Little Rocket Man has a crazy train.
Kim Jong Un is gearing up to ride the rails of luxury into eastern Russia, where North Korea’s leader is expected to meet Vladimir Putin about supplying weapons to bolster Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, US officials said earlier this week.
The 39-year-old Kim’s private train service was inherited from his father, former dictator Kim Jong Il, and created out of a fear of flying.
The cars are bulletproof, and this convoy certainly won’t be mistaken for a bullet train — the armored protection is so heavy that average speeds top out at 37 mph.
(Amtrak’s Acela Express hits 150 mph, while France’s TGV, the fastest in the world, exceeds 357 mph.)
The train is believed to be outfitted with conference rooms paneled in dark wood, as well as multiple bedrooms, satellite phones, flatscreen TVs and roughly 100 security agents who scan routes and upcoming stations for bombs and other threats.
As for the dining car, chefs are on call to whip up Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese or French cuisine.
Cases of live lobsters and other delicacies are flown in fresh, according to a 2002 account by Russian official Konstantin Pulikovsky who traveled with Kim Jong Il.
Barbecue is on hand, along with Bordeaux and Beaujolais.
Kim Jong Il was known for his pickiness aboard the train, like at a stop in Omsk when he was unimpressed by a serving of fried Russian dumplings.
“Kim Jong Il picked at them with a fork and said: “What kind of pelmeni are these?” Pulikovsky wrote. “They should be big, boiled and in broth.”’
The New York Times has reported that the current leader’s diet tends toward Swiss cheese, Cristal Champagne and Hennessy cognac.
To spice up the ride, a group of female performers known as “beautiful lady conductors” frequently serenaded the elder Kim in Korean and Russian, Pulikovsky wrote.
On the lookout for attacks, a separate train precedes and follows the convoy, which has reportedly consisted of as many as 90 carriages.
The next voyage for the hermetic Kim Jong Un, 39, could come as soon as Sunday and the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Russia, some 425 miles away from Pyongyang.
He also plans to travel via armored train to Russia’s Pier 33, where anti-submarine ships monitor the Pacific port city, as well as a possible stop in Moscow, the New York Times reported.
The expected expedition will mark Kim’s first foreign travel since North Korea closed its borders in early 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Kim and Putin, 70, last met in April 2019 meeting in Vladivostok, Russia, where the North Korean leader arrived after a 20-hour ride aboard a fortified green-and-yellow train.
Kim’s mysterious, slow-moving caravan took him to Beijing in 2018 for secret talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and he rode his armored entourage to meet President Trump in Vietnam in 2019.
Some 20 stations have been built throughout North Korea specifically to accommodate the trains, which have caught the attention of South Korean and US intelligence operatives using reconnaissance aircraft and other methods.
A mausoleum outside Pyongyang, where the bodies of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung lie in state, features a replica of the tricked-out train carriages.
With Post wires
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