101–110 of 135 posts
This seems to be a great resource! However, when I looked at prices, seats are quite expensive. Does anyone have any advice for finding cheaper train tickets?
I've been on one night train (Moscow to St Petersberg) and, for the experience, I greatly enjoyed it. Was it the most comfortable? Naw. The bed was too short, too hard, and it was far too hot and stuffy in the cabin. But I'm glad I did it.
Was it a platzkart? Those are only for the most hardy travelers. I've only done kupe, but SV looks pretty decent.
So often people online tell me such-and-such night train route is no longer in service (my first trip was almost 30 years ago now, so many of my night train memories stem from an earlier era). But now i can actually see and point to something with night train routes people can take advantage of.
Also, as someone who is building a Europe Travel planning web app, this is also a great resource to link to for train travel.
Thanks for posting/making this.
There is a clear lack of connection toward France and Spain. EDIT: Paris is of course well connected, but southern France and Spain are not. I live in Zurich and it's quite easy to go north, south, and east by train, but going south-west towards Marseille, Toulouse, Barcelona is really inconvenient. And it's not just about Zurich, because doing so from Milan or Frankfurt, I would guess, is the same. However I heard o…
Both France and Spain are greatly invested in high speed rail so you can travel there via daytime trains.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was it a platzkart? Those are only for the most hardy travelers. I've only done kupe, but SV looks pretty decent.
No it was a more traditional sleeper car ala From Russia With Love. Private cabins of 2-4 bunks per.
There is a clear lack of connection toward France and Spain. EDIT: Paris is of course well connected, but southern France and Spain are not. I live in Zurich and it's quite easy to go north, south, and east by train, but going south-west towards Marseille, Toulouse, Barcelona is really inconvenient. And it's not just about Zurich, because doing so from Milan or Frankfurt, I would guess, is the same. However I heard o…
One cause is that France is rather obstinate when it comes to sleeper trains passing through, but not stopping in, France. A direct line from the Netherlands and Belgium to Spain (e.g., Barcelona) would be viable and possible on standard gauge, but it wouldn't make sense to stop in Paris at 2:00 in the night or so. SNCF and the relevant French agencies insist on trains serving France as well. Maybe some company will…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq0aA9RZ1ls
The train passes through France non stop. Along the way, around 2AM, a single carriage decouples from the end and smoothly glides into a Paris terminal, where it functions as a de facto hotel room for the night as guests won't be kicked out until morning. Will anyone use it? IDK. But it does satisfy the requirement of stopping in France.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. While it looks good on paper, booking some of these is quite a pain. I loved travelling by train as a kid, and would love to do it now, but when you compare the offers, it's quite bad. A flight is 1:15 between 2 places of interest for me. The train routes on this map exist (used it twice), but part of it is at night but only has normal compartments. Whole train journey is 15:34 (compared to 1:15 flight),…
Things could certainly be better, but it is a but disingenuous to give the pure flight time of 1:15, when we all know that flying has quite a bit of time requirements on both ends. Not enough to bring it to 15.5 hours, but still easily enough to triple the trip time.
I arrive at the airport 30 minutes before departure. I check in using a mobile app. Automatized gate with facial recognition tech takes my ID and boarding pass QR code - there are so many gates there's never a queue. The worst part of the ordeal - the security check of baggage - takes 5-10 minutes or so. I sit in the plane and we fly. At the destination I simply walk away without any queues anywhere (single duty zone...).
Definitely not 3x the travel time, no way. I never had boarding take more than an hour, and it only took that long when I was going out of EU.
Those sound good on paper but then reality hits you. Last summer we as a family decided to take a night train to reach our vacation destination. What should have been 6-7 hour car drive was ~12 hour train ride. Sleep was not great, getting to and out of train stations, herding two small kids etc so at the time we've reached our destination we were pretty tired. Much more tired if we just drove. The route back is wher…
Why didn't you drive? With a full car, the environmental and certainly economic argument for the train is gone. I have used about 5 night trains in recent years. I don't sleep very well, unlike my Russian colleague who grew up with this, but they have all been more or less on time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Does anyone have any advice for finding cheaper train tickets? What I did: - got a DB Bahncard 25 (25% reduction on all prices) - use the DB site or app to find the lowest-cost connections (enable "Show our best prices", only works 2 days in advance or later) - select the lowest-price connection which has a bearable number of changes and waiting periods, for me this ends up between 6 and 10 changes for the trip fro…
Also worth mentioning regarding Deutsche bahn ICEs, my understanding is that prices only increase over time. They never decrease like plane tickets do. And there's only a predetermined number of saver fares, so once those are gone, you have to buy the more expensive tickets (which are also more flexible, as opposed to the train-specific saver fares).
Having said all this it is remarkable that ICE and to a lesser extent IC seem to be far less reliable than RE (regional) trains in Germany. I've spent large parts of several nights in the dank tunnels of German train stations with alcoholics coming by every few minutes to ask for money to start new lives (i.e. get a new can or bottle) waiting for ICE trains which are delayed up to 4.5 hours.
Here we are wishing that we had daytime trains half as good in the US. Yes it's fine if you live near the northeast corridor, but what about the rest of us out here in "flyover country"?