Dhaka to Cox's Bazar

For most of Bangladesh's history the country's most famous stretch of coast had no railway at all. Cox's Bazar sits at the far south-eastern corner of the country, past Chattogram and the Karnaphuli, where the land narrows between the hills and the Bay of Bengal, and the only way there was the road. That changed on 1 December 2023, when Bangladesh Railway began running trains over a new 102-kilometre line from Dohazari to Cox's Bazar and put the beach within a single night's ride of the capital.

The journey is 551 kilometres and takes about eight and a half hours. It runs down the busy Dhaka–Chattogram main line, pauses at Chattogram to reverse and change crews, and then turns south onto the new railway — single track, dual gauge, and quiet in a way the first two-thirds of the trip never is. Two named trains work it in each direction: the overnight Cox's Bazar Express, which leaves Dhaka at eleven at night and arrives in time for breakfast, and the daytime Parjotak Express — parjotak is Bengali for tourist — which leaves at quarter past six in the morning and gets in mid-afternoon.

What makes the last hundred kilometres worth staying awake for is what the line had to cross. Roughly 27 kilometres of it run through the Chunati and Fasiakhali wildlife sanctuaries and Medhakoccopia National Park, which are elephant country, and the railway was built with a green bridge over the top of it — the first elephant overpass on any railway in South Asia.

The train that leaves Kamalapur at eleven at night is a metre-gauge intercity of the kind Bangladesh Railway runs everywhere: a long rake in green and cream, or in the newer white, red and green, with an air-conditioned end and a non-air-conditioned one. At the head of it, more often than not, is a locomotive of Class 3000 — an EMD GT38ACL of 2,200 horsepower, built by Hyundai Rotem in South Korea under licence from Electro-Motive Diesel and delivered in 2020. Thirty were bought. The first ten are metre gauge outright; the other twenty can be lifted onto broad-gauge bogies, which is the practical answer to a country that never settled on one gauge.

Twenty-three minutes out, the train calls at Biman Bandar, the station under the flight path at Dhaka airport, and then does not stop again for four hours. This is the Dhaka–Chattogram corridor, the busiest railway in the country, and at night it is mostly a matter of level crossings, bells, and the lights of towns.

Chattogram, and the turn south

Chattogram comes at twenty to four in the morning, and the train stands there for forty minutes — the longest booked halt anywhere on the run, and the point at which the journey stops being a main line trip and becomes something else. The daytime Parjotak Express makes the same pause at twenty past eleven, in daylight, which is the better of the two if you want to see the yard.

South of Chattogram the character changes completely. The line runs through Patiya to Dohazari on rails that have been there since the colonial period and were relaid for this project, and then, at Dohazari, it joins the new railway. From here to the sea everything is 2023: concrete sleepers, fenced boundaries, level crossings with barriers, and stations at Satkania, Lohagara, Harbang, Chakaria, Dulahazara, Islamabad and Ramu that were fields eight years ago.

The elephant overpass

Beyond Satkania the railway enters Chunati Wildlife Sanctuary, and for roughly 27 kilometres it is running through protected forest — Chunati, then Fasiakhali, with Medhakoccopia National Park alongside. This is one of the last corridors used by Bangladesh's wild Asian elephants, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature counted sixteen places along that 27 kilometres where elephants cross.

The Asian Development Bank, which financed the line, commissioned a baseline biodiversity assessment in 2018 and it recommended three structures: one overpass and two underpasses. The overpass is at Chunati, it is the first built over a railway anywhere in South Asia, and it is planted with banana and bamboo to persuade elephants to use it. The project's deputy director told The Business Standard in 2023 that elephants had already been seen eating the banana trees, and that the ADB would monitor the crossing for two years once trains were running. Conservationists who worked on the IUCN survey argued at the time that three structures for sixteen corridors was not enough, and that argument has not gone away.

None of this is visible from a carriage window at three in the morning. On the daytime train it is: green hills to the east, forest close on both sides, and — briefly — a wide vegetated bridge passing overhead.

Ramu, and the oyster

Ramu gave the project its middle name — it was built as the Dohazari–Ramu–Cox's Bazar line — and it is the last station before the sea. From there it is seventeen minutes to Cox's Bazar, where the train runs in under a building shaped like an oyster shell. That is deliberate: the architect, Mohammad Foyez Ullah, took the form from the shells on the beach. It cost ৳214 crore, it has five floors, three platforms, left-luggage lockers and a 39-room hotel upstairs, and it stands a short drive inland from 120 kilometres of sand.

Two named intercity trains work the full 551 kilometres between Dhaka and Cox's Bazar, each six days a week, and each with a different rest day. Times below are Bangladesh Railway's own, taken from the operator's train-information service in August 2026, and are local time (BST, UTC+6).

Dhaka to Cox's Bazar

Cox's Bazar to Dhaka

The through trains stop only at Dhaka's airport station and at Chattogram, where they stand for twenty to forty minutes. Booked time is 8 hr 20 min to 8 hr 35 min depending on the working.

Chattogram to Cox's Bazar only

Two shorter all-stations trains cover the 150 kilometres from the port city, calling at Sholoshohor, Patiya, Dohazari, Satkania, Lohagara, Harbang, Chakaria, Dulahazara, Islamabad and Ramu. Both run daily except Monday.

Bangladesh Railway republishes the running days and times whenever a working is altered, and single trains are re-timed at short notice after track incidents. The live version is at eticket.railway.gov.bd (opens in a new tab).

Bangladesh Railway sells its own seats, online and at station counters, and nobody else does. Online tickets open ten days before travel and the popular classes on this route regularly clear within the hour, so a Thursday-night berth to the coast is not a walk-up proposition. Buying online needs a registered account with the railway.

Fares are set by the railway rather than by demand, and they last changed on 20 December 2025, when the Eastern Zone added a pontage charge — a levy that counts every 100 metres of bridge as 2.5 kilometres of extra distance. That put the biggest single increase in the country onto this route. The cheapest chair class is well below the air-conditioned fares in the cards below, and it is the class most Bangladeshis travel in.

No rail pass covers Bangladesh. Interrail and Eurail are European products, the Indian and Sri Lankan passes stop at their own borders, and Bangladesh Railway has never issued a tourist pass of its own — there is no equivalent of an all-line ticket to buy.

That is less of a loss than it sounds. The whole 551 kilometres in an air-conditioned chair is 1,449 taka, and the non-air-conditioned classes are a fraction of that, so a pass would have little to discount. What a pass would not have solved is the thing that actually constrains this route, which is availability: seats open ten days ahead through the operator's own booking service and go quickly, and no ticket type changes that.

The through trains call at two places between the capital and the sea, so most of what follows is either the destination itself or reachable from it. The one exception is the forest the line runs through in its last hour, which has no station worth getting off at and is the most interesting thing on the route.

Cox's Bazar has more hotel rooms than anywhere else in Bangladesh outside Dhaka, and most of them are strung along Marine Drive between Kolatoli and Laboni, a few kilometres from the station. The overnight train arrives at 07:20, which is well before any check-in, and the daytime train arrives at 14:40, which is not — a point worth weighing when choosing between the two.