Overnight trains are wonderful for traveling and saving a night's hotel. I used to take sleeper cars in China for distances that made sense (e.g. board at 9pm, arrive 7am). Some with shorter distances even optimized on sleep so that the train would stop for an hour outside the final station and arrive at a reasonable time in the morning. Unfortunately and similar with Europe, high speed rail has ended many of these schedules. On a side note, I've also failed to take this train multiple times in Japan due to its popularity: https://www.japan-rail-pass.com/japan-by-rail/travel-tips/su...
That's what I did when I went around northern Europe.
Took the Stockholm to Malmo, and then switch to Copenhagen.
Unfortunately, I don't think there was sleeper cars.
That train departed late evening, got us there in the daytime. I figured if I'm paying to sleep, I might as well be moving. I only wish that there was bunks on that train.
That Stockholm-Malmö night train is actually all sleepers except for one or two seating carriages. They tried to discontinue running it a few years ago but it’s becoming really popular so they might have just been sold out that night.
Good in theory, but implementation was poor the one time I tried it. The 6-person sleeper car is extremely cramped (2 triple bunks), and with the passport checks at border crossings, it's difficult to get a good night's sleep. Personal safety and luggage theft was a concern as well. I canceled my return trip and booked a low cost flight instead. Maybe the extra funding will improve train conditions and process.
If you choose a 6 person sleeper car, you can't really expect much. It's a bit like a hostel - you choose it because it's cheap, not because you expect to get proper rest.
To me, the 140EUR would be very much worth a private room, bathroom, and shower. It's travel + hotel, or some decent approximation. If you booked other forms of travel and an overnight hotel, you'd surely spend as much money and more time.
> What trains have you found that offer this? As an American unaccustomed to such trains, I'd be super interested to try them.
Just FYI, we have those in America on Amtrak long-distance trains; the Bedroom and Bedroom Suite (on both Viewliners and Superliners) have these features, as does the Accessible Bedroom on Viewliners. Roomettes don't have the shower (or the bathroom, on Superliners.)
The Late, Slow Limited (Lake Shore Limited). Cool route through the rust belt. The shitty thing about the two East coast-Chicago routes is they dropped dining car service. Until recently sleeping car passengers got an actual on board full service restaurant prepared meal included in the ticket. They dropped this due to costs. Now there is just the cafe car and these airplane style meals included with sleeping car tickets.. not the same at all.
The Trump 2019 budget cut over $600 million from Amtrack's budget, and Amtrack was already not in great financial shape.
If there's a change in leadership and some changes in US mentality regarding trains vs cars/planes, there might be hope for Amtrack in the future. If not, then I would expect more services being eliminated until there's nothing left.
That is too bad. My experience was a few years back.
I’m built like a gorilla and airplane seats are often pretty tortuous for me.
The train experience is pretty cool in many ways, despite with the problems that exist. Even in NYC, I can show up 5m before the train leaves and be good to go, while airports have all sorts of bullshit to deal with. It’s a shame that the circumstances of the mid 20th century prevented us from having good, integrated transportation for passengers.
You do realize that Amtrak long distance routes offer such accommodations?
I mean yeah, the trains themselves are slow as shit and might not go where you want, but superliners and viewliners have some interesting accommodations.
Train pricing is utterly insane, I have tried the last few years to find an affordable alternative to flying/driving by searching for long-distance or overnight Amtrak options (for Southwest area), but have consistently failed to find tickets less than $500, regardless of time of year.
I travelled in a such a cabin in 2012 from Denmark to, I believe, Munich. Very relaxing, and with a complimentary bottle of sekt from the conductor.
Sleeper cars are great—I have fond memories of travelling up the coast of Norway in 1990, as well as travelling in the seventies in Sweden with my father.
Not sure if it exists still but in 2012 I took a round trip Berlin Paris in a 4 bunk bed room around xmas. It was about 200 euros per person. About 13 hours in train, not the best sleep in such room.
> The 6-person sleeper car is extremely cramped (2 triple bunks)
You get what you pay for. There was probably an option of a 4-person compartment (2 double bunks), or perhaps even a first-class option with a two-person compartment. FWIW, I personally have never had a problem sleeping even in the 6-person cars; people are generally respectful of each other.
> with the passport checks at border crossings, it's difficult to get a good night's sleep.
