Being a regular traveler in Malabar Express in KZK - KPQ - KZK route, I was really looking forward to travel in the Bulgarian Railways on a weekend from the day I landed in the capital city Sofia for a 3 month onsite assignment. Established in 1884 , it has a total track length of about 4000kms( less than the distance covered by CAPE DBRG Vivek Express :D ) , uses 1.435m standard gauge tracks and 25kV OHE electrification. My tickets were booked in Train Number 8627 from Sofia to the coastal city of Burgas. The online booking system is similar to online bus ticketing system of KSRTC or rebus app. Sofia Central railway station was kind of a like an airport though the number of passengers was about half of the usual crowd I have seen at TVC. The signage were all in Bulgarian, hence took some time...
more... to identify the platform as even the platform details were not written in English. Me and my friends opted for seating reservation,as the sleeper tickets were not shown online. We can select the coach as well as the seat while booking. Identifying coach was also a challenge, luckily the loco pilot who was starting the loco up helped us with that. The rake was a 6 coach rake pulled by a mammoth electric loco which made it look like an overkill. The ticket checking staff said that they are seeing people taking online ticket for the first time which probably was an exaggeration. They scan the QR code on the print out and give us the usual kind of ticket.
The train left Sofia right on time at 10.45pm and was stopping at all stations. After about 1 hr probably were out of the city and the train picked up speed and soon we were asleep. We woke up next morning to find the train travelling in reverse direction entering our destination Burgas, which is a terminal. There was a loco reversal at Dimitrovgrad which we came to know when returning. Our destination for the trip was Sunny Beach in the Burgas Province for a much needed break from hectic work. After 3 days of adventures in the Black sea, the pubs and the nearby UNESCO World Heritage city of Nessebar, we returned to Sofia in Train number 8692 which is an intercity train starting in the evening. The train left bang on time and quickly accelerated to top speed which I measured using GPS as 149 kmph. The first halt was after about 40 minutes of MPS action in some small town. The countryside looked similar to those seen in the SBC - BWT section with many crop fields, open places with lot of shrubs and short trees. There was a section through some forest where the train was going slow at 30kmph for about 1hr. The line was mostly single line and crossed at least one tunnel in the day time. After entering city limits, the train became kind of like a passenger with frequent stops and finally crawled into Sofia station about 10 minutes before time. The travel time for both trains were almost equal. The distance covered is about 520 kms and duration is 7.5hrs at an average speed of about 70kmph.
