Planning a trip to the Caucasus – perhaps to hike some of the Transcaucasian Trail – but concerned about the carbon footprint of flying there and back?
I’m with you. Hiking has a small environmental footprint (depending on your shoe size). Air travel has a big one.
But the good news is that, if you’re a resident of Europe, you can travel by train to the Caucasus instead.
It’s easy, fun, affordable, quicker than you might think, and of course a heck of a lot greener.
And how do I know? I did it – twice. There, and back again.
This three-part post will explain how – at a level of detail that’ll allow you to replicate the journey – I travelled by train from a provincial railway station in England to the centre of Istanbul in under 72 hours, onwards to Tbilisi (the Georgian capital) less than 72 hours later, and finally to Yerevan (the Armenian capital) on one last overnight sleeper.
That’s six or seven days of pleasant, relaxing, low-emission travel from the far end of Europe to the South Caucasian capital cities. And if you’re travelling to hike the Transcaucasian Trail, every trail terminus is less than 24 hours’ onward journey.
I’ll also show how the cost of doing so – far from being overpriced and out of reach for the budget traveller – was comparable to flying, and share a few money-saving tips I came across on the way.
Finally, I’ll cover how I mitigated the risks of cancelled trains, late arrivals, missed connections, full trains (ie: no available seat reservations), and other variables you might be worried about for a train journey involving many different components.
(It’s worth mentioning that anyone starting closer to Istanbul than the UK should be able to shave additional days off this trip.)
London to Istanbul by train in less than 72 hours
The Man In Seat 61 reckons you need four days and four nights to travel by train from London to Istanbul.
In fact, you can comfortably do it in three – and here’s how I managed it:
Day One: Market Harborough–London–Brussels–Munich
Truth be told, I didn’t even start from London. I started from Market Harborough, a small town in the English Midlands where I was visiting family.
I shouldered my pack and walked to the station in the pre-dawn twilight. The southbound platform was lined with cloaked figures, some with briefcases, others with handbags or backpacks, all with smartphones. A hundred tiny screens illuminated a hundred tired faces in the gloam. The 06:00 to London St Pancras eased to a halt, the carriage doors hissed aside, and so began another morning commute.
My Interrail pass allowed me one ‘departure day’ to leave my country of residence. I planned to do more than that: by the end of the day I was hoping to have crossed five countries. In the meantime, my journey to London on this busy, peak-time express train was essentially free. The conductor scanned my mobile pass and an hour later we were spat out into a cavernous train shed, its single-span wrought iron and glass roof once the largest such structure on Earth. London St Pancras International now houses the only French border crossing in central London, with Eurostar trains departing several times an hour for Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, and occasionally further afield.
My original route plan had involved going first to Paris and then on to Stuttgart, but I’d found morning trains to Paris desperately hard to reserve at short notice. The same had been true for the TGV to Stuttgart, which also required reservations, and the sleeper from Stuttgart to Budapest was also sold out. In other words, even in the low season, the route suggested at seat61.com had been impossible to reserve with a week’s notice. I would have to figure out another way.
Instead, I’d found an available seat on the ES 9114 at 08:16 to Bruxelles-Midi (South). Taking that as my starting point, I researched possible onward routes using the official Rail Planner app from Interrail. I quickly realised that German inter-city express (ICE) trains did not require me to buy seat reservations. I could simply hop on with my Interrail pass and enjoy TGV-speed train travel at no additional cost and with loads more flexibility. Even better, ICE services connect to rail hubs in countries neighbouring Germany – including Brussels. Perfect!
My 07:01 arrival at St Pancras had allowed me time to carry out one important task: procure a decent cup of coffee before clearing passport control. This critical goal was achieved at Le Pain Quotidien (5/5; would buy again), right opposite international departures. The terminal was jam-packed, but this was clearly a routine occurrence: after getting my British passport stamped for entry into the Schengen Zone (this still hurts) we were hustled through to the waiting hall and through to the platform, from where the 08:16’s departure was punctual to the second.
Bruxelles-Midi was grim and functional. Stepping outside to take some photographs, I immediately felt like a target, loiterers eyeing my backpack and pockets. Heading back inside, I stumbled upon a back staircase to the platform for my next train, the 12:25 ICE 315 to Frankfurt Airport, and hung out there for a while with the train already sitting at the platform.
