North Korea, Russian diplomats return home with a manual rail car – Corriere.it

North Korea’s borders have been closed for a year: to prevent the pandemic, the Hermit Kingdom of the Kim Dynasty also blocked rail and air connections with China and Russia, the two neighboring countries with which it has the most relations. There are no exceptions even for diplomats, so to repatriate, a small group of relatives of the Russian embassy staff had to work with an antique train car activated by the arm, of which now only seen in films of the old west. The company’s news was posted on Facebook by the Russian Foreign Ministry.

The Cyrillic post explains:

On February 25, 8 employees of the Russian Embassy in the PRDC (official abbreviation of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, ed) and their families returned to their homeland. As borders have been closed for more than a year and that passenger traffic stopped, they had to face a long and difficult journey back home. Before 32 hours by train from Pyongyang to the north, then another two hours by bus to the border and finally, the crossing to the Russian side. To do this, they had to prepare a cart, put it on the tracks, load luggage and children on it and that’s it. The only man in the non-self-propelled vehicle, Vladislav Sorokin, was the engine, that is, he had to push the cart with the arms along the tracks for more than a kilometer. The hardest part was the bridge over the Tumannaya River. And finally home, the Russian border station Hasan, where our staff were received by the ministry staff in the Primorsky region and taken by bus to the Vladivostok airport.