Tehran's railway station is an odd place to begin a motorcycle ride, but it makes sense once you know what it stands for. The Trans-Iranian Railway was the great project of Reza Shah, the officer who became monarch in the 1920s and wanted a modern country stitched together by steel. It ran from the Caspian Sea in the north to the Persian Gulf in the south, cutting through the Alborz and the Zagros mountains on a staggering number of bridges and tunnels, and it was finished in 1938. The route was chosen partly so that Iran would not depend on the old lines of the Russians and British, and partly because it simply could be done by Iranian labour with foreign engineers, which was a point of national pride.
Strangely, the railway has a second life in the story of the Second World War. Within a few years the Allies were using it to push supplies north to the Soviet Union, and the line carried an enormous tonnage along what became known as the Persian Corridor. When people say Iran was always a crossroads, this is the twentieth-century proof.
Now the riding. Tehran is a city of seven million at the foot of the Alborz, and the station sits in the southern part of the centre, a few kilometres from the old bazaar. Traffic is dense, lane markings are treated as suggestions, and motorcycles filter through everything, so keep your mirrors honest and your eyes up. Fuel is cheap and plentiful, and every neighbourhood has a pump, with smaller towns such as Shahrak-e Emam Hasan just beyond the ring road. The reward comes when you leave. On a clear morning after rain, Mount Damavand, a perfect snow-streaked cone of more than five thousand metres, floats above the northern haze, and the roads that climb into the Alborz are wonderful.
A plate of kebab with grilled tomato and flat bread, or a bowl of thick abgusht, will carry you a long way, and tea turns up unasked.
A quiet word on timing: the city is at its most rideable early on Friday, the day of rest, when the streets empty out and you can finally see the old buildings rather than the bumper in front of you.