Al Jazeera – Sept 12, 2023
A luxurious yet battle-ready massive green train has rolled across North Korea’s border into Russia carrying leader Kim Jong Un to a meeting with President Vladimir Putin.
Since taking power in 2011, Kim has made seven international trips and crossed the border into South Korea twice, using a train emblazoned with a yellow strip for the majority of his overseas travel.
Here’s what we know about the North Korean leader’s preferred mode of transport:
Why the train?
From his 2018 trip to Beijing to a 2019 summit in Hanoi with then-US President Donald Trump, Kim has used his train for many high-profile visits.
A love of locomotives runs in the family: Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il, was known for his fear of flying, limiting his foreign trips to overland journeys to China and Russia by armoured train.
The elder Kim once took his train from Pyongyang to Moscow, a marathon 20,000km (12,400-mile) round trip in 2001 that took about 24 days.
According to the official North Korean account, Kim Jong Il was on a train for a “field guidance” visit in 2011 when he died of a heart attack.
The carriages used by Kim Jong Il and by his own father and predecessor, North Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung, are now on display at the Kumsusan Memorial Palace in Pyongyang, where both leaders’ bodies lie in state.
How safe is it?
The Kims reportedly have several almost identical trains made by a factory in Pyongyang.
Nicknamed the “Moving Fortress”, Kim’s current train has bulletproof windows and reinforced walls and floors to protect against explosives, according to South Korea’s Ministry of Unification.
“It is equipped with attack weapons and a helicopter for escape in case of emergency,” the ministry said.
To bolster onboard security measures, Pyongyang in the past has asked for guards to be deployed along the tracks, as it did for Kim’s Hanoi visit.
How fast is the train?
Because of the weight of all the extra equipment, the train moves at only 55 kilometres per hour (35 miles per hour). It has to haul 90 carriages lined top to bottom with heavy armour along with all the items packed inside.
The Moving Fortress is an excruciatingly slow mode of transport. Kim’s trip to Vietnam to meet Trump was 65 hours. But the train has key advantages over an aircraft, chiefly offering more flexibility in unforeseen circumstances, including attacks.
If an aircraft with Kim on board were attacked, “survival chances are significantly reduced”, said the Unification Ministry. It is also “more challenging to predict train itineraries”.
How luxurious is it?
Images of the train’s interior supplied by the state news agency KCNA have shown Kim sitting with other passengers in long rows of pink leather chairs. Some of its cars are designed to carry luxury vehicles for ground transport at the destination.
Konstantin Pulikovsky, a Russian official, once travelled on the train with Kim’s father in eastern Russia in 2001. In his book Orient Express, Pulikovsky recounted some of the fare on offer, including fresh lobster, pork barbeque and cases of fine French wine. Young women introduced as “lady conductors” sang songs for the passengers.
“It was possible to order any dish of Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and French cuisine,” Pulikovsky wrote.
Kim Jong Il had several luxurious trains equipped with reception halls, conference rooms and high-tech communication facilities, South Korean media reports said.
North Korea to Russia by train
After departing North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, Kim’s train was reportedly seen in the Russian city of Ussuriysk north of Vladivostok. He then boarded a new locomotive and continued travelling on the Trans-Siberian Railway to Khabarovsk or possibly Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Bloomberg News reported.
The 680km (320-mile) journey from Pyongyang to Vladivostok takes about 20 hours.
Does Kim ever fly?
Kim, 39, has made seven previous overseas trips: four to China and one each to Russia, Vietnam and Singapore. The latter two were for summits with Trump. He has also crossed the border into South Korea twice.
Unlike his father, he is not scared to fly. He flew on three of these trips – two to China and one to Singapore – and has even been shown at the controls of an aircraft in 2014 state media footage.
His private plane, which flew him to China in 2018, is known as Chammae-1 after the national bird of North Korea, and is a Cold War-era, Russian-made Ilyushin-62.
Analysts question the aircraft’s reliability because of its age and possible maintenance issues.
