The Logistics of Planning a Trans-Siberian Railway Trip

When I first attempted to plan our trip on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, I was overwhelmed. Russia is a huge country that spans eleven time zones and all trains run on Moscow time.  I couldn’t tell what time a 3 a.m. train in Kazan was really leaving. Would we have enough time at our destination? What if we miss the train?  I found some agencies who would book our travel for an inflated fee of course. The agencies all became “experts” with my travel style telling me things like “one day isn’t enough time to stop in X town.”  I couldn’t seem to get them to understand that I only had less than two weeks so I needed them to work with me.  In frustration, I gave up on the agencies and told myself, “Look, you’re not stupid, you can figure this out.” And with that I did.

The first thing I did was print off a blank calendar for the time I was planning to be in Russia. Across the top, I wrote the name of each city that we wanted to see and how many hours ahead of Moscow time each city was. (I found this information on a world time zone website. I use this page a lot for travel for finding how much daylight I have to sightsee in a given location). I then went to the Russian Rail site and found the route for each leg of the trip we planned to see. On the calendar, I recorded the arrival time and departure time of each train in Moscow/train time. I then I added the number of hours each destination was ahead of Moscow time to determine the local time. We used the calendar a lot. We needed the local time when not on the train, but Moscow time when on the train.  It’s very confusing, but if you book the trip, it will make sense. Feel free to contact me if you have questions.

Here is the calendar I created. You can see I have the times written in each date in both time zones. This calendar was invaluable. If you do this trip, I HIGHLY suggest you make out a time sheet like this in advance so that you don’t miss any stops or trains. Example, we arrived in Vladivostok at 6:55 a.m.  According to the train time zone, we would have been sleeping at that time, 23:55 p.m., on the previous day.

For reference, we boarded the train in Moscow on the 16th, arrived in Kazan on the 17th and left later that evening, arrived in Yekaterinburg on the 18 and spent the night. We got back on the train on the 19th and rode for three full days. On the 22nd, we arrived in Irkutsk and left that same day on a later train.  The 23rd we stopped at Ulan Ude 00:30 a.m. train time/5:30 a.m. local time and left at 2:44 p.m. local time. We then rode the train for two more days and arrived in Vladivostok at 6:55 a.m. on the 26th. We caught a 2:00 p.m. flight to Moscow that same day. The flight back to Moscow was nine hours. The flight cost $232 a person. Our airfare to Russia was $910 a person from Toronto booked two months in advance. The train journey with all stops was $799 a person booked six weeks in advance.

Make sure you print off all your tickets before you leave home. Each leg has a separate ticket and each passenger must have a ticket for each leg of the journey.  One thing that I cannot stress enough is to take the time to become familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet before you fly over to Russia.

~Bella