David Gilkey had 16 days to shoot a photo essay aboard the Trans-Siberian Railway. More than two weeks with little to do other than to gaze out the window and catch glimpses of passing towns and people; smoke trailing high above factories and fields quilted with snow.

Or so he thought.

Mr. Gilkey, an NPR photographer, had few chances to actually make pictures on his 6,000-mile rail journey, which began in Moscow and took him to the Pacific Ocean port of Vladivostok.

He was traveling with David Greene, NPR’s Moscow correspondent, for “Russia by Rail,” a three-part series that began being broadcast on Wednesday morning and runs through Friday. An interactive project featuring five different photo stories appears online to illustrate the adventure, which Mr. Greene called in his story “an epic, colorful, fascinating ordeal – perhaps just like Russia, itself.”

Mr. Gilkey, 46, has traveled the world on assignment for NPR, where he has worked for about four years as a photographer — for radio. He had never been to Russia, but soon noticed how the light fell across the landscape, the sun low along a usually cloudy horizon. Because they traveled in the fall, daylight was fleeting, from about 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The two men crossed seven time zones on the rails. “You go to bed at night in one time zone, and you wake up in the morning in another,” Mr. Gilkey said in a phone interview on Wednesday from Washington, D.C.

Their longest stretch aboard, with no stops, lasted more than two and a half days.

Travelers could not hop on and off the train as they pleased. Mr. Gilkey and Mr. Greene had to provide a detailed itinerary: where they were going to stop and what they hoped to do and see. They had a translator and a fixer, but rarely felt as if they were alone. “Trust me,” Mr. Gilkey said, “there were plenty of eyes.”

Even when he had permission to shoot, he found it unexpectedly difficult to use his camera. “I think every photographer has experienced being the center of attention because of the cameras,” he said. Many passengers seemed suspicious, and most stayed in their compartments, only moving to and from the dining car, where cameras weren’t allowed, to the restroom or outside for a cigarette.

“My grandiose idea of walking through the train and shooting pictures,” Mr. Gilkey said, lamenting, “it just wasn’t gonna happen.”

During stops in towns and cities — Yaroslavl, Ekaterinburg, Ulan-Ude, Khabarovsk and Vladivostok — he shot with a DSLR. But on board, he turned to his iPhone camera to reduce any unwanted attention. As the train pulled into stations, Mr. Gilkey shot from the window. When he could, he filed his photos to Instagram. Some of the images were shown on NPR’s photo blog, The Pictures Show.

David Gilkey/NPR

The finished project is a mix of new and old: the DSLR images and iPhone shots, as well as photos shot with a Polaroid Sun 660 camera and film from the Impossible Project – the company that created modern Polaroid film for traditional Polaroid cameras.

“In the age of digital cameras, you can say, ‘Oops, I’m overexposing,’ and look at it — this isn’t that,” Mr. Gilkey said. “You had to guess what you were doing and what you were going to get. But that’s also the magic of it.”

The Polaroids were meant to convey the iconic nature of the railway. The film has to develop in the dark, and the frigid air did not help. Mr. Gilkey would often take a picture, throw the Polaroid in his jacket pocket and hope for the best.

“Strange things started to happen to the images,” he said. “Now, that’s good and bad, because it did what we wanted to – it added a really unique perspective to things.”

Visit NPR to see the full set of images in “Russia by Rail” and hear David Greene’s report.