Where was this with passport checks with border crossings? Were you somewhere in Eastern Europe? There is plenty of room for overnight trains within Schengen where passports are not generally checked at border crossings.
With the migration crisis, spot checks have been introduced at a few select crossings, but that still leaves plenty of possible train routes within Schengen where the authorities are not concerned about checking for migrants.
Croatia to Germany is only a little less annoying with Slovenia’s ascent into Schengen.
But before that, it was stop for Croatian exit controls, deal with Slovenian EU immigration, then Slovenian/EU customs, then Schengen once entering Austria.
A lot of interruption for an overnight train when travelling solo.
Then the equipment problems where I had to board a coach train and transfer to a bus before getting on the sleeper some hours later.
Sleeper trains to Scandinavia were a thing not so long ago. When German DB scrapped their CityNightLine system around year 2014, Copenhagen was being served with a sleeper train that had carriages to Basel, Amsterdam and Prague. The carriages were shunted between trains somewhere in Germany. It only takes few hours to reach Copenhagen from most inhabitated parts in Sweden - actually Copenhagen's airport is the main airport for many leisure travellers in Sweden. Nevertheless, a decade or two earlier there was a similar sleeper service that reached Stockholm.
I'm finding it hard to believe that sleeper services are not economically feasible since Europeans think of them quite fondly but of course, if they were feasible they would not have lost to discount airlines and even buses. Maybe sleeper trains could be operated more efficiently or marketed and priced more aggressively? In addition, it's currently a lot easier to buy a plane ticket than to plan a long railway journey and figure out which companies will sell the tickets.
Most CNL trains were still well-filled when they were suddenly cancelled. It was just that DB didn't want to invest in them anymore (the carriages were 30-40 years old and needed to be replaced), they wanted people to take fancy high-speed trains instead. Also, some countries levied high track access charges. Blaming only cheap airfares is not entirely fair. ÖBB took over some CNL routes and marketed them a lot better, and has made profits on them.
> Sleeper trains to Scandinavia were a thing not so long ago.
There's still a Stockholm-Malmö-Berlin sleeper, though only in the summer. There's also a year-round Stockholm-Malmö sleeper, and in Malmö you just take a 20-minute ride by Öresund train to hop over to Copenhagen.
Too bad I can't read WSJ, so I can't verify what they're saying. However, I haven't had much luck finding overnight trains here. It used to be that many existed and were popular, but they started disappearing and now few routes still have overnight options.
"In Europe alone, several new affordable options have materialized too, running more utilitarian services (no guided excursions, just overnight schedules). In 2017, the United Kingdom’s Great Western Railway (GWR) relaunched the Night Riviera, traveling between London and Cornwall, one of England’s sunniest corners. Also in 2017, Italy’s Trenitalia-owned Thello debuted new sleeper cars with en suite showers on their Paris to Venice route. And in June 2019, Scotland’s Caledonian Sleeper will debut highly anticipated new cars with routes from London to Glasgow and Edinburgh and Highlander routes to Aberdeen, Inverness and Fort William with en suite showers, double beds and plenty of whiskeys in the bar car."
I also enjoyed "Cornwall, one of England’s sunniest corners" though it was admittedly mostly nice last time I was there. That said, might have been a useful option when I did a coastal walk last summer.
There are many overnight express trains in Europe. Cozy and not expensive, enough space for bikes. Warsaw-Moskow, Munich-Bologna, Paris-Tolouse, Kopenhagen-Hamburg just some examples.
there's only 8 million people in Sweden, most of whom live near Europe in the south and in Stockholm, so this is relatively small endeavour. Still good though!
I was disappointed when I checked if it was possible to do Paris-Warsaw by night train. I imagined entering the train at 5pm, eating something, watching a movie and waking up in Paris in the morning.
It sounded much better to me than spending an actual day commuting to/from far away airports and waiting in queues.
Unfortunately such train does not exist, but neither does the platform that would allow searching and booking such trips across Europe.
I second the recommendation of Bahn.de. For like two decades now it has provided a way to search train schedules across Europe when the national rail companies didn’t bother to provide their own accessible interface.
You can book some trips that go through Germany but don't actually start or end there (e.g., Amsterdam-Göteborg).