Disaster struck shortly before 3pm, just one station short of Frankfurt Airport where I was due to change trains for Munich. Had the on-board announcements not been in English as well as German, I would undoubtedly have been confused when the train stopped and began moving back in the opposite direction. There had been a “human accident”, we were told, on the line between Mainz-Mombach and the airport. The service we were on had been cancelled and we would be taken back to the closest mainline station at Koeln (Cologne), about 200km back the way we’d come!
My hopes of reaching Salzburg by the end of the first day evaporating, I opened the Rail Planner app to search for an alternative route, but found none avoiding Frankfurt. In times like this, the wise traveller quickly makes peace with what is beyond their control and falls back on spontaneity, initiative and experience to navigate what happens next. So that is what I did.
Back at Koeln Hauptbahnhof, I weighed my options. I could call it a day here and find a nearby hostel, but my onward travel plans depended upon being in Budapest by about 2pm the following afternoon. That, in turn, meant catching an early departure of one of the Railjet Express services that plied the west-east route across Austria from Munich to Budapest via Salzburg, Linz, and Vienna. And that required me to at least reach Munich by the end of the day. Failing to do so would mean travelling to Munich in the morning, missing the early train to Budapest, and triggering a domino effect that would mean spending a full extra day in a city further down the line.
A depressing list of cancelled services filled the departure boards at Koeln, and my hopes began to sink. Then, hunting about on Google Maps for alternative routes, I noticed that Koeln had a second major rail interchange across the Rhine. Searching for departures from this station – Koeln Deutz/Messe – I noticed that there was, in fact, a scheduled departure a couple of hours later bound for Munich!
Perhaps all would not be lost. I grabbed my bags, hopped on the S-bahn across the river, and sure enough, a train to Munich rolled up to the platform at 16:44. It seemed I wasn’t alone in having my plans disrupted, as two or three cancelled trains’ worth of passengers clamoured for seats. I set up camp in the buffet car and waited to see what would happen next.
What happened next was that the train took a completely different route across Germany to avoid the Frankfurt line. Unfortunately for anyone in a hurry, the detour involved a winding, scenic route along the Rhine valley. I got chatting to the lady sitting opposite, who pointed out the various hilltop castles silhouetted on the ridges and told me about the region’s winemaking industry. In fact, back in the summer of 2015, I had spent a very enjoyable couple of weeks cycling along this very valley with my wife and a couple of friends, furtively stealth-camping on patches of riverside grass and drinking quite a bit of the aforementioned wine.
Regular announcements kept us updated on the distinctly un-express-like progress of our rerouted Intercity Express service, and it became clear that the originally scheduled arrival time of 21:11 was impossibly hopeful. It would be at least 11pm by the time I arrived at the end of the line, putting paid to my hopes of a full night’s sleep before continuing my journey. But, as I said, travel has a habit of taking you out of your comfort zone and into a world over which you have no control. A delayed train is a pretty pedestrian example of this, but getting annoyed when things don’t go to plan is a sure-fire way to have a shit time. So I remained in the buffet car while my fellow passengers trickled off at various stations; the train staff distributed bottled water and sandwiches by way of apology for a disruption that was entirely not of their making; and we eventually rolled to a halt in Munich at 23:12.
All said and done, I think it was a reasonable effort for the first day of this journey, considering that I’d woken up that morning in Market Harborough.
Day Two: Munich–Budapest–somewhere in Romania
I jumped out of the hostel bunk, in and out of the shower, filled my water bottle, and walked for three minutes back to the station to catch the 07:23 Railjet Express to Budapest via Vienna.
This would be one of the simplest legs of the entire journey: a single high-speed train from the Bavarian capital, across the entire breadth of Austria, beyond the old Iron Curtain and through western Hungary to Budapest. Austrian trains being famously punctual, there would be no concerns about scheduling. Having failed to make it as far as Salzburg to catch the first morning train east, I would have an uncomfortably short connection at the far end of this line, but that’s a story for a little later on.
The cavernous train shed was already thronged with commuters striding to and from the metro. I picked a random coffee kiosk and received a woefully under-average cappuccino for my gamble, before making my way to the southernmost platforms. From here, the train would loop southeast for the Austrian border.
The RailJet Express train was particularly comfortable and modern, with generously sized seats and tables, very reasonably priced on-board catering, and mains/USB charging points at each seat, as well as the ride being fast and smooth with relatively few stops. I took the opportunity to pull out my laptop and do some writing. My blogging schedule is a permanent backlog of past trips and topics that life does not usually allow me time to sit down and write about. Travelling across Europe on comfortable high-speed trains, watching the world go by and with no distractions from other people, was proving to be one of the best writing opportunities I’d had for a long time.
