I recently crossed Russia from Mongolia to St Petersburg by train, making many stops, buying tickets online on rzd.ru and wanted to share a few impressions:
- the website is only in Russian and although it is fairly easy to use, if you can't read Russian, I would recommend you to get the help of a speaker of Russian at least the first couple of times. After you get acquainted with it, you could probably make it by yourself with the help of google translate or another machine translation tool (some browsers have an inbuilt function to translate the whole page for you).
- the website is a few years old but was recently upgraded. However locals do not seem to use it a lot.
- before buying your first ticket you need to make a username and a password. You cannot buy a ticket before you are logged in. Also after you log in you can view all your journeys, reservation numbers etc. This is important because they won't email you a confirmation after you buy a ticket. You only need the reservation number, so you can write it down (I take a picture of it) but if you lose it, the only way to retrieve it is to log onto the website.
- after you buy your ticket online (they accept any major credit cards, also foreign), you still need to get a paper ticket. At bigger stations they have a special machine for the purpose. You only need to enter the reservation number and your passport number (choose "foreign document" иностранньй документ). In some stations you will need to get your ticket at the normal ticket booth, which means you might have to wait in line, so it's wise to allow some time (and maybe a little bit more time on top of that). In Saint Petersburg they had a special window for tickets bought online. For some trains you can do electronic registration. This is usually offered at the time you buy the ticket. It means you can board the train without a paper ticket, just with your passport. The provodnitsa is supposed to have a list of passengers on her but right now so few people do it that they usually didn't bring the list but knew my name already;) If it is available, do it! It only takes one click (literally). You can still get a paper ticket (I always get one in case the police or border officials want to know where I have been), but in case you are running late it might make the difference between missing he train and not missing it.
- when booking online, you can see all options for direct trains, all prices and even a scheme of the carriage with free seats marked. Then you can choose upper or lower beds or simply a range of seat numbers where you want to be seated. If you want a specific seat number, say 61, you can enter "between 61 and 61" as the seat range and then you will get number 61 if it is available.
- if there is no direct train to suit your needs, you can choose to see possible connections but I think this service is still a trial version. As normally you will need to buy two or more separate tickets.
- in services where bed linen is not already included (such as some platskart classes), you will need to add it (you are prompted to) but you don't have to. I usually don't buy it in order to save some cash and protect the environment (less washing and plastic bags). The provodnitsa will come to you assuming you want to buy some but you can refuse, much to her amazement and amusement. I use my sleeping bag or a big scarf. Rumour has it that if you don't pay for bedlinen, you will not be allowed to use the mattresses and pillows, but that never happened to me. After all you can always pay for the linen (it's 100 roubles or so) to the provodnitsa.
- a bug with he website is that sometimes you need to log in twice. Normally after I first log in, I look for the "купить билет" (buy ticket) link on the left menu. Sometimes it is not there. Then I need to go to "вход" (entry/login) in the top right corner and log in again in order for the link to appear. Besides, sometimes the site does not work well under Internet explorer (somewhat understandably :P). Sometimes the "next" button simply doesn't work there.
- overall I think it is a great way to buy tickets, it is easy, you can see all available options, save time and money and avoid having to deal with the sometimes too nervous employees at the stations.
- please share your experience as well. I think many travellers nowadays unnecessarily pay too much money for Russian train tickets through foreign websites or agents. You cannot get tickets cheaper than through the Russian railways themselves.