Doğu Ekspresi

There is a photograph that did this train a great deal of good: a single red locomotive and a string of blue coaches, cutting a thin line across an entirely white world somewhere in eastern Anatolia. It went around Turkish social media, and then around everyone else's, and a slow, cheap, unglamorous overnight service became a national obsession. Tickets for the Doğu Ekspresi now vanish within minutes of the booking window opening.

The train itself is not new. The first one ran in 1936, and it was pushed through to Kars in 1962, once the eastern line had been converted to standard gauge. It runs daily, all year, the length of the 1,446-kilometre Ankara–Kars railway — a line built in stages between 1910 and 1939, mostly single track, curling through gorges and across an enormous emptiness.

It takes about twenty-six and a half hours. That is the point. You leave Ankara in the early evening, eat in the dining car, sleep as the train grinds across the plateau, wake somewhere near Erzincan with the Euphrates running beside you, and spend a whole second day climbing into the highlands until you reach Kars — a cold Russian-built town near the Armenian border, where it can hit −30°C and the ruined city of Ani waits an hour away on the steppe.

In between there is tea, endlessly. There are families, students, soldiers and grandmothers who will feed you whether you like it or not. It is one of the last great sociable train journeys, and one of the cheapest.

The train leaves Ankara at six in the evening and spends its first hours on the dry, rolling plateau of central Anatolia — brown hills, grain silos, small towns, the occasional flock. It calls at Kırıkkale, then runs on through the evening to Kayseri, sitting under the great extinct volcano of Erciyes, and on to Sivas, a Seljuk city with some of the finest medieval stone carving in Turkey. By now it is deep night, and the corridor has gone quiet.

You wake to the best of it. Somewhere before Erzincan the line drops into the valleys of the upper Euphrates, and for hours the train hangs above green-brown water in a series of gorges, crossing and recrossing, tunnelling through spurs. In winter the river runs between banks of ice. This is the stretch people stand in the corridor for.

Then the long climb. Eastern Turkey is high — Erzurum sits near 1,900 metres — and the train works its way up onto a bare, enormous plateau where the villages are low and flat-roofed and the horizon does not stop. Erzurum itself is a serious mountain city with Seljuk medreses and a ski resort above it. Beyond, the country empties out further still, through Sarıkamış and its pine forests, until the train finally rolls into Kars in the afternoon of the second day.

The rhythm of it is the thing. Twenty-six hours is long enough that the train stops being transport and becomes a place: you learn the corridor, the dining car, which window is best, whose children are running which length of the carriage. Tea comes past on trays. Somebody produces bread and cheese and hands it over without asking. You arrive at Kars knowing half the coach.

The Turistik Doğu Ekspresi runs the same rails differently. Introduced in 2019 because the regular train was impossible to book, it carries 120 passengers in nine cars — all sleeping accommodation — and stops for two to three hours at points along the way so passengers can get off and actually see somewhere. It runs from December to March, which is exactly when you want to be here.

There are two different trains on this line, and knowing which one you want is most of the battle.

Times for the regular Doğu Ekspresi, trains 22010 and 92009:

Both run Ankara ⇄ Kars, calling at Kırıkkale, Kayseri, Sivas, Erzincan and Erzurum.

Good to know:

• Booking is the hard part. The regular train is famous for selling out within minutes of the window opening — TCDD created the Touristic service purely because of it. Know your date, be online the moment tickets drop.
• Westbound is a different trip. Kars→Ankara reverses which scenery you get in daylight; many prefer starting in Kars.
• Erzurum to Kars in daylight. In winter TCDD also runs the Turistik Erzurum–Kars Bölgesel Treni, a regional train of Pullman seats over the last stretch of this line, stopping five minutes at Sarıkamış. It leaves Erzurum on Saturdays at 13:00, reaching Kars at 17:30, and comes back on Sundays, leaving Kars at 09:30 and reaching Erzurum at 14:00, from 26 December 2026 to 7 February 2027. A seat costs 850 TL, and tickets go on sale in December. See TCDD's page for the train (opens in a new tab).
• Winter is the draw and the risk. Snow is the whole reason people come, but it also means delays — build slack into onward plans.

Times are TCDD's own, as of September 2026, from its Trenim Nerede page (opens in a new tab), where each station's board lists the train and its stops.

Tickets come from TCDD Taşımacılık, online or at a station counter. The daily train carries four-berth couchettes and ordinary seats, with a dining car: Ankara to Kars costs 920 TL in a seat and 1,585 TL in a couchette. The difficulty is not the price but getting a place — winter dates can sell out in minutes, so be online the moment booking opens.

The winter Turistik Doğu Ekspresi sells two-bed sleeping compartments by the room: 16,500 TL from Ankara until mid-January and 20,000 TL after, or 15,000 and 18,000 TL from Kars. Tickets go on sale on 26 October 2026; excursions and meals are extra. Dress for Kars, not Ankara: the Kars platform at eight in the morning is not heated. Prices checked in September 2026.

The line strings together a set of places most visitors to Turkey never reach — and the far end is worth the day and a half on its own.

Between Sivas and Erzurum comes the scenic heart of the ride. Around Erzincan the train spends hours above the Euphrates in a chain of gorges, and if you are passing in daylight this is the stretch to stand in the corridor for. Higher and further east, the pine forests of Sarıkamış hold the snow into spring; the town is also remembered for the Battle of Sarıkamış, one of the major engagements of the Caucasus front in the First World War, in which an army was destroyed as much by cold as by fighting.

Kars is the terminus, and a strange, likeable place: broad straight streets and Russian-built stone houses left from the decades of tsarist rule, a castle above the river, and some of the best honey and cheese in Turkey. It was itself the capital of the Bagratid Armenian kingdom from 929 to 961, before the court moved on to Ani — so the two ends of the excursion are two capitals of the same vanished state.

Give yourself two nights in Kars if you can. Everything below is reachable from a stop along the way.

For the journey itself the decision is simply which class you book — and at about twenty-six and a half hours, it matters more than it would on a normal overnight run.

• Couchette — four berths to a compartment, made up with sheets, a blanket and a pillow, and shared with whoever turns up. The way to arrive in Kars rested, and where the sociable side of the train really lives.
• Coach seat — a proper seat for a day and a half. Fine if you're young, stubborn and travelling in summer. Less fine in January.

The daily train has no private sleeping cars; those are on the winter Turistik Doğu Ekspresi only.

At the ends of the line:

• Ankara — plenty of business hotels near the station; nobody lingers, and there's no need to.
• Kars — stay at least two nights. You need one to recover and one to get out to Ani, which is the reason you came. The town has a growing set of small hotels, some in restored Russian-era buildings, and the local honey and kaşar cheese are famous.
• Erzurum — a good place to break the trip, especially if you want to ski at Palandöken or see the Seljuk medreses.
• Kayseri — break here for Cappadocia, which is an easy add-on and a completely different Turkey.

Two notes. Winter is the reason to come and the reason to plan — Kars can sit at −30°C, and delays happen. And book everything early for December to March, when the whole country wants to be on this train.