We trundled over the Rákóczi Bridge across the Danube and rolled to a halt at Budapest-Keleti station at 14:19 sharp. I was already waiting by the door to the front carriage with a memorised map of the station in my mind and one singular goal: to locate the international ticket office and buy a sleeper reservation on the overnight train to Bucharest in neighbouring Romania. This particular train departed in 51 minutes. Time was of the essence!
I’d done some deep research into the Budapest–Bucharest leg of the route, and had come to the conclusion that, by ignoring The Man In Seat 61 and catching an earlier connection out of Budapest, I could shorten the length of my overall journey by a full 24 hours.
Several things made this strategy more complicated and risky than it could have been. Firstly, I’d had to call in a favour from a friend in Budapest to confirm for me that the 15:10 train did in fact have a sleeper car (it had been reported elsewhere that it didn’t). Secondly, I would have to hope that there were berths still available on the spot, because advance-booked sleeper reservations for international trains still – archaically – had to be physically mailed to the passenger, which would have taken at least two weeks.
I was left with no choice but to cross my fingers as I disembarked the train from Munich and marched in the direction of the international ticket office, which I found at the end of a maze of corridors on the southern side of the station. On asking to buy a sleeper reservation (which, by the way, usually involves paying a small supplement to use with an Interrail pass), I was told that the system had already closed sales for this particular train as it was about to depart!
There was nothing to lose, so I span on my heels and hurried to find the train in question, which was sitting at one of the northernmost platforms outside of the main train shed. Walking down to the front of the train where a single sleeper car was coupled, I clambered on board and found the conductor in his ‘cabinet’, surrounded by a mass of passenger manifest printouts and bedlinen. A quick conversation in stunted English and sign language later, I’d negotiated myself a berth in the sleeper car for €20 cash.
Yes! The odds were back on in my favour. I found my coupe and sank into my seat in relief.
(Some brief notes on how this might have gone more smoothly. Had I made it to Salzburg on Day One, I’d have been able to catch an earlier train to Budapest and arrive at midday with 3 hours to spare, which would have allowed me to buy my sleeper reservation “officially” and also meet my Hungarian friend for coffee. Had I planned this trip more than a few days in advance, I’d have been able to buy the sleeper reservation online and have it mailed to me. And had Hungarian railways got round to modernising their online booking system, none of this would have been necessary anyway!)
So there I was, sat in an ageing 4-berth coupé, familiar to me from past train journeys in the Caucasus and Russia, including one particularly long trip from Ulan Bator in Mongolia back to Moscow, which if I’m not mistaken involved living in one of these little rolling bedrooms for about 4 days. As then, the train ambled eastwards at the Soviet regulation speed of 60kmph. It would be 16 hours before I arrived in the Romanian capital the following morning – although it has to be said that, while slow, these Eastern-bloc train schedules generally run like clockwork.
I woke in the middle of the night at (I think) Timisoara, where (I think) several more sleeper cars were coupled to the train. While I slept, the Fagaras Mountains of southern Romania passed by in darkness. I’d once spent a couple of weeks cycling across this region, getting my first real taste of rural life outside of the manicured patchwork landscapes of Western Europe and setting the tone for much of my future travels. And we rolled into Bucharest at the precisely scheduled time of 08:06 the following morning.
Day Three: Somewhere in Romania–Bucharest–Rusa–Gorna Oryahovitsa–Dimitrovgrad–somewhere in Turkey
I could scarcely believe it: the pieces were falling into place! Not only did my early arrival in Bucharest mean I could catch an onward series of trains to meet the Sofia–Istanbul sleeper train that night, but I also had a luxurious 2½ hours to spend in one place! I celebrated this double-barrelled success with not one but two cappuccinos in one of the station’s many cafés, then toured the various bakeries stocking up on paninis and doughnuts for the next 24 hours of the journey. Romania really knows how to do baked goods.
In the summer season, and with a reservation in advance, it’s possible to catch a sleeper train direct from Bucharest to Istanbul, with these wagons joining the Sofia–Istanbul train at Dimitrovgrad late in the evening. As I was doing the journey in the off-season (late March), I would have to link up local trains to achieve the same end result.