Conversely, there are some trips that are best booked online on the web site of the national railway of a third country. For example, the site of the NMBS (Belgian Railways)[0] knows about some Dutch fare reduction cards that the DB (Germany) doesn't know about, while it also knows about more German stations than the NS (Netherlands) does, so some (admittedly fairly obscure) tickets from the Netherlands to Germany can only be bought online on their site.
I was thoroughly confused trying to book a French train yesterday when I realized that the regular SNCF website only lets you browse train schedules.
You had to lookup the schedule on another website (oui.sncf) to do the booking.
Then Iberia airlines kept showing a different date at the top menubar, which was a day before what I was actually booking. Thankfully the date in the body was correct.
Bahn.de is remarkable. You can search for Paris->Beijing if you want(202h with one change or 173h with three changes). Or you can look up the train schedule of a remote Scotish villages.
Off-topic, I remember reading about the history of the online Bahn schedule lookup, it apparently started with a guy, not affiliated with them, who put the contents of the Bahn's CD-ROM timetable online. IIRC that was 1998.
"If we are at step 4 for a long time, I'm probably personally at the machine and doing some tinkering.". I love that there's no separation between a developer and productive system.
I did exactly what you describe, about ~12 years ago, traveling Paris --> Florence, and Florence --> Amsterdam. We took a day train back to Paris from Amsterdam.
The Warsaw to Paris trip on this train takes almost 21 hours... It's just a regular train, not particularly high-speed. There are a faster options available (down to 16 hours), but they require multiple layovers so I wouldn't say they're viable in practice. Overall, Europe is mostly dominated by cheap airlines, esp. in the Eastern part.
Actually, the Eastern part still has several useful and quite cheap night trains. In the west, lots are being cancelled because the train companies would rather have us take high speed trains.
Yep, but the distance that you can travel overnight is usually well under 1000 km... Which, even in Europe, is rather a regional and not a continental trip. The latter are practical pretty much only via air.
bahn.de used to be my go-to place (even for trains inside Italy) but these days https://www.thetrainline.com/ is the best for finding good train connections across Europe.
For longer trips, I like having longer transfer times, just to have some kind of buffer in case of delay.
> Rail doesn't seem prepared to international travel.
There is some truth to that. You used to be able to buy a single ticket from Lisbon to Kiruna, and travel leisurely all the way, knowing you would arrive there even if you missed a train somewhere; you could just take the next one. Nowadays, you can't. You'll have to split up your trip into several tickets, and if your first train is delayed and you miss the train on your second ticket, you cannot just jump on the next train with it: each ticket is treated as a separate trip.
Also, if you buy your ticket online, you will probably have to visit multiple web sites to buy the separate parts of your trip. International ticket offices in most countries on the continent can book an entire trip for you, but will charge you extra booking costs for that.
Actually, for really long trips it's probably best to buy an Interrail/Eurail pass.
Warsaw on a warm summer evening. The sun is setting and there is a beautiful sky above the equally beautiful city. You relax into you sleeper cabin, and gaze out of the window waiting for the train to depart. 'Such a friendly city. Beautiful country.' you think to yourself. The train pulls out of the station. You watch the countryside pass as the night turns dark. You go to sleep.
-
You wake up at Gare du Nord. At least you think it's Gare du Nord. This can't be Paris, surely?! You think to yourself. You quickly leave the train to try and find out what horrendous 3rd world shithole your wrong train has taken you to... You immediately step in dog shit. You try to hop on one foot and clean it off. An tour group barge past you and knocks you over. A commuter flicks his cigarette toward the floor, hitting you in the face. He doesn't see you. Or maybe he just doesn't care. You can't tell. 'I need to get back to civilisation' you think to yourself as you get up and dust yourself off. You go to grab you suitcase. It's not there. It's in the hand of a Romanian running off down the platform. Welcome to Paris.
I don't know, I just arrived in Paris night and immediately after stepping out of Garre Du Nord, I was walloped with an overwhelming scent of urine. Not that far off.
I thought the punch line would be that he'd wake up parked on a siding in a Warsaw suburb 8 hours later. If Amtrak was in charge that's definitely what would have happened.
Excited about this idea. I wanted to do an overnight train in a Europe trip I did last year, but the timing and quality never quite worked out. A lot of the time, trains between cities in western Europe are annoyingly long for a day trip, but slightly _too short_ for overnight trips - almost like an NYC->London red-eye, where you arrive just after you fall asleep. The couple of overnight trains I saw that seemed like they'd work out timing-wise, like Paris to Venice, had really poor reviews, but I assume that's down to the various companies running these services, who probably haven't invested much in them lately as budget airlines continue to compete so heavily.
