Sofia's Aleksandr Nevsky Cathedral, Bulgarian train, and Tsarovets Fortress in Veliko Tarnovo

Sofia — Veliko Tarnovo
София — Велико Търново

Athens to Paris by Train Back to the start, the origin of the trip
	Athens — Thessaloniki Αθήνα — Θεσσαλονίκη
	Thessaloniki Θεσσαλονίκη
	Thessaloniki — Sofia Θεσσαλονίκη — София
	Sofia / София
	Sofia — Veliko Tarnovo София — Велико Търново
	Veliko Tarnovo Велико Търново
	Veliko Tarnovo — Bucharest Велико Търново — Bucureşti
	Bucharest / Bucureşti
	Bucharest — Gura Humorului Bucureşti — Gura Humorului
	Gura Humorului
	Gura Humorului — Sighişoara
	Sighişoara — Budapest
	Budapest
	Budapest — Prague Budapest — Praha
	Prague / Praha
	Prague — Köln/Cologne — Brussels/Bruxelles — Paris
Also see: Travel in Greece Travel in Bulgaria Travel in Romania Travel in France

This is part of the Athens to Paris by Train series, start at the beginning to get the background and the details so far.

In red: The rail route from Sofia to Veliko Tarnovo.

The next stage of our trip was across Bulgaria from Sofia to Veliko Tarnovo. The main line from Sofia to Varna, on the Black Sea coast, passes through Gorna Oryakhovitsa, a small city that is a rail hub in central Bulgaria. Veliko Tarnovo is a short distance south from there, it is at the end of the final hook in the red rail line on this map.

The route took us along a river flowing through a forested valley as we left Sofia to the north. We climbed out of that valley into the rich agricultural land running across the top third of Bulgaria, north of the Stara Planina mountain range running west to east across the center of the country.

The map below shows the route of the rail line: north out of Sofia along the river through Vratsa, where it comes out into the rich farmland running across northern Bulgaria. It then runs roughly east, first slightly to the north through Pleven and then slightly to the south to Gorna Oryakhovitsa.

Click here or on the map to see a full-sized version.

Our destination is Велико Търново, a name that gets transliterated into the Roman alphabet in a variety of ways. Велико or Veliko means Great, but shall we spell it Tarnovo, Târnovo, Turnovo, or Tŭrnovo? The character ъ functions as a vowel in Bulgarian, pronounced like the a in ago or the u in turn.

There are a few trains every day from Sofia connecting onward to Veliko Tarnovo, including 1005-1451, 1320-1805, and 1540-2020. There are several other trains getting you as far as Gorna Oryakhovitsa, at which point you can take a minibus or even a taxi for the short 8.5 kilometer ride on to Veliko Tarnovo, including trains running 0705-1051 and 0905-1305.

We'll start by going back to Sofia's main passenger station. Taxis, at least those not leaving from the station, are cheap and honest.

Here I am buying our tickets.

Here's a ticket. As it says, it was purchased at Gara Sofia (Гара Софиа) at 12:45, 35 minutes before the scheduled departure time (час) of 13:20. Train (влак) number 2615 from Sofia to Gorna Oryakhovitsa (Горна Оряховица) connecting there to train number 40217 to Veliko Tarnovo (Велико Търново). All for a cost of just 14.20 Lev (лв) or about US$ 7.10.

All of this becomes much easier when you can read at least a little.

We will buy some food and drinks for the ride. We definitely are in Eastern Europe. The largest words on the sign at left say, top and bottom:

SANDWICH

ALCOHOL

In smaller letters it mentions that they also have non-alcoholic drinks.

We want train #2615 to Varna via Gorna Oryakhovitsa. They have just posted the platform: 10и.

Notice the first column, headed КАТ, short for Категория or kategoria.

Б is short for бърз, meaning fast.

П is short for пътнически, meaning passenger.

You really want to take the бърз kategoria trains. The пътнически trains move slowly and stop pretty much everywhere.