Plane decoy
The Chammae-1 flew to Singapore in 2018 when Kim was heading to the city to meet Trump – but the North Korean leader was not on board.
Instead, he flew on an Air China 747 provided by Beijing, Pyongyang’s most important ally.
According to the flight tracking website Flightradar24, the plane took off using flight number CA122, a standard designation for the airline’s route from Pyongyang to Beijing. In midair, it changed its call sign to CA061 and headed south.
At the time, analysts suggested China had lent a jet to Kim as a way to assuage his safety concerns and in a bid to ensure it was not sidelined at a summit where Washington-Pyongyang ties looked set to improve.
But Kim and Trump’s rare bout of diplomacy collapsed in 2019 anyway.
Unlike that fake nuclear ballistic missile submarine, this is probably real but it would have been nice to see the butter ball Kim lounging on pink leather. Take a look at all the wheels on that heavy locomotive. Yet, Kim’s “1st operational tactical nuclear attack submarine” looks as if it should weigh about 8,000 tons, eighty times the weight of a locomotive, but it was transported on two little dollies (as commenter Liar pointed out TTS Sept 9, 2023). The more difficult contours of the propeller section were pixilated and a flag was draped over the sonar section. That takes care of that.
A few years ago, NASA and SpaceX were going on and on about sending multicultural crews to establish a base on Mars. What happened? Few were buying it or even cared so they quietly stopped lying about it. So many dates came and went without even one sheboon or pajeet on a Mars Seven/Eleven. It’s all keyboard sewage and pathetic CGI with a brownie reading a teleprompter.
Eventually, the lies about atomic and ‘hydrogen’ bombs will give way to other frauds. Incoming!!!! Triple Gay Neegers from Outer Space are on the way!!!! Duck and cover!!!! See, I told you, Zecharia Sitchin was right!!!! There was a secret space program after all. Jeff Bezos is building a rocket powered strap-on, looking around for his mystery meat wife.
Helicopter wont do you much good if the tracks been sabotaged.
Seems risky to me.
So Kim Jong Il, who supervised NK during their famine, suddenly died of a heart attack aboard that train? Hmmmmmm….. And those guards….did they have anything to do with it? Were those “guards” to Kim Jong Il what the Praetorian Guard was to Caligula–that is, did those “guards” cause the “heart attack”?
Because tyranny can only go so far–a warning to Kim Jong Un, who even murdered his own uncle!
–from a woman who knows someone who escaped North Korea in the mid-50s as a child with her family.
I returned to read Liar’s comments on the 9th Sept article as referenced by Bob Smith:
https://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=273102
It is a very good observation.
Why build a real sub to include fake ordinance when a fake sub said to contain fake ordinance would be much cheaper…
Let us look at the world from the perspective of Kim Jong Un. Let us ask the question: does he believe anyone in the world possesses “nukes”? It should be noted that during the Korean War, the USA said that it wouldn’t use atom bombs against the North Koreans because the terrain was “too mountainous” for these weapons to be effective.
If Kim Jong Un believes they are real, how can he sincerely believe whatever ordinance he has, if genuine, would stand any chance against a superpower. Unless he too believes in the defensive capability of Korea’s mountains.
If on the other hand, if he is bluffing, it is certainly a great propaganda coup for himself. I mean, if the world was certain that superheroes existed, he wouldn’t even need a supervillain train, he could just be photographed in red underpants and a blue cloak. And I think this is what the North Korean leader is doing. He knows that nukes are phony; therefore the USA need not be apprehensive, but he gains traction at home. At the same time, the North Korean nuke bogeyman might be a useful distraction for the USA who can talk tough and gain Brownie points at home…
In game theory this is a win-win for leaders of ostensibly opposing regimes, but a loss for the sheeple whose fear levels are cranked up by it all…
You all are missing the real news – Putin met with NK leader – who says he supports Putin in a holy war against the west.
NPR – North Korea’s Kim vows full support for Russia’s ‘sacred fight’ after meeting Putin
sacred fight is a religious word for holy war
NK soldiers are going to the front line to kill Globo Homo Jews