For thirty years the luxury-rail story of Xinjiang was an internal one: the New Orient Express and its siblings moved travellers around China's largest province. In May 2025 the story stepped over a line, literally. Train Y29 left Xi'an, crossed into Kazakhstan through the Horgos port, and became the first cross-border "humanities" tourist train operated from China on this corridor.
How the Y29 crossing actually works
The route runs more than 3,600 km in a roughly ten-day round trip, operated jointly by the Urumqi and Xi'an railway groups. The operational innovation is what the operator calls segmented domestic transport with cross-border joint support: guests ride the domestic leg to the Horgos port area, transfer within the port station, and pass through a dedicated cross-border channel that cleared formalities in about two and a half hours when the service debuted. On the Kazakh side the itinerary continues by rail and coach, pairing Central Asian steppe cities with the Xinjiang leg.
2026: more departures, more investment
At the 2026 Xinjiang International Travel Agents Conference in Hotan, the Urumqi Group announced plans to run three cross-border cultural trains with the Xi'an Group this year, alongside a RMB 113 million investment putting two upgraded New Orient Express sets on the rails. The numbers behind the push: in 2025 the group ran 356 inbound and intra-Xinjiang tourist trains, up 78% year on year, and its foreign guests now come from more than 160 countries with annual growth above 20%. The New Orient Express brand itself has carried over 40,000 guests across 350-plus departures since the 1990s, with overseas travellers making up about 85% of that history.
The supporting infrastructure has scaled with it: 64 stations upgraded in 2025, dedicated tourist-train waiting areas with multilingual staff and onboard medical teams at 14 key tourism stations, and visa-free entry policy doing the rest of the work at the border.
What it means for travellers
- · Two countries, one booking: the cross-border format packages the Kazakh leg into the same escorted product, removing the two-visa, two-operator juggling that used to make Central Asia-plus-Xinjiang itineraries complicated.
- · Check your passport: crossing formalities, transit rules and Kazakh visa requirements vary by nationality; confirm both sides in writing before booking, as with any multi-country product.
- · The domestic alternative stays strong: for travellers who prefer to stay inside China, the New Orient Express 2027 calendar and the Tianshan Express corridor remain the established choices, and October's southern editions pair well with a separate Central Asia trip.
Why we are watching it
China's luxury trains have been converging with hotel standards for a decade; the frontier now is geography. A scheduled, serviced tourist train that treats the border as a station rather than a wall is new for this corridor, and if the 2026 departures sell as the operator expects, expect the format to extend to other Central Asian directions. We track these programmes alongside the domestic fleet and will publish dates and cabin details as the operator releases them.
Related reading: the New Orient Express 2027 programme · the Silk Road corridor by train · the 2026 luxury-rail boom
Sources: Tianshan Social Media (Xinjiang Daily) reporting from the 2026 Xinjiang International Travel Agents Conference, June 2026; People's Railway newspaper coverage of the 2026 tourism product launch. Operational details are as announced by the operator; schedules and entry rules can change, to be confirmed at booking.