls.

Even though the BAM is a populist ride, it was as punctual and rode as gently as any train I’d been on in the United States. Czarist and Soviet Russia had always been proud of its impressively sprawling yet well-managed railroad system, and the tradition survives in the immaculate uniforms of the attendants who seemed to be constantly cleaning and polishing this big wilderness machine. Despite constant stream, hill and mountain crossings we never spilled a drop from our Russian tea glasses with metal handles balanced on the table. “Amtrak should only be this smooth,” Yulia said. And yet we would be riding over 2,000 bridges and some two dozen tunnels in areas so rugged that construction material often had to be floated inland on barges. The remoteness of this country, and the limited train traffic coming through here, means that trains often run along only a single track, which, at steep curves we could see trailing behind us into the unkempt tundra like a ball of yarn.

After our second night, our train stopped at the hamlet of Novy Uoyan, where for 15 minutes, we stepped out into the brisk Siberian air and bought a bag of dried omul — local troutlike fish — and a jar of garden-grown raspberry jam from a scrum of kerchiefed women huddled around the station gate. The building was a block-size behemoth with a sculptural roof that dwarfed the half-dozen concrete buildings that made up the rest of Novy Uoyan.

I asked a station attendant if there were many bears here.

“All over,” he said. “During the spring you can see them from the track all the time. Sometimes we get calls from railroad workers along the tracks to help rescue them when they get cornered.” He smiled tightly. “Occasionally we get there and find nothing but blood.”