Sweden seems perfectly set up to invest in overnighters, though, as the article notes some theoretical routes. Norway and Denmark would benefit too, I think; at one point I was investigating doing a trip that would involve going from Oslo to Copenhagen, and the only reasonable non-flight options were an overnight _ferry_ (which, all things considered, was surprisingly cheap, though I'm sure they gouge you on food and the on-ship shopping mall), or a 7 and a half hour train trip that'd take all day. If Sweden were running overnight service along that route through Gothenburg, connecting those countries, it'd be a pretty awesome way to get between places.
There’s a coach from Oslo to Malmö. Not sure if it goes on to Copenhagen, but it’s easy enough to walk to the train platform and be at Copenhagen in 40mins.
I can't stand to be in a bus for more than about an hour and a half (or on a plane at all), while I can be in a train all day and enjoy the ride. YMMV.
That Venice train is great. Living near Paris, we can do a weekend in Venice with two full days on the ground but only one night in a hotel (which is handy since rooms start at around $400/night there.)
It’s a shame that they killed off the dozen other night train destinations from here over the years. If Sweden and Norway open up as possibilities, I’ll be dragging the family up there the first sunny weekend.
completely off-topic but you could stay in mestre and take the very cheap train into SL; takes 11 minutes. for example Best Western Plus Hotel Bologna is right next to the station and when i went there in october was 84 euros a night...
Huh, I came _very_ close to doing it, but saw enough negative reviews to put me off. To be fair, most of them seemed to be people who had bad experiences in the shared (hostel) sleepers, though, most of which seemed to not really be the fault of the train (just lots of complaints about snoring and such, which, like, is why I always have ear plugs when I travel), but some complained about broken AC and busted toilets which sounded like... well, a normal Amtrak experience, but not something I really wanted on my vacation.
You write "_ferry_" like it's something weird, but it's a completely normal transport option for a huge number of Europeans -- usually for longer journeys, but sometimes to cover a short distance in 20-30 minutes. There are many ferry connections across the Irish, North, Baltic and Mediterranean seas.
Ignoring the price, I'd choose an overnight ferry over an overnight train. The worst room on a ferry is probably as large as the best room on an overnight train.
The food menu for Oslo-Copenhagen is [1], the prices seem in-line with what I'd expect to pay at a restaurant in either city, though I don't know what the quality is like.
I'll second that overnight ferries can be great, and not just for Europeans. I've been on the one from Bari, Italy to Dubrovnik, Croatia which worked out really well. Another time I took one from Helsinki to Stockholm. If you take the ferry in the summer time you get an hours long never ending sunset.
Then of course there are the local ferries like you mention. IMO, one of the best ways to visit Venice is to stay in Rovinj, Croatia and ferry over for the day.
I took DFDS overnight from Sweden to Lithuania last summer and found it quite enjoyable. The tickets, including transport for your car, are reasonably priced (about the same price as plane tickets), we got to take the dog in the room with us and had a private shower. There's also a nice community of people to chat with out on deck during the night, everyone else is stuck on the ferry with you so you can have nice little parties.
Cell signals (at least in the Baltic) apparently travel super far over the water so you also get cell service for a freakishly longer time than you would expect. I think we had ours for about 3-4 hours after we left and 3-4 hours before we arrived back at shore.
Food was not great by any means, but edible.
The other kind of hilariously infuriating thing is that they wake you up at 7 am with an incredibly loud announcement that they are serving breakfast with an intercom piped directly into your room. And you can't turn it off. Was more funny than anything, though I can imagine that if it was a multiple-day endeavor that I could learn to hate it pretty quickly.
I have been on a few overnight trains here in Sweden and they have all been quite old, noisy and shaky ones. This initiative might give enough incentives for companies to invest in better overnight trains, but so far what we are being promised are more lines rather than better experience.
In contrast, overnight ferry has been mostly a delight. The room are smaller than hotel but much better than train, they don't shake (and I only appreciate a gently rocking movement of the ocean), and unless you buy the cheapest tickets you tend to get a mostly quiet night (the ac can be a bit loud through). The only drawbacks is that it is much slower than air travel, and the food prices in the restaurants are about as atrocious as those on planes and trains.
