Night train route
Van Gölü Ekspresi
Ankara → Tatvan · Türkiye
Van Gölü Ekspresi in pictures
Photographs by their authors, hosted on Wikimedia Commons · tap through for the licence
- Distance
- 1,267 km
- Fastest time
- 25 h 50 min
- Average speed
- 49 km/h
- Top speed
- 120 km/h
- Operator
- TCDD Taşımacılık
- Train
- TVS2000 sleeper & pullman cars
- Countries
- Türkiye
- In service since
- 1964
- Runs
- 2× weekly each way
Figures are published values, not live data · corrections log
Ends 1,267 km from Ankara at a ferry slip on Lake Van, where wagons bound for Iran are floated across Turkey’s largest lake.
The Doğu’s quieter southern sibling takes almost 26 hours to amble from Ankara to the shore of Lake Van, and devotees insist the second day is the best of Turkish rail travel. After the steppe cities of Kayseri and Sivas the train works south through the Euphrates headwaters, then winds along the Murat River canyons between Elazığ and Muş. It ends at Tatvan’s ferry slip beneath the 4,058 m Süphan volcano, where wagons for Iran are floated across the lake to Van.
How this line was checked
- Line drawn from OpenStreetMap relation 12158683 — the same nodes OpenStreetMap holds for this railway, thinned to within 173 m of them
- Checked against OpenStreetMap: 98.9% of this line lies within 250 m of real track, a median 54 m from it
- Checked against the running timetable via Transitous: our line sits 0.2 km from the shape of 22012
- Wikipedia has an article for this line
Along the way
- Kayseri under Mount Erciyes
- Sivas steppe
- Malatya apricot country
- Murat River canyons past Elazığ
- Muş plain
- Lake Van ferry slip at Tatvan
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All sleepers serving these cities: night trains from Ankara · all 108 night trains.
More train routes in Türkiye.