Kim’s family has travelled on green armoured train for years

On Sunday afternoon, the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, got on a traditional green train. This train is a symbol of North Korea being closed off and secretive.

Pictures released by North Korean media KCNA show Kim getting on his personal train as he gets ready to go to Russia for a meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. The United States has cautioned that they might discuss a weapons agreement.

We don’t know when or where this meeting will happen. However, according to Russian state media, Kim’s train has arrived in the country and is currently moving towards the north through Russia’s far east region.

Pictures of Kim leaving Pyongyang show a train station with a long red carpet specially placed for him. Along the carpet, there are people in uniforms and soldiers standing very still. A few important people bend forward and shake Kim’s hand. In the distance, there are women wearing dresses and traditional clothes. They are happy and excited, cheering and waving the flag of North Korea.

In the pictures, it seems like the people shown are North Korea’s Foreign Minister Choe Sun Hui and Ri Pyong Chol, who is a vice chairman of the Central Military Commission of the ruling Workers’ Party.

At one point, Kim and his group stand near the train entrance, waving to the crowd. They give the crowd a quick look at the train, which is very strong and moves slowly. Inside, the train has shiny wooden floors and a fancy white doorway with decorations.

The line of dark green train cars, decorated with yellow stripes on the side, look like the trains Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il used. They say Kim Jong Un also had fancy dinners on the train.

The train has always caused curiosity because it has carried the Kim family for several generations when they travel within the country and sometimes even outside the country.

Kim Jong Il didn’t like flying and used trains a lot, according to Reuters. This is different from his son, Kim Jong Un, who used to travel in a fancy private jet and studied in Switzerland in the 1990s.

The train that had green color and yellow stripes was also seen in a video from Russian state media when Kim Jong Il visited Russia in 2002. At that time, the rules that limited interactions with other countries had been loosened, giving North Korea a short time to connect with the rest of the world.

Memoirs written by Konstantin Pulikovsky, a former Russian official, tell a story of luxury during Kim Jong Il’s one-month train ride across Russia in 2001. These memories are based on a report from a note-taker in the Russian Foreign Ministry who was on the train with them. According to a 2002 article in the New York Times, Pulikovsky said that the train was run by attractive ladies and had delicious food and wine.

Pulikovsky wrote that you could choose to order dishes from Russia, China, Korea, Japan, and France. According to Pulikovsky, live lobsters and cases of Bordeaux and Burgundy red wines were sent to train stations on the route.

CNN was not able to confirm or verify the information from The New York Times on its own.

South Korean media have previously reported on the train’s safety features. According to a report from a South Korean newspaper called Chosun Ilbo in 2009, the train is very well protected and moves at an average speed of 60 kilometers per hour (about 37 miles per hour).

According to the paper, it had rooms for meetings, a place for people to listen, and bedrooms. It had phone connections through satellites and modern TVs.

The newspaper said that the power is turned off on other tracks before Kim’s train gets close to the station, so that no other trains can move.

North Korea today is very different from the time at the beginning of the 2000s when Pulikovsky wrote about how the train had many expensive and luxurious things.

In 2003, other countries placed restrictions on North Korea because they were still making nuclear weapons and chose not to follow the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Information from inside the country has been flowing very slowly, especially in recent years when Kim Jong Un has been in power.

North Korea, a country that is already very closed and alone, closed its borders during the coronavirus pandemic. Reports from earlier this year said that people who are not part of the important leaders in Pyongyang were having serious problems with not having enough food.

Even before the Covid pandemic, almost half of the people in North Korea did not have enough food, as stated by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

However, the train has been seen on multiple occasions since Kim came into power in 2011, which shows North Korea’s connections with Russia and China – the only countries that support North Korea internationally.

In 2018, Kim took a train to Beijing. This was his first time visiting another country since becoming the leader of his own country. During this trip, he met with the leader of China, Xi Jinping, and other important officials. A video from KCNA showed Kim and some Chinese officials on a train. They were sitting on pink couches in two rows on each side of the train.

Kim traveled to Beijing by train again in January 2019. Then, the next month, he rode the train to Vietnam to meet the President of the US, Donald Trump, in the capital city of Hanoi. However, the summit was not successful, as there was no agreement made or significant progress made in efforts to achieve denuclearization.

In April 2019, Kim went on a train to Vladivostok to meet Putin for the very first time. During their meeting, Kim complained that the US was not being trustworthy during the Hanoi summit. Pictures from the trip display North Korean workers cleaning the outside of the train at the Vladivostok station.

In 2022, North Korean state media released a video of Kim Jong-un working in his office on a train. The office had blue curtains and teal chairs around a white table.

State media showed a documentary that had rare scenes of Kim being more relaxed. He was sitting in his office on the train, wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and smoking a cigarette while talking to officials. There is a laptop and computer monitor in the corner.