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Interrail: 6,379Km and 13 Countries over 7 weeks

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Re: Interrail: 6,379Km and 13 Countries over 7 weeks

#141

Post by qurren »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #140
qurren wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For actual travel I've almost always preferred trains over flights in Europe. Much less hassle, you can take your favorite liquids, no idiot airline agents trying to steal your 8kg kg carry-on for being overweight, no security line. I've travelled to almost every country in western Europe and several in Eastern Europe, not taking a single inter-Europe flight. The only part I hate is after taking an overnight train, h…

One great "hack" I've discovered is that most hotels are more than happy to stow your luggage behind the counter, or even in a luggage room if you arrive before check in times. This more or less completely eliminated my gripe with check-in times being later than I arrive to a city.

True, but I still need to shit an average of 3 times every morning and the arrivals are Poisson. Problematic in many European cities that don't have restrooms everywhere.

Re: Interrail: 6,379Km and 13 Countries over 7 weeks

#142

Post by bluebarbet »

SoftTalker wrote: post #135
bluebarbet wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All true. Also: Weekend holidays involving flights are a completely unsustainable and irresponsible form of tourism given the climate crisis. Not that anyone much cares.

Not always. For solo travel, flying can emit less carbon than driving an ICE vehicle, assuming a full commercial flight and depending on vehicle fuel efficiency. For EVs, hybrids, and group travel the calculation may be different. Also, if you drive, it's likely that the flight you would otherwise have taken is going to make the trip anyway. So you've just added whatever carbon your car emits to the total. If you're…

As you hint, the rule of thumb is that driving is (mile for mile) roughly as polluting as flying. But that's surely the point: nobody is going to drive across a continent to go the beach. The problem with flying is precisely the speed with which the damage is done.

>if you drive, it's likely that the flight you would otherwise have taken is going to make the trip anyway

This is a terrible argument, a straightforward (but surprisingly common) fallacy. The plane is leaving because of the price signal: people bought tickets for the flight. If they stop buying tickets, planes will very quickly stop leaving.

I agree that if we care about the environment then we should at least try to travel less, or less far.

Re: Interrail: 6,379Km and 13 Countries over 7 weeks

#143

Post by unD »

sph wrote: post #74

Interrail used to be more popular years ago among young adults who had just finished high school. I did it with a few friends at the time, and it was an incredible experience of self-reliance, patience and just complete freedom. My best memory is sleeping under the stars outside the train station of Biarritz, France, on a mild summer night next to the Atlantic Ocean. Such a refreshing sleep. The next night we did the…

My daughter (now 20) did something similar last summer: Prague, Berlin, Copenhagen, Malmö, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and Paris in a couple of weeks, IIRC.

She left with a friend, who headed home after a few days, so she ended up traveling solo for most of the trip. She stayed in hostels (bar in Paris) and ate basically only TooGoodToGo food [0] to save €. She made it home in one piece, with the biggest smile on her face.

[0] https://www.toogoodtogo.com/

Re: Interrail: 6,379Km and 13 Countries over 7 weeks

#144

Post by bergie »

marvelous wrote: post #132
sph wrote: post #74

Interrail used to be more popular years ago among young adults who had just finished high school. I did it with a few friends at the time, and it was an incredible experience of self-reliance, patience and just complete freedom. My best memory is sleeping under the stars outside the train station of Biarritz, France, on a mild summer night next to the Atlantic Ocean. Such a refreshing sleep. The next night we did the…

A guy told me once that he used his interrail ticket to sleep in the trains and save the cost of a hotel. He'd spend half the night going to a random destination and the other half back. The issue he faced once was that some border guard recognized him on the way back and would not believe that he wasn't involved in some sort of smuggling.

That's the way. Get on a train, sleep, wake up in a new city.

Last time I did interrail (some 15 years ago), you could sometimes pay a bit of extra to get a spot in a sleeping car.

Re: Interrail: 6,379Km and 13 Countries over 7 weeks

#145

Post by jmkd »

sph wrote: post #74

Interrail used to be more popular years ago among young adults who had just finished high school. I did it with a few friends at the time, and it was an incredible experience of self-reliance, patience and just complete freedom. My best memory is sleeping under the stars outside the train station of Biarritz, France, on a mild summer night next to the Atlantic Ocean. Such a refreshing sleep. The next night we did the…

Ha, have also slept outside Biarritz station whilst interrailing. Must be the sea breeze.

Re: Interrail: 6,379Km and 13 Countries over 7 weeks

#146

Post by 4ggr0 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #71
4ggr0 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

doesn't it say quite a bit about the german train system when you have to compare it to india to make it seem not that bad?