(A note here that if you take the later sleeper train from Budapest to Bucharest, as suggested on seat61.com, you consequently miss the morning departure from Bucharest and have to stay overnight, or else travel on to Sofia and stay the night there, in either case putting you back a full day.)
First up was a small two-carriage train to Ruse/Rusa, just across the Danube in Bulgaria. The train had seen better days: several of the windows were cracked and the exterior was covered in graffiti. The flatlands of southern Romania passed forgettably by, spiced up only by the bridge crossing of the mighty River Danube.
We disembarked, our passports were checked and stamped (as I’d left the Schengen Zone I was now due a passport check at each successive intra-EU border – thanks, Brexit), and we were free to go.
There was a 35-minute wait until the next train to Sofia. I decided it was worth a visit to the ticket office to see if I could get my onward seat reservations. Bulgarian train reservations being even more archaic than elsewhere in Eastern Europe, it is only possible to buy seat reservations in person, and only at stations that have a computer connected to the ticketing network. Ruse was one such station, and I once again got lucky: the ticket hall was empty, and a few minutes later I held in my hand reservations both for the Sofia service and the sleeper train from Dimitrovgrad to Istanbul. Back of the net!
The Sofia train was clean and comfortable, with bench seats in individual coupés. I got off at Gorna Oryahovitsa to change for the train to Dimitrovgrad and was glad I’d stocked up on food in Bucharest, for the station was dark and barren with a paltry selection of refreshments and no card payments accepted anywhere in the vicinity.
Next was the local service to Dimitrovgrad, which passed through the substantial mountains of central Bulgaria, picking up and dropping off passengers at increasingly remote towns and villages. Spring had come earlier to Bulgaria, at the southeastern end of the European continent, than it had further north, and the countryside was rapidly greening.
The sun was soon setting over the mountains, and by the time the train terminated in Dimitrovgrad at 22:06, all was dark, the streets empty. I had more than an hour to wait in this small, provincial station for the delayed Sofia–Istanbul train, and I was glad for my winter jacket.
But the train’s headlights eventually appeared out of the gloom, and up to the platform rolled a long train of clean and modern-looking Turkish sleeper cars, painted in whites and reds and blues – the penultimate leg of my journey across the European continent by train to Istanbul and the Bosphorous Straits; a journey so smooth, achievable and affordable I now found myself wondering why I hadn’t done it sooner.
And so we come to the Sofia–Istanbul sleeper train itself. This was one of those trains that only sounds pleasant on paper if you aren’t paying close attention. The truth is that it isn’t a very restful way to spend the night, because at around 1am you leave the European Union and enter Turkey. This means that – exactly when you want to be in bed – you must pass two sets of border checks. And the second of these checks involves hauling your luggage off the train and queueing first to have your passport stamped and second to have your luggage X-rayed, outdoors and in whatever weather on a floodlit concrete platform in the middle of the night. The whole process takes 2–3 hours, depending on how busy the train is. By the time you’re back on the train and moving, there’s only another 4 hours to go until you arrive at the suburban Istanbul station of Halkali. Like I said – good in theory, laborious in practice.
Some sleepy backpackers I’d shared the carriage with started hunting for the automated ticket machines to buy an Istanbulkart, which is the unified pay-as-you-go payment card for public services in Istanbul. I smugly walked right past them with the Istanbulkart I’d bought and topped up during my previous visit last December. I’m such a twat.
At 7am local time, the suburban “Marmaray” train from Halkali to the central stations of Istanbul (and beyond) rapidly becomes crammed with commuters. It’s not the ideal place, time or circumstances under which to arrive in the city, but as long as you grab a seat quickly, it’s just about bearable. This final, somewhat unglamorous metro ride would take me to Istanbul Sirkecı, the historic rail terminus on the European side of the Bosphorus in the Fatih district. Trains such as the sleeper I’d recently disembarked used to arrive triumphantly at this station until a few years ago, when it was decided the station needed refurbishment – a process that is still ongoing.
In the meantime, I was swept up the corridors and escalators by the crowd of commuters and out into the bright sunlight of early-morning Istanbul, the smell of balik ekmek on the wind, the honkings of ferries and seagulls in the air. I checked the time. It was 08:44 on the morning of Day Four – or 05:44 back in the UK.
And that’s how I travelled by train from Market Harborough to Istanbul in less than 72 hours.
In other words, the easy part of the journey was over.
Check back soon for Part Two: how I continued east by train to Ankara, Kars, Batumi, Tbilisi, and finally Yerevan.
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