I never thought I’d feel nervous about boarding a train in Central Asia.
But there I was, standing on Platform 3 at Tashkent’s main railway station at 7:15 AM, clutching my ticket for the Afrosiyob—Uzbekistan’s answer to Japan’s Shinkansen or France’s TGV—and realizing I had no idea what to expect from a high-speed rail experience in a country that, until recently, most travelers associated more with ancient Silk Road caravansaries than with modern transportation infrastructure. The Afrosiyob, named after the legendary pre-Islamic ruler of Samarkand, started running in 2011, connecting Tashkent to Samarkand in roughly two and a half hours at speeds up to 250 kilometers per hour, give or take. I’d read that it was Spanish-built, a Talgo 250 model, the same trains that run between Madrid and Barcelona, which seemed promising. But I’d also read reviews mentioning erratic air conditioning, unexplained delays, and—this is Central Asia, after all—the occasional bureaucratic hassle that can turn a simple journey into an endurance test.
Anyway, the boarding process was surprisingly smooth. A uniformed attendant checked my passport against my ticket, scanned a barcode, and gestured me toward Car 4. Inside, the train looked decidedly European—cream-colored seats with burgundy accents, overhead luggage racks, individual reading lights. Not what I expected, honestly.
The departure was punctual to the minute, which felt almost surreal given my previous experiences with post-Soviet transportation systems. As we pulled out of Tashkent, the city’s Soviet-era apartment blocks gave way to cotton fields and the occasional crumbling collective farm building, remnants of an economy that once prioritized agricultural quotas over, well, pretty much everything else. The landscape was flat, achingly so, stretching toward the horizon in shades of brown and dusty green.
Here’s the thing: speed changes your relationship with a landscape.
The peculiar disorientation of watching Uzbekistan blur past at 250 kilometers per hour
At conventional train speeds—say, 80 or 100 km/h—you can watch details unfold: a shepherd with his flock, a roadside chaikhana with its blue-tiled exterior, children waving from a village. At 250 km/h, those details compress into impressionistic smears of color and movement. I found myself staring out the window, trying to anchor my vision on something, anything, only to have it whip past before my brain could process what I was seeing. The sensation was oddly hypnotic, but also—I guess—a little melancholy. Traveling this fast meant sacrificing the intimate observations that make slow travel so rewarding, the kind of noticing that lets you feel like you’re actually inhabiting a place rather than just passing through it at velocity.
The onboard service was, wait—maybe I should explain the class system first. The Afrosiyob offers three classes: VIP (basically first class with meal service), Business (comfortable but no meals), and Economy (which I’d chosen, because I’m cheap and curious). My Economy seat was perfectly comfortable, with more legroom than most European budget airlines, though the upholstery showed signs of wear—small tears, faded patches where thousands of passengers had rested their heads. An attendant came through selling tea, coffee, sandwiches, and these peculiar Russian-style pastries filled with cabbage. I bought tea, which arrived in a proper ceramic cup on a saucer, not a paper cup, which felt somehow dignified.
I used to think that high-speed rail was primarily about efficiency—getting from A to B as quickly as possible, maximizing productivity, all that modern optimization rhetoric. But sitting there, watching Uzbekistan scroll past in accelerated motion, I realized it’s also about a kind of temporal displacement. You leave Tashkent’s urban density at 8 AM and arrive in medieval Samarkand—with its Registan Square and Timurid architecture—before lunch. The physical distance collapses, but the cultural distance remains vast, which creates this disorienting sense of having traveled through time as much as space.
What nobody tells you about the Afrosiyob’s bathroom situation and other practical realities
Let me be honest about the less glamorous aspects. The bathrooms were clean but small, with that slightly chemical smell of industrial sanitizer. The Wi-Fi, advertised on their website, was essentially non-functional—I managed to load exactly one webpage in two and a half hours. The air conditioning oscillated between Arctic and broken, with no apparent middle ground, which meant I alternated between shivering and peeling off layers. These aren’t dealbreakers, just the kind of minor imperfections that remind you this is still a developing system, not the polished efficiency of German or Japanese rail networks.
The train made one brief stop at Jizzakh, a mid-sized city I’d never heard of, where a few passengers disembarked and new ones boarded. Through the window, I watched a woman in a bright floral dress and hijab help her elderly mother up the platform steps, moving with the kind of patient slowness that seemed almost defiant in the context of high-speed rail. It was a useful reminder that for every traveler like me—foreign, curious, treating this as an experience—there were locals for whom this was simply transportation, a way to visit family or conduct business.
We arrived in Samarkand at 10:24 AM, four minutes ahead of schedule, which felt like a minor miracle. Stepping onto the platform, the air was noticeably warmer, drier, carrying that distinctive Central Asian scent of dust and diesel and grilling meat from nearby street vendors. I’d traveled 344 kilometers in 149 minutes, which works out to roughly 138 km/h average speed when you account for acceleration and that Jizzakh stop—not quite the advertised maximum, but still impressive for infrastructure that didn’t exist fifteen years ago.
Turns out, the Afrosiyob is one of those experiences that resists simple categorization. It’s not quite world-class modern rail travel, but it’s also far better than most transportation options in the region. It’s efficient without being soulless, comfortable without being luxurious, fast without being frightening. Would I recieve my money’s worth? Absolutely—the ticket cost about $20 USD, which is almost absurdly cheap by Western standards. Would I do it again? Definately. But next time, I might spring for Business class, just to see if the seats are any less worn.
