Chișinău to Bucharest — the Prietenia, and two hours on the jacks at Ungheni

Train 105 leaves Chișinău at ten to five in the afternoon and reaches București Nord at twenty to seven the next morning — 592 kilometres and thirteen hours forty-eight minutes later. Both railways call it the Prietenia, the Friendship, and on the Romanian side it carries the numbers 401 and 402 instead. It is the most substantial thing Moldova's railway still does. Calea Ferată din Moldova's own timetable returns four passenger workings out of the capital and no more: this sleeper, a train to Kyiv, a weekend railcar to Iași and a local to Ungheni three days a week. Ask it for Bălți, for Ocnița or for Tiraspol and the board comes back empty.

What makes the night worth having is the two hours in the middle of it. Moldova's railways are 1,520 mm Russian broad gauge and Romania's are 1,435 mm standard, so a through carriage cannot simply run across the Prut. At Ungheni, the frontier station on the Moldovan bank, the train is taken apart: each carriage is drawn between a pair of lifting frames, jacked clear of the rails with the passengers still inside it, and set down on a different set of bogies. It goes in at 19:34 and leaves at 21:35, and the border formalities happen in the same two hours. Nothing else is asked of the traveller. Everybody aboard has a berth, because the booking system offers two classes of sleeping car and no seats at all.

Out of Chișinău

The station is a short walk below the centre of the city, and it is the second one on the site. The first was designed in the 1880s by Heinrich von Lonsky and built under Alexandru Bernardazzi, in the years after the railway reached Chișinău from Tiraspol; it was bombed in 1941 and again in 1944, and what stands now is the post-war rebuilding, finished in the 1950s in the heavy style of the period. International trains use platform 1, whose concourse can be closed off with barriers to make a customs hall — a detail that tells you what the station is mostly for these days.

The train is a rake of blue Moldovan sleeping cars, ex-Soviet in pattern, with white curtains lettered MOLDOVA and a hand-sized route board in one window reading CHIȘINĂU – BUCUREȘTI and the numbers 105/106. It leaves at 16:50 and turns west almost at once, up through Strășeni and Călărași into the Codri — the wooded hills in the middle of the country, low and green and nothing like the steppe most people expect of Moldova. Cornești is the top of it. Ungheni, 107 kilometres out, comes up at 19:34, two hours and forty-four minutes after the capital.

Two hours at the break of gauge

Then everything stops. Moldova inherited the Russian gauge of 1,520 mm along with the rest of the Soviet railway; Romania, a few hundred metres away across the Prut, is on the European standard of 1,435 mm. The difference is eight and a half centimetres and it is enough to make a through carriage impossible without surgery.

So the train is taken apart. Each carriage is drawn in turn between two green-and-yellow lifting frames, uncoupled, and raised off the track on jacks with everybody still aboard. The broad-gauge bogies are rolled out from underneath, standard-gauge ones are rolled in, and the body is lowered onto them. Passports and customs are dealt with in the same window. The operator's own timetable gives the arrival as 19:34 and the departure as 21:35 — two hours and one minute standing still, in what is otherwise a fairly brisk overnight run.

Beyond the station the line crosses the Prut on an iron bridge that Moldova has always called the Podul Eiffel and that Eiffel did not design: it was drawn by the Russian engineer Nikolai Belelubsky and built between 1874 and 1876, ahead of the war with Turkey. Iași, the first Romanian city, is reached at 23:08 and left at 23:28.

Down Moldavia in the dark

The rest is Romanian Moldavia in the small hours, and it goes quickly because the line is a main one and the train is now on standard-gauge bogies behind Romanian traction. Roman at 01:15, Bacău at 01:54, Adjud at 02:40, Mărășești at 03:04, Focșani at 03:30, Buzău at 04:39. Moldova's railway is unelectrified from end to end, so the wires overhead are the first the journey has seen; the locomotive at the Bucharest end is a CFR electric — 41-0891-6 in one photograph of this train, 410872 in another, both of them in the railway's red and cream. Ploiești at 05:50 is when people start folding bedding, and București Nord arrives at 06:38.

Northbound it is the same night in reverse and thirteen hours thirty-eight minutes long: away from Gara de Nord at 19:06, Iași at 02:03, into Ungheni at 04:09 and out at 06:03, Chișinău at 08:44. The jacking happens in the dark on that run, which is worth knowing if the bogie change is the reason for the ticket.

Since the autumn of 2025 the train has been longer than it looks. Ukrainian Railways carriages are attached at Chișinău and go on to Kyiv, which is how a passenger travels from Bucharest to the Ukrainian capital by rail again after five years without a through service.

One train a day each way, all year. Southbound it is 105 on Moldovan paperwork and 401 on Romanian; northbound, 106 and 402. Times below are as published by Calea Ferată din Moldova in August 2026, and are given in local time — Moldova and Romania keep the same clock.

The two hours at Ungheni are the bogie change and the border, and they are in the timetable rather than a delay. Southbound the whole run is 13 hours 48 minutes; northbound, 13 hours 38.

Availability was sampled for five separate September 2026 dates, in both directions, and the train was on offer on every one of them; the operator's timetable also marks all seven days of the week. CFR Călători states plainly on its own Moldova page that the Prietenia runs daily.

The live timetable is at railway.md (opens in a new tab) under Transportul de pasageri → Orarul trenurilor, and the same board on the Romanian side is published by CFR Călători (opens in a new tab). Both are worth a look before travelling: this is a single daily train across two frontiers, and it has been suspended before.

Calea Ferată din Moldova sells this train from its own portal at on.railway.md (opens in a new tab), in Romanian and Russian, opening thirty days before departure. Only a limited allocation goes online — the portal says so — and the rest is sold at station ticket offices. Prices below were read from it on 31 August 2026 for September departures, in Moldovan lei; children pay about a third less.

CFR Călători sells the same train as 401/402 and prices it in euro. Its SMART Prietenia offer is €31 for a berth in a four-berth sleeping carriage in either direction, limited in number, neither refundable nor exchangeable and with no further reduction for children. Through to Kyiv in the Ukrainian carriages, the same operator quotes €75.90. A passport is needed: this is a train between a country inside the European Union and one outside it.

A rail pass is not worth buying for this journey, and the reason is a border rather than a price. Moldova is not an Interrail or Eurail country — it does not appear on Interrail's list of covered railways at all, checked in August 2026 — so no pass reaches Chișinău, Ungheni or any part of the Moldovan half of the run.

Romania is covered, on CFR Călători, which is the operator of 401/402 on its side of the Prut; Interrail lists five private Romanian operators as excluded, and CFR Călători is not one of them. A pass held for Romania is therefore useful for the Bucharest–Iași part of a wider trip, but a berth on a sleeping car is a separate purchase whatever the ticket, and the Moldovan section has to be bought outright. For a single crossing, the operator's own fare — about 850 lei, or CFR's €31 SMART Prietenia offer — is the whole cost, and a pass adds nothing to it.

The train is at its two ends in daylight and everywhere else in the dark, so the places worth building a trip around are Chișinău, the frontier town of Ungheni, and the two Romanian cities the line runs through. Iași is reached at twenty past eleven at night southbound and two in the morning coming back, which makes it a stop to break the journey at rather than to see from the window.

The night itself is the accommodation, so a bed is only needed at either end — or in Iași, if the journey is being broken there rather than slept through. Chișinău's station is a walk below the centre and Bucharest's Gara de Nord is a short metro ride from it, which puts most of both cities within reach of an arriving train.