Also notice that at least for this sample the fast бърз trains have 4-digit numbers and the slow пътнически trains have 5-digit numbers. I don't know if you could always count on this, but it seems like a common practice for the increasingly obscure routes on railroads and airlines to have larger numbers.

It's time to get out to the platform and find our train.

Here's one of the cars.

This is car 2, seats 71 to 98, from Sofia via Gorna Oryakhovitsa (the placard says Г. ОРЯХОВИЦА) to Varna (ВАРНА, the placard can be rotated 180° to show БУРГАС) However, we have second class tickets, no reserved seats, so we will sit anywhere we can find seats in a second class car.

The passenger compartments are three seats facing three more seats, with luggage storage on racks over each row of seats as well as in a compartment over the corridor.

The guy sitting next to me for the first part of the trip was on his way to visit family in Plevin. He was in the military, not in any especially technical role, but here he was using a newer laptop than I owned at the time.

I gave him my business card, and he brought up my web site. His Internet connectivity was through a small GSM interface that plugged into a USB port. This was a little jarring. The American image of Bulgaria does not consider the possibility that Bulgaria and other eastern European nations have better networking infrastructure than what you find in the U.S.

Then he went back to reading the BBC's Bulgarian language news pages.

The content delivery service Pando Networks did a worldwide study in 2011. Bulgaria had the third-fastest Internet service in the world. The USA came in at #26. Pando's systems distributed around the world serve up the bulky image content making up the majority of the data on media-rich pages. They are therefore in a position to measure network speeds from their widely scattered servers, all of them with very high bandwidth connections to the Internet backbone, to client hosts all around the world. The limiting bandwidth is the bandwidth of the connection between the client and its ISP, and that is what is measured here. Pando collected data for a year, gathering statistics on 27 million downloads by 20 million client computers in 224 countries, totaling over 35 petabytes of data.

We arrived in Gorna Oryakhovitsa after about four hours.

Here we are arriving in Gorna Oryakhovitsa. The large yellow "2" means that these are second-class cars. With our tickets, we could have taken seats in any of them.

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Some people got off in Gorna Oryakhovitsa, others continued toward Varna.

The main line from Sofia and Pleven to Varna runs west to east just north of Gorna Oryakhovitsa, you see its station (gara) is just north of the city on the main line.

The line that winds a bit before disappearing to the north leads nearly due north to Ruse, on the Danube River and the Romanian border, and then continues on north to Bucharest.

Athens to Paris by Train Back to the start, the origin of the trip
	Athens — Thessaloniki Αθήνα — Θεσσαλονίκη
	Thessaloniki Θεσσαλονίκη
	Thessaloniki — Sofia Θεσσαλονίκη — София
	Sofia / София
	Sofia — Veliko Tarnovo София — Велико Търново
	Veliko Tarnovo Велико Търново
	Veliko Tarnovo — Bucharest Велико Търново — Bucureşti
	Bucharest / Bucureşti
	Bucharest — Gura Humorului Bucureşti — Gura Humorului
	Gura Humorului
	Gura Humorului — Sighişoara
	Sighişoara — Budapest
	Budapest
	Budapest — Prague Budapest — Praha
	Prague / Praha
	Prague — Köln/Cologne — Brussels/Bruxelles — Paris
Also see: Travel in Greece Travel in Bulgaria Travel in Romania Travel in France

Another line starts back toward the west and then winds to the south, down one side of a river valley with a highway on the opposite bank. That leads to Veliko Tarnovo, marked here as Tŭrnovo. That line eventually continues to the Turkish border and on to İstanbul.

Small modern self-powered trains like the one below are used for the shorter runs with frequent stops, such as the connection between Gorna Oryakhovitsa and Veliko Tarnovo.

We stayed at Hostel Mostel in Veliko Tarnovo:
10 Улица Йофдан Инджето
+359-897-859-359
hostelmostel.com
An ensuite double room was €30 and a dorm bed was €11:

The next stage of the trip is a number of days in Veliko Tarnovo. We will see the Veliko Tarnovo station (and Gorna Oryakhovitsa once again) when we continue on from there toward Bucharest.

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