Not at all, India is great at many things, I think this comment might say more about you than what you replied to or trying to say :)

the comment i replied to used India as a bad example, all my comment says is "doesn't it say something about X if you have to use the worst example which comes to your mind to use as a counterpoint"

i have no clue about indian railway, just tried to make a point about the fallacy.

Re: Interrail: 6,379Km and 13 Countries over 7 weeks

#147

Post by basisword »

bluebarbet wrote: post #142
SoftTalker wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not always. For solo travel, flying can emit less carbon than driving an ICE vehicle, assuming a full commercial flight and depending on vehicle fuel efficiency. For EVs, hybrids, and group travel the calculation may be different. Also, if you drive, it's likely that the flight you would otherwise have taken is going to make the trip anyway. So you've just added whatever carbon your car emits to the total. If you're…

As you hint, the rule of thumb is that driving is (mile for mile) roughly as polluting as flying. But that's surely the point: nobody is going to drive across a continent to go the beach. The problem with flying is precisely the speed with which the damage is done. >if you drive, it's likely that the flight you would otherwise have taken is going to make the trip anyway This is a terrible argument, a straightforward…

>> I agree that if we care about the environment then we should at least try to travel less, or less far.

I disagree. Regular people have already made plenty of sacrifices. We should continue enjoying our lives so long as billionaires utilise their private jets, governments wage wars, and citizens in countries like the US continue to consume exponentially more resources than everywhere else.

Re: Interrail: 6,379Km and 13 Countries over 7 weeks

#148

Post by [deleted] »

qurren wrote: post #141
BobaFloutist wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One great "hack" I've discovered is that most hotels are more than happy to stow your luggage behind the counter, or even in a luggage room if you arrive before check in times. This more or less completely eliminated my gripe with check-in times being later than I arrive to a city.

True, but I still need to shit an average of 3 times every morning and the arrivals are Poisson. Problematic in many European cities that don't have restrooms everywhere.

[deleted]

Re: Interrail: 6,379Km and 13 Countries over 7 weeks

#149

Post by panick21_ »

Someone wrote: post #49
panick21_ wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually no. German trains are often late, true, but outside of that its actually very nice. There are a lots of lines and lots of collections. The only time its a bad idea is if you have a real time constraints.

But the problem is: everybody doing a trip with a transfer has real-time constraints. With Interrail, that is doable. You’ll have to mostly plan for overnight stays in large cities, but that’s what most Interrail users want to, anyways.

Yes but many trips don't have real-time constrains or only with local transit. If I go to city X and I need to go somewhere usually in X there are trains every 30min or trams to get me to my hotel.

But granted if you have a connection with two ICE depending on each other, this gets more problematic. Believe me I had that multiple times, and I was late but usually the next train is also late so it works out.

You can't plan super time constrained, but mostly for me it has been fine if you go in with that expectation.

Again, not defending this overall, in Switzerland I plan my journey I expect it to be on point, but I just dropped that expectation in Germany. And that fine for many situations, you just have to know that's what it is.

Re: Interrail: 6,379Km and 13 Countries over 7 weeks

#150

Post by pchangr »

mqus wrote: post #72
pchangr wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it depends on what you expect. If you expect the train to be on time .. yes, India is much better than Germany. ~80% trains delayed 15 min or less vs Germany 36% trains delayed 15 min or less. It can get pretty bad when your train is delayed so you miss your connection and now you’re stranded in a random town waiting for the next train .. which is coming .. at 5am the next day. Or you can take the regional an…

> I guess it depends on what you expect. If you expect the train to be on time .. yes, India is much better than Germany. ~80% trains delayed 15 min or less vs Germany 36% trains delayed 15 min or less. I won't defend DB too much here but saying that 64% of trains in germany are delayed more than 15min is just plain wrong. The official statistics put it at 40% for 6min or more for long distance trains and 11% for reg…

Hey, I’m sorry for the delay, had to take a train yesterday (how fitting). I think you have a point. I got the German statistics from the official site https://zbir.deutschebahn.com/2025/en/interim-group-manageme... and yep.. I missread, dbahn marks passenger trains as delayed after >5 min. Only cargo passengers are marked delayed after >15min.

It seems that India doesn’t really release this data officially but it can be obtained from third parties. In this specific case, I got my figure from a news article. I am not entirely sure about the primary source, they just quote a gov. official statement.

However, It seems that somebody released a public dataset to Kaggle https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/rxydenxd/indian-railways-del... but it’s older than the news I read.

From what I read, the main criticism is that the 80% just takes into account the delay at the last station, not the intermediate ones and 15 min is indeed a lot.

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