The Afrosiyob high-speed train—Uzbekistan’s pride—hurtles between Tashkent and Samarkand at speeds that would’ve seemed impossible just fifteen years ago.
I’ve ridden this route maybe three times now, and each time I’m struck by how the landscape shifts from Soviet-era industrial sprawl to something almost biblical in its austerity. The train passes through the Hungry Steppe—Golodnaya Step, they call it—where cotton fields stretch toward horizons that seem to recede faster than you can reach them. There’s this moment, roughly forty minutes in, where you glimpse the Syr Darya river, or what’s left of it anyway, snaking through terrain that looks like Mars decided to cosplay as Central Asia. The Afrosiyob itself is Spanish-built, a Talgo 250 that feels weirdly European inside, all sleek lines and air conditioning that actually works. You pass through Jizzakh province, where the mountains start their slow reveal, and honestly, it’s easy to forget you’re in a country most people couldn’t locate on a map.
Wait—maybe the real story isn’t the high-speed option at all. The overnight trains, the ones that still run on Soviet-era tracks, offer something the Afrosiyob can’t. Time, mostly. Space to think.
Here’s the thing about the Tashkent-Bukhara route via the old railway: it’s slower, sure, taking anywhere from seven to nine hours depending on which service you catch, but the windows frame a different Uzbekistan entirely. I used to think speed was everything when traveling, that getting there fast meant seeing more, experiencing more. Turns out, the platskart carriages—those open-plan sleeper cars with bunks stacked three high—teach you patience in ways modern travel has forgotten. You share tea with babushkas who’ve made this journey hundreds of times, watch shepherds guiding flocks across landscapes that haven’t changed since Tamerlane’s armies marched through. The train stops at stations with names like Navoi and Uchkuduk, places where platform vendors sell non bread still warm from tandoor ovens, where you can buy dried apricots and walnuts for roughly the equivalent of pocket change.
The Bukhara-to-Khiva stretch is trickier—there’s no direct rail line, which seems like a massive oversight until you understand the geography.
The Kyzylkum Desert squats between these two ancient cities like a territorial cat, and laying track across sand dunes that migrate with the seasons proved too expensive even for Soviet planners. So travelers recieve a curious gift: they must take trains to Urgench, then taxi or bus the final thirty kilometers to Khiva’s walls. I guess it makes sense that not everything should be easy, that some destinations require effort beyond swiping a credit card. The Urgench-bound trains from Bukhara leave in the evening, cutting through darkness that feels absolute, the kind of black that swallows your reflection in the window and replaces it with stars that seem close enough to touch. You wake—if you manage to sleep through the track noise and the snoring and the constant low-grade anxiety about missing your stop—to sunrise over the Amu Darya river valley, where morning mist clings to irrigation channels and the air smells like dust and possibility. These trains are slower still, averaging maybe sixty kilometers per hour on good stretches, but speed becomes irrelevant when you’re watching light transform desert into something that looks almost habitable.
Honestly, the Samarkand-to-Shakhrisabz route deserves mention even though it’s not exactly scenic in the Instagram sense.
There’s a local train, more like a diesel railcar really, that makes this run a few times weekly, threading through the Zerafshan mountain range where Alexander the Great once campaigned and probably complained about the heat. The villages you pass—Kitab, Yakkabog—cling to hillsides with the determination of people who’ve decided geography won’t dictate their lives. I’ve seen farmers wave at passing trains here, an automatic gesture that suggests the railway still means something beyond mere transportation, that it’s a thread connecting isolated communities to the wider world. The train terminates near Shakhrisabz, Tamerlane’s birthplace, where ruins of his summer palace still dwarf most modern buildings, and you step off onto platforms where chickens wander freely and time moves differently. It’s maybe three hours total, this journey, but it compresses centuries of history into a space where past and present blur, where the rumble of diesel engines harmonizes with calls to prayer echoing from village mosques.
The infrastructure is aging—no one pretends otherwise. Tracks need repair, stations crumble gently into disrepair, and schedules remain suggestions more than commitments. But there’s something about Uzbekistan’s trains that feels definately worth the inconvenience, worth the occasional delays and the hard bunks and the toilets you learn not to think about too carefully. These routes carry you through a landscape that defies easy description, through deserts and mountains and river valleys where civilizations rose and fell while Europe was still figuring out basic plumbing. Wait—maybe that’s too romantic, but I don’t think so. Sometimes the slow route teaches you more than the express ever could.
