The easiest way to move freely in Uzbekistan and from one city to another is by train.
The Spanish Talgo was incorporated into the Uzbek high-speed fleet in 2011, making Uzbekistan the only country in Central Asia with high-speed trains.
The Uzbek rail network links the country from East to West, crossing the country’s main tourist destinations: Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva and Nukus, although not all via trains afrosyob Of high speed.
Tickets can be purchased online or through tourist agencies that will charge you a commission for the process. So to save you some expenses on your trip, we are going to show you how to buy train tickets to move around Uzbekistan without having to resort to the services of an agency.
Uz Railway Mobile App
Not so long ago, the only way to buy a train ticket was to do it at the station several days in advance. Subsequently, a web page was set up, which they said put tickets on sale with little notice, but today, all these procedures can be done through an application called Railway.
At first, I tried to do it online through the PC, but there was a problem when making the payment, which always exceeded the waiting times and could never be made; but this does not happen in the app. So it is better to carry out all the procedures through the mobile, from where later, you can also retrieve the tickets and the QR codes necessary to travel.
Steps to follow
The first thing is install the application on the mobile.
First, From the main page of the app, you select the route and the day.
From there, you There will be a list with all the trains, the schedules, the duration of the journeys and the price (in soum) of the tickets.
Once the route and timetable have been selected, it will be necessary to select on the next page the number of people, the wagon and the seats.
There are three types of tickets: Economy, Business and VIPs. The difference is the number of passengers per car (Rows of four in Economyfrom three to Business and 15 seats in VIP), but really all the seats are comfortable. We book our journeys in business because due to the economic difference, it was worth going further apart. We didn’t book them in VIP because there were no correlative seats.
Then you have to fill in the data of each of the passengers. This data is recorded in the app and allows you to keep it for future reservations.
Finally, it is decided if you want to take out insurance or get an SMS notification.
Next, and after the purchase summarythe (secure) card payment, having to choose the modality Stripe for Visa, MasterCardmaster or American Express.
Card details are entered And with that, you have completed the purchase.
Tickets are stored in the app -down, where it says tickets– in the part of tickets Active (reserves not yet used) or Archive (where used banknotes are stored).
At the train station
When you go to the Station, where you must be one hour in advance, you have to show the tickets in the app (below the path there is a tab that says Get Order Sheet that generates a PDF document that has all the details of the tickets -route, schedule, wagon number and seat-) both at the door (along with the passports), and to the inspector at the door of the car.
Data of our train journeys
The routes we did were from Tashkent to Samarkand and from Samarkand to Bukhara. We did not do the one from Bukhara to Khiva by train because the schedules did not fit.
The journey from Tashkent to Samarkand We did it on the 08:00 train, which arrives at 10:08 in Samarkand -the journey takes 2h 08´- and it cost us €11.93 per person.
The journey from Samarkand to Bukhara We did it on the 9:50 train that arrived at 11:23 -the journey lasted 1h33´- and it cost us €7.81 per person.
Taxis from/to Stations in Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara
On the other hand, the Yandex to get from the hotel to the Tashkent railway station it cost us 6,600 sum (€0.56) and the taxi from the Samarkand train station to the hotel 25,000 sum (€2.13).
In Samarkand we paid 11,000 sum (€0.94) in the Yandex that took us to the train station and in Bukhara, from the train station to the hotel – which is far away – we paid 30,000 for the taxi sum (€2.56).