HSR from.Urumqi to Xian

[sctilr87]

Hi there, no I haven’t gone on that journey. My experience with trains in China is that the view is typically nothing too special except for brief time periods. That being said, it can be fun still.

For buying train tickets and booking hotels in China, i HIGHLY recommend you use the trip.com app. It doesn’t charge much as a service fee and you can cancel or change your tickets for free. I’ve even missed my train before and got an 80% refund.

[minion]

i think the HSR train used for the premium routes eg beijing-shanghai is newer / more fancy, compared to urumqi - xian. yeah there are sleepers in D2708, i just couldnt figure out what type. if you based it on the chinese word, you would think it is a) New Sleepers (Dong Wo动卧) and b) Soft Sleepers Compartment (Ruan Wo软卧) but i am not 100% confident this urumqi-xian also get the newest train like for premium route

btw, do you have to change bullet trains at lanzhou? or is it the same D2708 train from urumqi to xian?

you are right, i went to watch youtube. there are some sections where there is 10 km tunnel where you see nothing. actually the train i took from lhasa to xining was also like that in some areas. i think the urumqi-xian train is unique for the fact that they manage to build a railway line at an area where wind is a big problem. perhaps scenery is not as good as lhasa-xining, which means i should temper my expectations.

[sebhoff]

It’s a train that goes all the way to Xian.

[rryb3]

Just a tip, Trip.com usually has lower markup than Chinahighlights for booking train tickets and their app is super easy to use. Even better still, '12306' is the official China Railways app, so reservations can be made here. It can be a bit of a pain to initially set up, but works like a charm when all sorted.

[BertiniAn]

Just a tip, Trip.com usually has lower markup than Chinahighlights for booking train tickets and their app is super easy to use. Even better still, '12306' is the official China Railways app, so reservations can be made here. It can be a bit of a pain to initially set up, but works like a charm when all sorted.

Are you sure you can reserve train tickets within '12306'? In the calendar in the app I see that only the next two weeks are clickable, which are the tickets already on sale (right?)
I agree with you that Trip.com is a better alternative to Chinahighlights, also the train ticket store within WeChat seems to have similar markups for reservations.

[minion]

Just a tip, Trip.com usually has lower markup than Chinahighlights for booking train tickets and their app is super easy to use. Even better still, '12306' is the official China Railways app, so reservations can be made here. It can be a bit of a pain to initially set up, but works like a charm when all sorted.

Are you sure you can reserve train tickets within '12306'? In the calendar in the app I see that only the next two weeks are clickable, which are the tickets already on sale (right?)
I agree with you that Trip.com is a better alternative to Chinahighlights, also the train ticket store within WeChat seems to have similar markups for reservations.

yeah HSR tix are only available for sale at T-14. i dont think anyone can purchase the tix earlier than that

when travel agent like chinahighlights or travel portal like trip.com promise you tickets at T>14, what they mean is they will do the job of grabbing the tickets at T-14 once it go on sale. but they compete on the same platform as the rest of mere mortals without third party help.

[bekker]

Hi all, I did this journey yesterday from Urumqi to Xining on the D576 (that has Lanzhou as final destination) departing at 10:13 and arriving at 19:46. We were in a seating compartment (rows of 3 and 2 seats) and booked this through trip.com. The first six hours the landscape was very boring, all grey, stony dessert. Many sections there are wind break barriers that obstruct the view. It is impressive that they manage to keep a high-speed train operating here, but that's all. The final section when the train climbs up through the mountains (highest high-speed train in the world) is probably nicer, but it was already dark and as mentioned in previous posts, it consists mostly of tunnels.

[minion]

Hi all, I did this journey yesterday from Urumqi to Xining on the D576 (that has Lanzhou as final destination) departing at 10:13 and arriving at 19:46. We were in a seating compartment (rows of 3 and 2 seats) and booked this through trip.com. The first six hours the landscape was very boring, all grey, stony dessert. Many sections there are wind break barriers that obstruct the view. It is impressive that they manage to keep a high-speed train operating here, but that's all. The final section when the train climbs up through the mountains (highest high-speed train in the world) is probably nicer, but it was already dark and as mentioned in previous posts, it consists mostly of tunnels.

thanks for sharing your experience. sounds like it's not very worth it for the scenery!

[fuzzyfurs]

As an add-on: the 12306 app worked really well for me. I suspect most travellers are put off when they see that they have to put in a Chinese phone number but if you click through all the steps and read carefully, it states that an email address is sufficient to register! Which is what I did.

The app works for me even when I switch to English (just make sure you download the official app then change language, you don't need to type in Chinese) and I have purchased my tickets with my foreign credit card. If there is any change of plans and you need a refund or change of dates/times, you can do it all by yourself via the app. There is really no need to pay for the middleman service. The prices on the app are the same as when buying in person at the terminal.

One last thing to note: the system doesn't always assign you the seats that you have selected as your preference I.e. if you select the bottom beds and they are out, they will just give you the middle or the top and if booking for multiple passengers you might not be seated next to each other.