Malatya by train · Malatya by train
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Malatya by train
Malatya by train
There are daily services of 4 Eylül Mavi Treni from Ankara. The Mavi Tren departs at 3:10PM, arriving in Malatya at 7AM next morning, and has couchette and soft sleepers, a restaurant car, as well as standard seating cars attached.
From Istanbul, Güney Express and Vangölü Express, which are bound for further southeast and east from Malatya respectively, call at Malatya station on alternating days, 6 times a week. They share the same route for most part of their long journey across the country, calling at İzmit, Eskişehir, Ankara, Kayseri, and Sivas, among many other smaller towns and cities, before arriving to Malatya. Their paths diverge east of Malatya—while Güney Express heads for Diyarbakır and Batman, Vangölü leads to Tatvan on the Lake Van via Elazığ and Muş. Both has standard seating cars, compartment cars, couchettes, and sleeper cars available.
There is also the daily Fırat Express, which operates between the Mediterranean city of Adana and Elazığ to northeast of Malatya, which can be caught from either direction.
More details on trains can be gathered from the website of the Turkish State Railways .
Trains to Istanbul. Depending on the day of your trip, you'll either take Güney or Vangölü Express out of Malatya. They depart around 5:50PM six days a week, offering beautiful views of the apricot orchards surrounding the city and wilder vistas of Upper Euphrates Valley further out on the way before the night falls in spring and summer. While the scheduled arrival time to Istanbul is 8:29PM the next day (i.e., a duration of more than 24 hours), they are generally several hours late, and that usually means they arrive after the midnight—when Istanbul's public transportation is in a very reduced operation. So, assuming that the keeping your budget down is why you prefered train over other means of transportation in the first place and therefore you may want to avoid hefty taxi rides across the city, in order not to stuck at the station in the middle of the night, make sure you have arranged your accommodation at least for the first night in Asian Side, where the terminal train station of Istanbul, Haydarpaşa, is located.
A standard seat in a pullman car (like those in buses) costs 30.75 TL for a ride between Malatya and Istanbul. Note that neither Güney nor Vangölü Express has a restaurant car attached, so make sure to pack along some supplies (there is a large Carrefour supermarket near the station) as the nearest convenient stop is in Ankara, about 20 hours away (as the other long-enough stops, Sivas and Kayseri are both scheduled in the dead of the night).
Malatya's train station is located northwest of the city centre, in residential suburbs of the city, about 200 metres off the çevreyolu?intercity highway (look for the small white sign saying TCDD Gar at the roundabout with a big-box store named Carrefour at one side). From the city centre, it takes around one and a half hour to get to the station even with a relatively quick pace, but fortunately public bus lines #1A and #1B as well as a number of minibuses connect the station with the central square quite frequently.
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Malatya Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.