Trans Siberian Railway

Wow. This would have been far down my list. I'm glad I read thru these entries! Reply to this

I've heard that it is significantly cheaper to get tickets at the stations rather than booking beforehand, especially packages. I'm planning on going myself in Feb next year but am starting to worry about costs myself, I remember finding a quote on the internet for ~600GBP, moscow - irkust - ulan batuur - bejing. But tours and packages seem to be 1600+! I am wondering if anybody that has actually done this trip can gi ve an estimate?

Thanks, Reply to this

I have heard that this rail journey will no longer happen next year. Cheap airlines have brought about it's death. Reply to this

I tried to find the online story after I posted my repy but could not find it. I assume they will still use the tracks but not have the full service. Reply to this

woah.. wait next year as in 2010 there will be no trans siberian? Because if so my entire trip has been ruined.. Reply to this

Thanks Ed,

Do you think it would be relatively easy to buy tickets at the stations with very basic russian?

Also wondering whether it is best for me to do the trip in summer or winter?

Reply to this

woops sorry that last answer sounds a bit sharp - just meant that the queues at the station are huge and slow moving and you do tend to get shouted at by the person who sells the tickets if you dont speak Russian and as a nuisance by everyone else! Still, if you can tolerate that you should have no problem, just like write down the date you want to travel and the name of the destination Reply to this

When I travelled on the TSR in December 2007 (Beijing to Moscow, stopping at Ulan Bator, Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk, and Yekaterinburg), I bought each leg separately. For the Russian sections, I turned up at the station with a piece of paper on which I had written in Cyrillic a generic request for a ticket (copied from the Trailblazer guide to the TSR), populated with the appropriate destination/date/class. After saying "hello" in Russian, I would then hand over the piece of paper followed by a "please", also in Russian - this represented 40% of my useful Russian vocabulary. This worked swimmingly, and in fact often prompted the ticket seller to bust out a few words of English.

If the thought of buying the tickets in person is too traumatic, you can usually get your hostel to do it ($10 was the going rate at the time).

Though this info is obviously 2 years out of date, I paid about $400 in total for my tickets. Buying a ticket all the way through from Beijing (not stopping) would have been $370 (though note EdVallance's comment above). At the time, agencies were charging about $600. I would most definitely NOT recommend going all the way through without stopping - apart from the dubious pleasure of not having a shower for x days, Russia is too interesting a country to be seen purely from the inside of a train. Reply to this

Now you can take the trip online! Didn't go through much of it, but apparently they have filmed the journey from the train and now you can see loads of it through the powers of the internet.

Enjoy 😊 Reply to this

Juts in case you didn't notice, its not just the one, if you chose different locations in the Travel Route menu you can see different parts. In the article I found it through said it was a total of 150 hours of video there if I remember correct. Total overkill for the most of us, but for someone contemplating the journey it could be nice to have some sneak peaks of what they can see along the rails 😊 Reply to this