OK, we're back and have started booking parts of the journey. It is not going to be the journey we imagined in every detail but it does include Moscow to Vladivostok and then to Taiwan.
So far ~ London - Brussels - Cologne - Berlin - Warsaw - Kiev - Moscow - Vladivostok - Kaohsiung City - Taipei
We have friends joining us up until Moscow and then we travel on alone on the 002 Rossiya to Vladivostok . Have already booked from London to Berlin but can't book any trains after that as the tickets are not yet available, more available in 5 days time.
Have spent some time using Seat 61 to check on ticket sources, there are major differences from company to company for the same journey. From London as far as Warsaw all tickets have/will be bought directly via Deutsche Bahn via their English language website The savings compared to Rail Europe/SNCF/Polrail are enormous providing it is done soon after the tickets are available. Within Poland it's difficult not to use Polrail as the site works very well but is expensive.
From Kiev to Moscow we are using RZD which is Russian Railways which is not the same as Russian Rail, again Russian Rail and Real Russia are at least a third more expensive than RZD although the RZD website (also in English) is a bit quirky, but with some patience and time working out why certain things happen it works pretty good.
Sorry can't post links on this forum as there is a problem from both France and the UK with our computers, mentioned this in the past.
From Vladivostok we will now fly via Hong Kong to Taiwan and will fly out of Taipei. Intend to travel on the Taiwan high speed train between Kaohsiung City and Taipei. From Taipei we don't know which direction yet but should know within 2 weeks. Our hoped for direction is to Los Angeles, Sunset Limited to New Orleans then onto either Orlando or Miami with Greyhound to fly back to London, but we may fly west via Thailand for a short first look as have had friends rave about the people there, we'll see.
There are two smaller problems that have occurred in planning so far. UK (and other) passport holders have to have a transit visa for Belarus, a visitors visa for Russia and a visitors visa for China. If we had Real Russia arrange these for us it is quite a lot of money but worse we have to remain in the UK for up to 4 weeks as each visa must follow the other as our passports are required. At this time of year we are very busy with work and that takes us out of the UK for a few weeks at a time so can't afford 4 continuous weeks in the UK between now and the end of February when we start on this journey.
To overcome part of this we could fly London to Moscow but we want to train, so travelling via Ukraine is the answer to not applying for the Belarus visa as we don't need a Ukraine visa. We have read that Kiev is an interesting and beautiful city so worth the day stopover we will have there.
The Chinese visa is plain expensive and time consuming, and as this was not exactly the trip we had intended we are over flying China.
The second minor problem is transport to Vladivostok airport from Vladivostok city center. There are 3 options, train, bus and taxi but none are heavily recommended. Cab would be easiest but may not be the budget option, train is supposed to be good but also read somewhere that it stopped running and started again so maybe not reliable? The bus station is way outside the city so I've read.
These are small things to overcome so we'll see.
Have found out why there is confusion as to how long the Trans Siberian takes, 6 days or 7. It is 144 hours on the Rossiya but there is a 7 hour time difference between the two cities. So technically it's 6 days exactly but in travel time adjusting for time zones it's 6 days and 7 hours. It is a funny system as all Russian railways work on Moscow time only so the further east you go the more out of sync you are with daylight.
That's it so far and sure to have a few questions for the experienced Russian rail travellers here.