Update on Mongolia railfan tours
When we travelled to Mongolia for the first time in October last year, we honestly didn´t expect such a huge success with our trips to the Transmongol railways:
October 2017 was fully booked
February 2018 has just been confirmed to run
June 2018 is sold out
September 2018 is already confirmed to run!
We will add some surprises to all of these tours in due course and can only advise you, not too book to late to take part. Our photographic success was excellent, we are just working on a new tour gallery to showcase some of our achievements!
What does make our tours so special: well, mainly the fact that we know which train runs when and where! We are in touch with the central dispatcher at Ulaan Bataar, we know the phone numbers of all stations along the route (yes, all!), and we have quite a lot of friends among the locomotive drivers who report first hand about any delays. So you will, most likely, not miss any train because we can tell you when the trains trains shows up and in which direction it is running. That´s pretty important if you stand on top of a hill and have set up your gear to shoot in one direction... if you do not know the movements and the next train suddenly pops up at the wrong place, running in the wrong direction, you will be pretty annoyed. During our October tour it only happened once that the dispatcher fooled us a bit and told us that the 2 trains we were waiting for should not arrive at our position before 1 hour to go. In real life both trains turned up 15 minutes later. But otherwise: all movements were precisely predicted !
So the next trip will be in February: it will be cold, that´s for sure, most likely we will see a lot of snow - and we have added a pre-tour to the existing main tour: this pre-tour features the M62-only operated branch line to Shariin Gol in the north of the country: steep gradients, mixed trains, and mainly coal freight trains.
Read all about this winter tour here.
