The Trans-Mongolian Line is one of the world’s epic railways, cutting its way through some of the planet’s harshest terrain along seven-and-a-half-thousand kilometres of track.
The route runs along the better-known Trans-Siberian Railway out of Moscow, branching off at Ulan-Ude and connecting the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar with the Chinese capital of Beijing.
Two Spanish filmmakers have now captured the amazing journey, shooting 3,000 video clips from their cabin window during the nine days on board.
“In the film, we try to show how the landscape you see through the train window is short lived. Everything goes fast and slow at the same time,” said Rubén Sánchez.
“We were shooting every day from the train windows. The most difficult part of the video was the editing due to the huge amount of footage.
“Travel is our passion, and the train is one of the most beautiful and emotive ways to travel.
“You meet many people during the trip from all over the world, from workers that travel every day to tourists who are fulfilling a dream, but one of the most amazing things is all the different and breathtaking landscapes you can see through the window in just one day.”
Crossing the China-Mongolia border involves a five-hour stop over at Erenhot in the Gobi Desert while the Chinese standard gauge bogies are swapped for wider Russian replacements.
Rubén, who made the four-minute film while on holiday, runs Factoria, a multimedia studio based in Northern Spain.
Trans-mongolian : A long train journey from Factoria on Vimeo.
Train Bogie Exchange in China Mongolia Border from Factoria on Vimeo.
Wow – the first bit sounds like a percussion factory! This is almost exactly what it was like at Brest on the Belorussian border on a Brussels – Moscow service I was on. I thought it was a bit of a waste of time. Passengers could have transferred to another train on the opposite platform in about half-an-hour. Of course that would have required another set of carriages and two train diagrams: Brussels-Brest and Brest-Moscow. Time for “Talgo” gauge-changing technology! At the Spanish-French border (Port Bou) it can’t have taken more than 20 minutes…