Semarang to Jakarta by Train

Roughly 440km west along the north coast from Semarang Tawang into Jakarta, taking five and a half to six and a half hours.

Give yourself a few minutes at Tawang before boarding. The 1914 station hall, with its high dome and arched windows, is among the finest colonial railway buildings still in daily use anywhere in Asia, and it was restored and formally reopened in 2026.

Which trains run this route: Argo Muria and Argo Sindoro are the dedicated eksekutif services into Gambir. Every westbound Surabaya train on the northern line also calls here, so effective frequency is considerably higher than the dedicated services alone suggest.

Semarang works well as a stopover splitting the long Surabaya to Jakarta run into two manageable halves, with a city genuinely worth a day in between — the restored old town, Lawang Sewu, and the cooler hill suburbs above the coast.