It is now 7:26 a.m. Beijing time on August 12. Passengers, please board quickly; the train to Ulaanbaatar is about to depart.
Ticket checkpoint at Beijing Station
No matter how well I prepared, I was still nervous the moment I stepped into Beijing Station. After all, this was my first international train ride for a long-distance trip. Two days earlier I had traveled from Shanghai to Beijing, and a typhoon happened to accompany my departure. It wasn’t chaos, but it still felt like a bit of a wind-and-rain expedition.
In Beijing I ate Peking duck and skewers, met an old friend, and by coincidence visited an exhibition at CAFA (Central Academy of Fine Arts). By the way, I highly recommend the exhibition called “Realm of Emptiness.” With a full belly from homeland food and a dark circle from a sleepless night, I got to Beijing Station bright and early. There didn’t seem to be that many passengers today, and most of them looked like they would get off at Jining or Erenhot. Only a few foreign travelers seemed likely to actually cross the border.
I’ve said a lot already, but I still haven’t said what I was going to do and where I was going. One hot afternoon in June, while I was trying to figure out where to escape the summer heat in August, I suddenly decided to take a train north to Russia. A good friend in Beijing bought the tickets over two trips—they were not easy to come by. I planned to go from Beijing to Ulaanbaatar and stay there for a few days, then continue north on Mongolian Rail to Irkutsk.
International train route map
When I thought about why I wanted to travel so far by rail, I realized it’s a bit like my experience with noodles: something I hated as a child has gradually turned into a hobby I now enjoy, even like.
My bucket list includes a dream to experience famous train routes in this lifetime (preferably not alone). From the Orient Express I once rode, to the Pride of Africa where your wallet cries every minute, to the California Zephyr, to the all-glass Rocky Mountaineer, and of course the Qinghai–Tibet Railway. Considering practical factors, I decided to make the Trans-Siberian line my first rail journey destination.
International train boarding time is earlier than usual; you can get off the platform 40 minutes early. As soon as we came down the platform and saw the white-and-red Mongolian train, my nerves faded, leaving only anticipation for the moment the coach started to sway.
A group of us gathered for a photo beside the train emblem. In fact, this train, K23, is not the famous “number one Chinese train,” K3. K3 runs from Beijing via Ulaanbaatar to Moscow, and after group-ticket sales opened last year, summer seats are often completely snapped up by agencies. So we had to take a workaround and choose its sister service, K23, to go to Ulaanbaatar first.
No way to read Mongolian: couldn’t even figure out which characters spell “23”
Mongolian Rail attendants, sturdy and friendly
It’s a little disappointing that I couldn’t ride K3—the one with the China-Russia heist and endless legends—but seeing the all-white Mongolian Rail cars coupled with the dark-green China Railway cars was still a kind of consolation. K23 runs between Beijing and Ulaanbaatar, operated alternately by Mongolian Rail and China Railway. On Mondays, when Mongolian Rail is in charge, one to three China Railway coaches (No. 0 turnaround cars) that only run between Beijing and Erenhot are attached to the rear; these are removed at the border station. As a bonus, one trip lets you experience two very different types of coaches, even if the original reason for split-ticketing was simply to save money.
Combination of China Railway and Mongolian Rail trains
Add-on service train from Beijing to Erenhot
No. 0 add-on turnaround coach
After boarding, I made up my own berth (yes, do-it-yourself and all that), got my luggage settled, and started wandering around. Compared with Mongolian Rail’s MECT-36 coaches, the China Railway attached RW18 coaches felt nostalgic and old-school, reminiscent of hard-seating rides from Wenzhou to Hangzhou more than a decade ago. What struck me most was that there was no air conditioning, so I had to rely entirely on a tiny fan.
The bedding and blankets are actually pretty cute
Through the blazing heat, everything depended on this one little fan
Pretending I was on the Orient Express while having a hearty breakfast
After wandering around and getting tired, I dozed off in my compartment; when I woke up, it was already close to noon. I pulled up my phone map and saw we were roughly near the Hebei–Shanxi border.
