Getting around
Getting Around Romania: The Train and the Car See Different Countries
Romania is the largest country in its region and the distances are honest — Bucharest to the far north is a serious day's driving, not an optimistic one. But the useful thing to understand here is not how long anything takes. It is that the country has two transport networks which serve two almost entirely separate sets of destinations. The railway is comprehensive, inexpensive and connects every city worth the name. The things most people come to Romania to see are in villages, and the railway does not go there.
Updated 2026-08-16
What the railway is good at
Romania's rail network is extensive, dense by European standards and remarkably cheap, and it connects Bucharest to Brașov, Sibiu, Cluj-Napoca, Timișoara, Iași, Suceava and Constanța along with a great many smaller towns. Trains are slow — the network is old and much of it is single-track through mountains — but slow here is not the complaint it sounds like: the Bucharest to Brașov run climbs the Prahova valley through the Carpathians and is one of the more scenic mainline journeys in Europe, and it is faster than driving the same route in summer traffic. Overnight sleepers cover the longest hops, which turns a punishing drive into a night you would otherwise have paid for in a hotel.
Book the faster inter-city services rather than the stopping trains, which serve every halt and can double a journey. Seat reservations are standard on the faster classes. Stations are generally central, which matters more than it sounds — the train drops you in the middle of a city while the airport does not.
Where this stops being sufficient is the moment your destination is not a town. The Saxon fortified churches, the Maramureș wooden churches and the Bucovina painted monasteries are all in villages, several of them at the end of unnumbered roads, and no amount of rail cleverness reaches them. That is the whole argument.
When you need a car, and what driving is like
Hire a car for the village legs and you unlock the country. Roads are a mixed picture that is improving quickly: there is real motorway, but far less of it than in western Europe, and much of the network is single-carriageway national road that passes through every town rather than around it. Average speeds are therefore lower than the distances suggest, and overtaking behind lorries on two-lane roads is the normal rhythm of a Romanian drive.
Two things genuinely differ from driving further west. Rural roads carry traffic that is not all motorised — horse-drawn carts remain in everyday agricultural use in parts of the north and east, they are slow, and they are frequently unlit. And livestock on unfenced roads is ordinary rather than exceptional. Both mean the same thing in practice: drive rural roads in daylight. The health and safety guide treats night driving as the genuine risk it is rather than as an inconvenience.
The compromise most well-planned trips reach is a hybrid: rail for the long city-to-city hops, then a hire car collected for two or three days in whichever region has the villages you want — Transylvania for the fortified churches, the north for the wooden churches and monasteries. Renting for the whole trip means driving a great many kilometres you could have slept through.
Flying, and the shape of a long country
Bucharest's main airport is the country's gateway and by far the best-connected, but it is not the only sensible arrival point: Cluj-Napoca, Timișoara and Iași all take international flights, and arriving into one of them can remove an entire day of internal travel if your trip is focused on Transylvania or the north-east. Anyone building an itinerary should at least check the fares before defaulting to the capital.
Domestic flights exist and matter more here than in a small country, because the geography is genuinely large. Bucharest to Cluj, Timișoara, Iași or Suceava takes about an hour against most of a day by road or rail, and for a trip with limited time the flight that gets you to the north-east in the morning is worth considerably more than the money it costs. The trade is that you then need ground transport at the far end, which brings you back to the car-versus-train question in a different region.
Long-distance buses and minibuses fill the gaps the railway leaves between towns, and they are cheap and frequent, though less comfortable and harder to plan from abroad. For most visitors they are the fallback rather than the plan.
The two mountain roads, which are not routes
Romania has two famous high mountain roads, and both are routinely misunderstood by people planning itineraries around them. The Transfăgărășan crosses the Făgăraș range in a sequence of hairpins past a glacial lake and a dam; the Transalpina, further west, is higher still and runs along an open ridge for much of its length. They are genuinely spectacular and they are worth building a day around.
What they are not is transport. Both are closed by snow for roughly half the year — commonly from around October until late June, with the exact dates set by conditions rather than a calendar — and even when open, both are slower than the ordinary valley roads that go to the same places. Nobody local drives them to get somewhere. If your route depends on one of them being open in May, it does not have a route; check the status before committing, and have the valley alternative in mind.
The corollary is worth stating plainly: an itinerary that crosses the Carpathians should assume the ordinary road passes rather than the famous ones. Those are reliable, open year-round barring weather, and unremarkable, which is exactly what you want from a transfer. Save the spectacular roads for a day when the drive itself is the plan — the trip-planning guide sets out where they fit in an arc through the country.