Winter comes to summer including freak hailstorms, mega-flooding but also wild fires.
Special train - the Eurasian Star - will reopen exotic and historic trail linking China, Mogolia and Russia.
Russia's coldest region is up to 20C milder than average this month, say meteorologists.
Rare historic pictures show Russia's last tsar as the first builder of the Trans-Siberian Railway 125 years ago this month.
New statistics on Saturday showed the vast scale of the human effort in Russia to halt a natural disaster that has destroyed swathes of woodland and taiga.
The zoo at Seversk - a city closed to outsiders without special permits - has unveiled its latest inhabitants, several brightly striped snakes.