Trans Mongolian Express

“Many thanks for you help, Natasha. I think we’re about there now.” I hung up the phone and breathed a sigh of relief. For the past month, Karen and I had spent many hours on the phone and in email conversations with Natasha in an attempt to book the train journey that would take us from Moscow to Beijing on the Trans Mongolian Express. Natasha had done an excellent job. So patient and so tenacious – like many of her colleagues working at Real Russia.

Since we initially decided to use the Trans Mongolian Express as part of or Overland Adventure, Karen and I had been wresting with the dilemma as to whether or not we should pre book any of the train tickets. In keeping with the overall spirit of our trip, we wanted to travel and live as spontaneously as possible, only working the detail of our trip as and when we needed to. However, in our research into this epic intercontinental rail-road journey we had learnt that the trains were often over subscribed. In principle that wouldn’t be a problem to us - we could just get the next train, but with the Trans Mongolian Express, the trains were sometimes days or even weeks apart and we would be encountering temperatures en route as low as minus 30 or minus 40 degrees Celsius!

To be honest with you, the prospect of getting stuck in central Siberia for a week or so and having to endure day time temperatures lower that we had ever encountered in the heights of winter during one of our alpine skiing trips, didn’t really feel like the ‘perfect experience’. A little reluctantly therefore, we decided it was probably best to purchase some of our train accommodation in advance; thus guaranteeing our passage through the Russian Federation, Mongolia and into China.

Conscious of the fact that booking tickets on the Trans Mongolian Express wasn’t that straightforward we asked Real Russia, the Moscow based travel agency processing our visa applications, to help us. And we’re pleased we did!

It wasn’t so much the huge variety of trains that travel this mammoth route; ranging from slow local commuter trains to international express trains, or indeed the huge array of ticket types and travel classes on offer. It wasn’t our lack of understanding of the ‘international’ tariff, available if certain train permutations were combined together and it wasn’t even that each leg of the journey was undertaken by potentially different service providers operating under different regulations in different countries. No, the biggest problem we faced was determining whether the trains we wanted to use actually existed or not! Our approach had been to select trains that best met our needs from the published timetable, thinking that would be the end of it. “Not quite so simple!”, Natasha remarked as she tried to establish whether the trains we had chosen did in fact run between the towns, on the dates and times specified.

After a conversation with one of the stations along our proposed route she wrote, “Sorry for this confusion but as it turned out it is still under a big question whether the train days are changed… and this is what we are trying to find out now… And I will get back to you as soon as we receive an official information… nobody seems to know about it at the moment.”

Russia sure is going to be an interesting experience!