Tbilisi to Batumi — over the Surami Pass to the Black Sea

Georgia is a small country with a mountain range across its middle, and everything about its railway follows from that. The Likhi range runs north to south between the Greater and Lesser Caucasus, dividing the dry east from the wet, subtropical west, and the only sensible way through it is the Surami pass. The line from Tbilisi to the Black Sea has crossed there since 1872. It carried Caspian oil to the port of Batumi under the tsars, it was the first railway in the Soviet Union to be worked by electric locomotives, and it is still the spine of the country — 343 kilometres from the capital to the coast, all of it electrified at 3,000 volts.

Four trains a day now run the whole length of it in four hours and one minute, calling three times on the way. They are double-deck Stadler units in Georgian Railway's white and red, with the country's five crosses on the flanks, and they were not built for Georgia at all. What the passenger gets is a morning of dry hills and vineyards east of the pass, twenty minutes of tunnels and river gorge through it, and then a long green descent into Imereti that ends beside the Black Sea. Second class costs 36 lari, and every seat is reserved.

The train leaves from Tbilisi Central on Station Square — a Brutalist block of the early 1980s, rebuilt in 2010 as station and shopping centre together, with the only interchange between the city's two metro lines underneath it. Departures are at 06:30, 08:05, 10:15 and 17:10, and the first thing that happens is a long slow curl through the freight yards and out along the Mtkvari. Mtskheta passes on the right at kilometre 21, the old capital where the Aragvi meets the Mtkvari, and after that the valley opens into Shida Kartli: flat brown fields, poplar windbreaks, vineyards, and the Greater Caucasus standing along the northern horizon on a clear morning. Gori goes by at 76 km, Khashuri at 120. Neither is a stop on these trains.

Khashuri is where the character changes. The Borjomi branch turns south there towards the mineral springs, and the main line begins to climb west into the Likhi range — the wall that separates eastern Georgia from western, and the reason this railway exists in the form it does.

The pass

The Surami pass is only 949 metres, the lowest crossing of the range, and the line that opened through it in 1872 was built cheaply: gradients of 1 in 22 and curves of 100 metres radius, worked by Fairlie articulated tank engines because nothing else would go round them. By the late 1880s the section was full. The answer was a tunnel of about four kilometres between Likhi and Tsipa, finished in 1890, which eased the ruling gradient to 1 in 34 and let the curves out to 150 metres. The portal above the Chkherimela still carries the dates 1886–1890 cut into the stone over the arch.

Even so, the 63 kilometres from Khashuri down to Zestaponi stayed the bottleneck of the whole Georgian network for another century — steep, twisting, and slow enough that freight trains overheated their brakes on the descent. The rebuilding of that section took fourteen years, began in September 2011 and was declared complete on 24 December 2025, at a ceremony held at Kvishkheti in front of the mouth of a new dual-tube tunnel 8,300 metres long. The project laid 40 kilometres of new railway, six tunnels and ten bridges, and cut the time through the mountain section by between forty and fifty minutes. It is the reason a run that the 2022 public timetable allowed five hours and fifty-five minutes for now takes four hours and one.

Where the first Soviet electric train ran

There is a second reason to look out of the window here. Work on electrifying Khashuri–Zestaponi at 3,000 volts direct current began in 1928, using power from new stations on the Mtkvari and the Rioni, and it finished in 1932. On 2 August that year an electric locomotive numbered S10-01 made its trial run over the pass; on 16 August electric working opened officially. Both were firsts for the Soviet Union, and the locomotive was American — one of eight ordered from General Electric, which had built comparable machines for the mountain railways of Brazil. Seven more came from Tecnomasio Italiano Brown Boveri, and only then did Kolomna and Dinamo start building the Soviet copy, the class Ss, whose name simply stands for Suramsky sovetsky — Surami, Soviet. The USSR's first passenger electric locomotive, the PB21, went on trial on the same railway between Khashuri and Gori in 1934.

