I’d forced myself to wake early on my last day in Izmir, determined to wear myself out so that I’d sleep deeply on the night train to Ankara. For all their romanticism, these trains are rarely conducive to a good night’s sleep. This time would be different, I told myself.

Just as the market owners were setting out their wares on the cracked cobbled streets, I began crisscrossing the laid-back coastal city in Turkey’s far west. Boats took me across a tributary of the Gulf of Izmir towards some of the city’s splendours: fragile çay (tea) houses in the Ottoman-era Kemeraltı Bazaar, the landmark Clock Tower, and Barlar Sokağı, a street lined with bars and cafes, restaurants and beautifully renovated historic buildings. 

With the help of a few ice-cold pints of Efes, I’d started to relax but then remembered: I still had a 15-hour train journey east to the capital. And from there I would take another 26-hour service to Kars, an eastern frontier city near the border with Armenia. 

As I walked along the platform and towards the Izmir Mavi Tren (the Izmir Blue Train), the thought of a sleepless night was all-consuming. But after being shown my private berth, I was pleasantly surprised by a fridge stocked with drinks and snacks, a plush bed, a desk, a sink and, most importantly for this summer journey, a beautiful stream of ice-cold air conditioning. All for just £40. 

I shouldn’t have been surprised. In the past two decades, Turkey has been undergoing a railway revolution, with billions of lira being sunk into mega-projects to give the country one of the largest rail networks in Europe and the Middle East.

In the next 30 years, its aim is to increase the number of rail passengers carried from around 20m to 269m. The bulk of the investment will be pumped into new high-speed lines, which will cut the duration of long night train journeys. By 2027, the Izmir to Ankara journey will take just three and a half hours.

This isn’t to say night trains are being phased out: part of the strategy is bringing them into the 21st century with luxury tourism in mind, restoring routes and introducing special seasonal services.
For travellers, trains are the cheapest, most comfortable, and most convenient way to explore this vast country.  

As the Blue Train rolled east, the Aegean Sea disappeared and the sun dipped below the undulating hills of the Anatolian steppe. Occasionally we stopped at rural stations, where sickly lights illuminated old men in flat caps hunched over plastic tables drinking çay. I fell into a deep sleep at the sound of their clinking glasses.  

In the morning, the carriage filled with the scent of freshly brewed coffee. The train arrived at Ankara station on time at 9.07am, pulling up alongside the German-built locomotive once used to ferry Atatürk, the country’s founding father, around the republic.

Part of the railway museum adjacent to the station, known as the National Struggle Atatürk’s Residence and Railway Museum, the exhibition is located inside the former station master’s house built in the late 19th century – a time when the Ottoman Empire still existed and the world was carved up by long-dead kingdoms.

A few days in Ankara between trains was enough. I paid homage to Atatürk’s spotless mausoleum and watched the sun set from high up in the city’s Ottoman old town and castle.  

Returning to the railway station, the departure board was filled with tantalising names: Konya, Sivas, Diyarbakır, Batman. Thousands of miles of track which thread around a country with a thousand different faces. 

My destination was Kars via the Doğu Ekspresi, the spiritual successor of the Orient Express. This time I would share a sleeper compartment with three strangers for £24. Less modern than its Blue Train counterpart and a little rough around the edges, the Doğu Ekspresi was still fit for such a journey.

My berth mate, a Turk from Kars who had been in Ankara for work, was returning home to his family. His weathered face gave him an air of wisdom and authority, and I was sure he was many years my senior. But I was surprised to learn he was, in fact, just 20 years old.

It was hot inside the berth, and so he cracked open the window to let in a cool breeze. Withdrawing a full-sized kettle from his duffel bag, he plugged it into the outlet dedicated for small electronics. I made to protest, but with a finger to his lips, he appeased me with a steaming hot cup of çay.  

The Doğu Express has become a popular tourist train since its first journeys in the 1930s. Back then, it offered a convenient way to travel to Turkey’s far east and beyond. Today, its popularity is less about getting travellers from A to B, more for the landscapes it chugs through.

In winter, passengers jostle for space by the windows to see the snow-washed mountain terrain hidden deep within Turkey’s interior.  

The land is transformed into an unlikely oasis during the summer. I watched parched earth flanked by soaring mountains and deep ravines fly by the window. Pure sapphire water, which joins the mighty Tigris and Euphrates rivers further south, rushed alongside the tracks. 

With no food of my own, I ventured into the restaurant wagon and ordered Mercimek Çorbası, a hearty red lentil soup. I thought it was a steal at £2, though my berth-mate guffawed when I told him.

“Very expensive!” he exclaimed, passing me what was his breakfast, lunch and dinner: a fistful of sunflower seeds. 

After a comfortable night’s sleep that lasted into the afternoon, the train eventually sped into Kars under the cover of night.  

The next morning, I awoke to a strange city. If it weren’t for the abundance of Turkish flags, I’d have thought I was in Armenia – buildings are made with the same black volcanic tuff found throughout the country next door.  

This is because Kars was once part of the Russian Empire and was developed at the same time as many Armenian cities. Even before this, in the Middle Ages, Kars was within the Kingdom of Armenia, a fact betrayed by the many Armenian churches scattered across the region, today converted into mosques or simply left to rot.  

A gateway to the ancient ruined Armenian city of Ani, a Unesco World Heritage Site, Kars is famous for its cheese. High-altitude pastures provide cattle with thousands of wildflowers to graze on and, combined with borrowed European and Russian cheese-making traditions, the cows produce some of the world’s highest-quality dairy.

Until 1993, the train went even further east, onwards from Kars to Gyumri in Armenia and Tbilisi in Georgia. Because of political tensions, the tracks now peter out beyond the city and rust away into the hinterlands.  

I returned to the station one last time before continuing east by bus. There was a lone train waiting at the platform: the Doğu Express, returning west. I thought back to my journey, the land and the people and the layered history I found, and for a moment, I was tempted to climb the train’s stairs and do it all over again.  

Tickets for trains in Turkey can be bought online via the TCDD website or app. You can fly from Kars to major Turkish cities such as Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir.