Lenin's "sealed train" is one of those events that lent itself well to drama and the revolutionary's own mystique. The notion that Bolshevism was something akin to the Black Death and needed quarantine was an image that not only appealed to immediate political needs, but one that elevated Lenin's return to Russia as one of the Revolution's singular moments. The emerging cult of personality around Lenin as well as the idea of an imminent revolution in Europe added further to the mystique of the sealed train, so that the image of Lenin and company hermetically sealed became a given. The reality behind the sealed train is much more prosaic and actually a bit dull.

Firstly, it was not really a "sealed train" in the sense of bars and chained doors. There was a chalk partition between "Russian" cars and German ones, with one of the cars as "neutral" territory for the passengers to co-mingle. There were two German officers to mind the train in the rear, which was not an overwhelming military presence. The train's passengers could move freely on the train and were able to exit at some train stops to buy newspapers and beer. For some of the train's other passengers, getting off these stops was also important because Lenin had banned smoking on the train except in its two lavatories. At a prolonged stop at Frankfurt am Main, the Swiss Bolshevik Fritz Platten bought a consignment of newspapers and beer and had a detachment of soldiers bring it to the train, where Platten also had a chance to talk to German railway workers. The sealed train also did not prevent the German trade unionist Wilhelm Janson from visiting the Bolsheviks. Janson had received permission from the German government to meet with the train, but this irked Lenin. According to Platten, the meeting was extremely unpleasant and after a consultation, the Bolshevik leadership told the German trade unionist if he entered into "Russian" territory, he would be physically manhandled out of it by the Bolsheviks.

Janson's less than cordial reception underscores one of the key realities of the sealed train: these security measures were not for the protection of Germany, but for the Bolsheviks. Accepting the German's offer of safe passage was a calculated risk for Lenin as it opened him up to charges of being a German stooge. Lenin had tried entreaties to the Entente for safe passage, but was rebuffed, but was bale to use his contacts with the Germans to arrange for rail passage. This was a somewhat unpopular move at the time, and some of Lenin's Zurich contemporaries were aghast at it. When the Bolsheviks left Zurich, there were some well wishers, but also cries of "traitor" and "pigs" mingled in. The less-radical Menshevik emigres in Switzerland were initially reluctant to take the German offer up as they thought that the taint of German collusion would hurt their political fortunes in the post-February milieu. Lenin was much more of a gambler, but his sojourn through Germany did pose political problems. Upon his return to Russia, Lenin would spin the lax security measures into a hermetical seal because it simultaneously prevented the Provisional Government from locking the Bolsheviks up for treason while emphasizing the Bolsheviks' political importance in the grand scheme of things.

Wilhelm II would later claim that he first knew about Lenin's arrival from the German newspapers, and while this may be another self-serving myth like the "sealed train," the story does underscore the somewhat marginal nature of the Bolsheviks in the wider world of Russian revolutionaries. The Bolsheviks were a very vocal group of intellectuals and revolutionaries, but this was a very crowded field in 1917. The Bolsheviks not only having to contend with established rivals like the Mensheviks and the populist Socialist Revolutionaries, but also new revolutionary formations like the workers' and soldiers' soviets. Soviet historiography, which often verged on hagiography, would emphasize that the Bolsheviks' ascendancy was the natural evolution for the Revolution, but this was far from clear during this time.

When James Joyce heard of Lenin's departure from a journalist friend during a luncheon in Zurich , the Irish writer termed it a "Trojan Horse," and with the benefit of hindsight, Joyce's evaluation was quite astute. The "sealed train" had a mythic potential that could be used to great effect by a political propagandist. The Bolshevik state would play up the hermetically sealed legend so much that the sealed train became a given historical fact that "everyone knows." Media like The Fall of Eagles replicated the Bolshevik myth about the train and lent more to its power. While the reality of the Bolsheviks' train was quite conventional and routine, as a legend it was quite powerful.