Down to the sea

West of the tunnels the train drops through the gorge of the Chkherimela, past Marelisi and Kharagauli, and the landscape turns. Imereti is wet where Kartli was dry: box and hornbeam forest on the slopes, small red-roofed villages, and the Kvirila running alongside. Zestaponi arrives at 183 km, Rioni at 213, and then the only stop of the first half — Kutaisi International Airport, 231 km out and two hours thirty-five minutes from Tbilisi. The station was rebuilt in 2022 and put the country's second-busiest airport on the railway; it is a two-kilometre transfer to the terminal, and Kutaisi itself is fourteen kilometres further east.

After Samtredia the line swings south and runs down the Colchis lowland to meet the coast. Ureki comes at 301 km, a resort whose beaches are sand rather than shingle, black and magnetic; Kobuleti at 326. From there to the end the railway is squeezed between the hills and the water, through short tunnels and tangles of bamboo, palm and banana at Green Cape, and it finishes at Makhinjauri — 342 km — and Batumi Central at 343. The station is not in the middle of Batumi despite the name: it stands about four kilometres from the old town, on the site the trains have used since services to the city centre stopped in the 1990s.

Georgian Railway runs four trains each way between Tbilisi and Batumi, every day, and they all take the same four hours. Times below are as of August 2026, taken from the operator's own selling system; tickets are sold through Georgian Railway (opens in a new tab) and its ticketing partner, and the booking window opens 20 days before departure.

Tbilisi to Batumi

Batumi to Tbilisi

What runs when

Trains 802, 808 and 804 out of Tbilisi, and 803, 801 and 807 back, are the year-round service. Train 806 at 06:30 from Tbilisi and train 805 at 14:10 from Batumi are a summer addition, and the last date on which either is being sold is 15 September 2026 — from the 16th the selling system shows three trains each way with several hundred seats free, and those two gone.

Only three intermediate stops are served: Kutaisi International Airport, Ureki and Kobuleti. Every other station on the 343 kilometres — Gori, Khashuri, Zestaponi, Samtredia — is left to the slower trains, of which two run daily from Tbilisi: the 08:15 to Zugdidi and the 17:30 to Poti. Both are single-deck, both take a good deal longer, and both cost about a third as much.

Every seat is reserved, so a ticket is bought for a named train. Georgian Railway sells from 20 days before departure and closes sales ten minutes before it leaves; buying online adds a service fee of about a lari, and an agent adds theirs. Registering a ticket needs a personal identification number — a passport, for a foreign visitor — and that document is checked again at the train door.

Refunds slide with the clock: the full fare back more than 15 hours before departure, 85 per cent between 4 and 15 hours, 70 per cent inside 4. Children under five travel free without a seat of their own; five to ten pay a child fare. The fares below are as sold in August 2026.

Georgia sits outside the Interrail and Eurail area. There is no Georgia One Country Pass among the twenty-nine that Interrail sells, and the Global Pass buys nothing here — checked against interrail.eu in August 2026, where the only mention of Georgia is in the list of countries a traveller may live in.

That matters less than it would elsewhere, because the fares are low enough that a pass would struggle to pay for itself. The full 343 kilometres from Tbilisi to the Black Sea costs 36 lari in second class, and the slower trains to Poti and Zugdidi are cheaper still. Tickets are bought directly from Georgian Railway, online or at a station, and the only thing worth planning ahead is the 20-day selling window in July and August, when the coastal trains do sell out.

The train stops three times in 343 kilometres, which makes each stop a decision rather than a convenience. Kutaisi International Airport is the way into Imereti and its eleventh- and twelfth-century monasteries; Ureki and Kobuleti are the two beach resorts on the Guria and Adjara coast, twenty minutes apart on the timetable and quite different in character; and Batumi is where the line ends, four kilometres from a station that carries its name.

The two ends of the line are the two places worth a night, and Kobuleti is the one intermediate stop with hotels on the beach it sits behind. Tbilisi Central and Batumi Central are both a short taxi ride from their city centres, so neither end obliges an early start. What follows for each hotel is what it says about itself on its own site.