The coach still looked neat and fairly clean
Back in the compartment, the little kid in the room next door had already started writing his summer homework
I went to the dining car to find some food. China Railway’s dining car was similarly retro and empty—most domestic passengers probably don’t dine on the train. The attendant said that because almost no one was ordering meals, they weren’t bringing much food onboard. The only options were scrambled eggs with tomatoes, eggs fried with onions, and onion-fried sliced pork. So, yes, it was basically permutations of a few ingredients.
A retro but somewhat austere dining coach
These lights have a very distinctive atmosphere
K23’s special onion-and-egg combination
The food was only barely “well cooked,” but at least the dining car had air conditioning. The highlight of lunch may have been overhearing a group of conductors from Beijing cooling off and talking nonstop. They covered everything from King Zhao Wuling extending the Great Wall to Tang-dynasty halberds, from India’s colonial history to Trump. If you make friends with people from Beijing, your ears will never be alone.
CRH head car seen while stopping at Datong station
A little after 3 p.m., the train reached the first major stop along the way, Jining, which is also the starting point of the Ji-Er line. I got off to stretch my legs and buy some water. To be precise, the tracks we are on are not the Trans-Siberian Railway in the classic sense. The true one is the nearly 10,000-kilometer line starting from Moscow on the Baltic Sea, passing the Ural Mountains and the Siberian Plateau, crossing the Buryat steppe and the forests of the Greater Xing’an Range, and ending at the Pacific port city of Vladivostok—the route known in old geography books as the “First Eurasian Land Bridge,” the Great Wall of the Russian Empire era.
This trip is actually on a branch line, connected from China’s Ji-Er Line to the Mongolian Main Line. Besides this, the Trans-Siberian also has three other branches that connect to Manzhouli, Suifenhe, and Pyongyang.
Jining Station in Ulanqab
By evening, the train was gradually moving deeper into the heart of the steppe. Inner Mongolia’s prairie always has a somewhat bare, windswept look—still, I’m looking forward to the Mongolian section of the Trans-Mongolian Railway tomorrow.
We stopped for two minutes at a small station called Zhurihe. For military enthusiasts, this name should sound familiar. The PLA Northern Theater’s largest tactical training base is based here, so the name “Zhurihe drill” appears in the news all the time.
At last, a meadow that actually looks like one
Zhurihe station—much simpler than Jining
The steppe sunset disappears fast; in a moment the sun is down below the horizon. Night slowly settles over the grassland, leaving only scattered lights in the distance, wind turbines, and trains roaring past.
A carriage at sunset
The sunset in the carriage—nothing like the others
Even the sun on the steppe is hurrying home
A giant windmill in the night—where is Don Quixote?
A little after 8 p.m., the train arrived at the last city inside Chinese territory, Erenhot. Everything ahead was Mongolia. We had to stay here for a little over four hours, mainly because the train needed to enter an international bogie-exchange depot to swap from China’s 1,435 mm standard-gauge wheelset to the 1,520 mm broad-gauge used in Mongolia and Russia. The reason for the different gauges on each side was mostly military: in the 1960s, it was to prevent the Soviets from rushing troops deep into China by rail.
Because I bought my ticket in segments, I had to get off and clear the station gates, so I couldn’t experience that magical wheel-changing process firsthand. I used the time to wander around Erenhot and buy a few supplies while exchanging some cash.
It was night, so the lights in the carriage came on.
At Erenhot, everyone in the CR coaches has to get off and wait while the wheels are changed.
At night, Erenhot is a quiet little city. Locals along the roadside were doing all the familiar crowd activities—playing badminton, dancing in the square, scrolling on Douyin.
The square-dance crowd in Erenhot seems relatively young, maybe because entertainment options are a bit limited there.
I stopped at a barbecue place in the city center—lamb skewers in the steppe are really good. The straightforward Inner Mongolian waiter just walked off in disbelief when he heard I’d drink while eating barbecue but chose not to, and didn’t realize what I meant at first.
Back in the international waiting room, I finished exit formalities. Very few travelers were on board tonight, so the departure hall felt cool and empty. The customs and immigration process in Erenhot was the friendliest I’ve ever had—there was a small crowd of border officials around you, chatting.
Just after midnight, the train with the exchanged wheelsets rolled into the platform. Once I boarded the Mongolian train, I could finally get the good sleep I had been waiting for.
Deep in the night, K23 slowly pulled out of the border, leaving Erenhot behind.
Goodbye for a while, my homeland.
Hello, Mongolia.