Hawkers on Electrichkas.

An electrichka is a suburban train, one that is powered by electric cables hanging above the tracks. They deliver vast quantities of fresh meat into the gaping maw of the city every morning, and then they cart away the drained carcasses each evening.

They also take people out to dacha land: on the weekends they are full of old ladies carrying gardening implements, seeds, and half dead plants in cardboard boxes. Sometimes there are drunken men on them too, standing in the gaps between the wagons, propping the doors open with empty beer bottles and smoking up a storm.

Our Electrichka runs from Kursky station, about 40 kilometes away to Electrougli. IT is the Moscow Petushki train, made famous by a book http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow-Petushki published in the late soviet period. It’s a standard green or blue painted suburban train with plain wooden seats 3 deep either side of an aisle that is filled with people’s legs and bags of random crap. If you get a seat you are lucky, if you don’t you’d better have a chest full of medals, one leg and be an 89 year old woman with an intimidating glare if you want anyone to give theirs up for you. Electrichka etiquette is a fairly brutal business.

 And on these trains they have hawkers, a constant stream of tired looking sales people who enter each wagon, stand by the door then do their sales pitch to largely indifferent crowd. They are selling pens and magazines, anti mosquito devices, ice cream and all that crap you used to see in the back of cheap magazines in the 70s that you could send away for to the acme cut your own hair company. They have complicated mirrors that seem to reflect the whole room from 27 angles at once, red plastic torches that are powered by your own fear and hooks that expand into clothes racks where you can hang a family of 73 Tadjiks for the night. Some of them have a spiel they have memorized, tales of wonder involving people saved from despair inducing inconvenience by pliers that have 300 extra attachments and a built in GPS, or a revolutionary new directory of every address in the former soviet union where you can swap your old underpants for fertilizer and scissors.

 A few bored people buy this crap, and if you did about 200 wagons a day you might just be able to pay the rent come month’s end, but it is dispiriting work.

Previously there would be drunk musicians, howling songs of prison woe to the accompaniment of a wheezing accordion, sometimes even a pair of gypsy kids. one of them singing hideously out of tune while the other plunked hopelessly on a 2 stringed guitar.

 More than anything it is entertainment for bored commuters and, as the years pass, their numbers dwindle. Time was you could see three or four hawkers lined up at the wagon’s end waiting to take their turn, Poor people selling shit to other poor people, depressing but mildly diverting: now pretty much everyone on the train is listening to headphones and takes no notice.