Meanwhile, in Russia...
 

https://www.rt.com/business/442533-g...ilways-arctic/
This is an interesting link, and so is the Wikipedia entry for the Siberian port (Sabetta) where the railway will go to. The only airline connections are with Moscow, as far as I could gather. Gosh, what an adventure it would be to visit the port - if it were allowed by the RF government. Which is doubtful for citizens of any NATO nation, probably! If the world isn't destroyed by a nuclear war, some of our descendants might put this on their list of places to go to.

Re: Meanwhile, in Russia...
 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_A...int_Petersburg)
I'm way too old to travel to this place now, and when I was in Leningrad in 1965 it wouldn't have been accessible to tourists****. But I post this item here in case some adventurer is interested!

**** My companion and I drove in my VW Beetle from Finland down to Moscow and out through what is now Belarus, and in those days tourists weren't allowed to depart from the pre-approved itinerary. I'd never even heard of this fort until today.

Re: Meanwhile, in Russia...
 

Well, it was easy enough to get a visitors' visa for the USSR, but we were limited to a few specific highways**** (except in the cities) and specific cities for overnight stops on specific dates. We could choose our own sleeping-places for our overnight stops (we chose camping-grounds every time). We felt very brave, the whole ten days we were in the country!
**** Once, we picnicked off the highway up a small hill a couple of hundred yards away, and were ordered back onto the road by a motorcycle-cop. No trouble with the KGB, fortunately. They never found the black-market roubles we had smuggled in at the border...

Re: Meanwhile, in Russia...
 

I travelled in "The Eastern Bloc" in the 1960s but never got to The Soviet Union. My bad. 30 years later I became a resident of Bulgaria and stayed there for 17 years. Now trying to sit down and wqrite about it all !

Re: Meanwhile, in Russia...
 

Oh hell yes, Scot! You really must write something down about it. I wish you well. My Mum always used to nag me to "write a book about your adventures", but the best I could manage (many years later) was a series of a dozen or so short reminiscences on my blog. Those didn't really meet the purpose, but we do what we can do and that's all. As practice, you could perhaps start a thread "Behind the Iron Curtain" or similar, on BE or one of the other expat forums. Not everybody wants to read about "ancient" travel-history or politics, but there are quite a few old codgers even here on BE (though only British codgers, of course) who would be interested enough to ask pertinent questions. "Did you have any problems getting local currency?" kind of question, for instance. And, "Any inter-action with the Police?" That sort of thing. Living in Bulgaria alone would be interesting to read about, even without any travel adventures.