Moscow by train · Moscow by train
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Moscow by train
Moscow by train
Moscow lies at the western end of the Trans-Siberian Railway from Beijing, Ulaanbaatar and Vladivostok. You can reach here from almost anywhere in Europe and Central Asia. Moscow is also the main railway hub of Russia; it is often easier for a person going cross-country to change trains in Moscow, even if it's a little out of the way, as the choice of direct trains is limited compared to the ones going to the capital. This means, unfortunately, that main train stations are always crowded with transients, and are generally about the most unsafe places in the city.
This said, and even with proliferation of large and small air carriers in the post-Soviet Russia and the price of plane tickets coming down considerably (and the price of rail tickets creeping up year after year, as the government monopoly establishes new tariffs), train travel still remains the predominant mode of middle- and even long-distance transportation for the majority of Russians. In a day and a night (the price of budget sleeper accommodation, in the descending order of comfort roughly equivalent to T2, T4 and T6 arrangements on the European rail networks, is not that much more than that of a seat in a coach car) a traveler based in Moscow can cover a significant part of the Eastern Europe; two nights and the intervening day will find you the second morning as far south as the Black Sea and as far East as Ural Mountains. Some train routes are even stretched, usually by means of extra stops, to last through the night (for example, one of the two trains to Orel, about 350 km south of Moscow, departs Kursky Station at 6PM and arrives at 10:39PM, making 2 stops, while the other one departs at 10:22PM and arrives only at 6:27AM the next morning, with 10 stops along the way), so the train ticket is often a moving bed as well, eliminating the need for the extra night in a hotel.
Most trains to Saint Petersburg (13 in all) are in service overnight; with notable exception of high-speed Sapsan trains - and the same is true the other way, making Saint Petersburg a viable, albeit a little bleary-eyed, one-day excursion. In December 2009 Russian Railway launched the high-speed Sapsan trains, there are 7 daily departures from Moscow at 6:45, 7:00, 13:30, 13:45, 16:30, 16:30, 19:30, and 19:45, with some trains stopping at Tver, Vyshniy Volochek, Bologoe, and Okulovka. The ride takes between 3h 45min and 4h 15min. The train times are bunched, as there are not fully dedicated tracks for the high speed trains.
You can now (finally) buy tickets to any long-distance train on the Internet from the Russian Railways JSC Russian Railways , but you still need to validate yours before the start of your trip in manned booths within the stations ("kassa").
Moscow has nine train stations, 8 of them offering long-distance and local train services (Savyolovsky Station offers local train service only). All are located relatively in the center of Moscow and have metro stations nearby.
Belorussky Railway Terminal: Serves Smolensk, Minsk, Kaliningrad and, through the border crossing at Brest in Byelorussia, Vilnius, Warsaw, Berlin and most of the Central and Northern Europe. Metro: Belorusskaya.
Savyolovsky Station. Commuter trains only, to the northern suburbs and beyond. Metro: Savyolovskaya.
Rizhsky Railway Terminal: Relatively small; serves only Riga and other Latvian destinations. Metro: Rizhskaya.
Kursky Railway Terminal: Actually two directions at one terminus. Southeastern branch serves Vladimir and Nizhny Novgorod, but most trains go south, through Tula, Orel, Kursk and eastern Ukraine to the Black Sea and beyond, including Adler/Sochi, the Crimea and the Caucasus. Metro: Kurskaya/Chkalovskaya.
Paveletsky Railway Terminal: Serves Voronezh, Astrakhan, and other destinations to the South. Metro: Paveletskaya.
Kievsky Railway Terminal: Southwesterly direction. Serves Kiev, other destinations in central and southern Ukraine and, through the border crossing at Chop, the Southern Europe destinations such as Budapest, Zagreb, Belgrade, and Sofia. Metro: Kievskaya.
Leningradsky Railway Terminal: Trains for northwestern and northern destinations. Serves Novgorod, Pskov, Saint Petersburg, Petrozavodsk, Murmansk, Tallinn, and Helsinki. Metro: Komsomolskaya.
Yaroslavsky Railway Terminal: Starts out going through northeastern suburbs but then turns east. Serves Rostov Veliki, Sergiev Posad, Yaroslavl, Vologda, but mainly functions as the primary gateway for the Trans-Siberian Railway, serving several destinations in Siberia, the Russian Far East, Mongolia, and China. Metro: Komsomolskaya.
Kazansky Railway Terminal: Southeastern direction. Serves Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Kazakhstan, Ulyanovsk and Uzbekistan. Metro: Komsomolskaya.
These last three are all located on one huge square, informally known as the "Three Stations' Square". A running joke among Moscow taxi drivers ever since the Soviet times is to be able to pick up a fare from one of them to the other, taking the unwary tourist on an elaborate ride in circles. Be prepared for enormous queues trying to enter or exit the Metro at peak times, as people are getting off or on the commuter trains.
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Moscow Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.
