Any slight resemblance between Iarnrod Eireann's Sligo Bonerattler and the Red Arrow express between Moscow and St Petersburg is purely coincidental. Even the minor similarities such as wheels, carriages and corridors are dispelled from the mind at 11.55 every night in what is still known as the Leningrad Station.
At precisely that time the Red Arrow, the first of a fleet of trains between Russia's two largest cities, is prescribed by the timetable to pull away from its platform. That, as with all Russian trains, is exactly what happens.
In this country the timetables appear to have been devised by stern officials who will not brook the slightest deviation from what is written in the regulations. Irish timetables, as every child knows, were drafted in the dim and distant past by Hans Christian Andersen.
Unlike the Sligo Bonerattler, the Red Arrow has electric light and central heating on all its journeys. Its restaurant service is adequate, though the provision of caviar does put it ahead of most of its rivals.
Clean sheets for the beds on the overnight journey, a constant supply of strong Russian tea from the samovar at the end of the carriage and a contraption that foils the attempts of thieves to enter one's compartment contribute to the comfort of mind and body.
For St Petersburg, which once regarded itself as Russia's cultural capital, is now known as the capital of crime. One friend puts it this way: "In Moscow the criminals are in the Kremlin. In St Petersburg they are on the streets."
On arrival at St Petersburg's Moscow Station, one is greeted by the strident tones, played on the station's amplification system, of the city's unofficial anthem, The Bronze Horseman, by the Belgian-born Russian composer, Reinhold Glier, and also, at precise five minute intervals, by the arrival of other members of the fleet of trains which left Moscow the night before.
Glier's tune is now the centre of controversy in the former imperial capital. There are no words to his anthem and some Petersburgers, notably the members of the city council, feel there should. The obvious choice is to set the words of Alexander Pushkin's poem, The Bronze Horseman, to Glier's music. But matters are not as simple as that.
Scansion has to be taken into account. Not surprisingly, since Pushkin and Glier worked independently of each other in their tributes to Falconet's equestrian statue of Peter the Great, the words and the music simply don't match.
The proposed solution to this problem verges on blasphemy. A draft law is being drawn up, according to the St Petersburg Times, to edit Pushkin's words to suit Glier's music. The newspaper quotes Mr Leonid Romankov, head of the city's Culture and Education Commission, as saying: "I don't think Pushkin would be offended if he found out that his poem is used for the anthem for his native town, and such a significant town as St Petersburg."
Mr Romankov could be in for a rude awakening. First of all he is likely to be informed, and quite forcefully so, by the next trainload of Muscovites from the Red Arrow, about Pushkin's real native town.
Pushkin first saw the light in Moscow. He did not come to live in St Petersburg on a permanent basis until 1831, six years before he lost his life in a duel on the outskirts of the city.
Muscovites and most other Russians would regard tampering with his words to suit the work of a minor composer as an inconceivable act of barbarism - a form of lese majeste. It would be comparable in its own way with the Red Arrow's status and level of service being reduced to that of the Sligo Bonerattler.