Sadly ferries is basically limited to traveling over the Baltic sea and Norway. I would very much like the option to travel to other costal nations in EU, even if it would take a day or two, but there simply isn't any lines.
There are in the Mediterranean. For instance between Morocco and Algeria it's one of the two options to cross the border, because the land border is closed (due to territorial disputes).
>I have been on a few overnight trains here in Sweden and they have all been quite old, noisy and shaky ones.
I've been on an overnight snabbtåg (SJ) from Köpenhamn to Stockholm to Norrköping and it wasn't that bad (however, I was the only one in my [train] car).
Overnight ferries are quite nice, I'll concede, such as from Holyhead to Dublin or Dublin to Cherbourg; however, that falls to the wayside when the seas are quite rough. In that sense, I would prefer the rickety train to the heaving ship.
Interestingly enough in Europe there are places [1] where you can take a train which goes on a ferry, so you can take the ferry while you take the train
It's fun once then mostly just annoying (unless you are a smoker I guess). There is, or at least used to be, another train ferry between Trelleborg and Sassnitz as well.
I've taken this train from Hamburg to Coppenhagen. It's fascinating to watch the train be put on the ferry and then you got a nice ferry ride and can marvel at the size of the wind farms off the coast. I would highly recommend it if you have the time.
I took this ride once but didn't actually know that was how it worked. I woke up in an empty car clearly in some kind of enclosure. It wasn't until leaving the car and going up a set of stairs that I realized my train was on a boat.
Until then, I wasn't so sure I wasn't in a rail yard or sci-fi movie.
I'm actually surprised they let you stay on the train. Both times I've taken that route they seemed pretty diligent about making sure everybody was off the train. I assume this is for safety reasons -- down in a darkened train on the lowest deck would be the last place I'd want to be if the ferry had any difficulties.
I really liked the ferry experience. The ferry part is only about 40 minutes, but it's just enough time to have a quick meal in the on-board restaurant. Unsurprisingly it's not exactly a bargain price for a buffet, but it did break up the train journey nicely. It's pleasant to sit in a comfortable booth and stare out at the sea for a bit.
> it's just enough time to have a quick meal in the on-board restaurant
The pickings seemed pretty slim for vegetarians, though, which took me by surprise as nearly every restaurant these days has at least one vegetarian option. I ended up having some plain fries with ketchup.
Yes, I'm a vegetarian myself and also would have appreciated a better selection in that regard. Both times I ended up having meals that were heavy in the potato and cheese departments. The buffet had some fruit and cooked vegetables as well, but nothing that was really a main dish by itself. Still, I didn't go hungry or anything.
I have done this exact journey about a decade ago. It was a really good experience - made all the more memorable as I was not expecting the train to roll on to the ferry! The daytime ferry transit provided good views and I second the recommendation to try it.
Overnight sleeper ferries are a thing in China, I took one from Shanghai to an island in zhejiang once.
If you take a ferry up from Washington state to Alaska, they have sleeper cabins of course for the rich but you are also allowed to pitch a tent on top in a designated area.
The ferry isn't too bad, I've taken it between Stockholm, Tallinn, Helsinki, and St. Petersburg. It's not like an all inclusive, nice experience like American cruises, but more minimalist (taking people, cars, and trucks). It's extremely cheap in the baltic sea and way cheaper than flight + hotel. It's a good experience all in all. Prices on board for food and shopping weren't bad at all.
The ferries are also known as booze cruises since Scandanavia has such high alcohol tax/gov. monopoly on alcohol, people buy a ton of it from the duty free store on board.
> The ferries are also known as booze cruises since Scandanavia has such high alcohol tax/gov. monopoly on alcohol, people buy a ton of it from the duty free store on board.
I've been on a few of these ferries and remember what looked like locals buying suitcase carts full of beer and liquor. On the ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn I met a nice couple who explained how it was cheaper to take a day trip to Tallinn to shop than it was to shop in Helsinki. Much like when Americans drive to the outlet stores.
It takes too long to get out of Sweden by sleeper train. High speed trains from major cities, as well as Oslo, and good regional routing that gets you to Copenhagen in ~3 hours would be a much better bet. Unfortunately that isn't happening anytime soon.
Try Middle Europe. Take a train from Prague to Vienna to Zurich and on to Paris .. or Berlin, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, I mean if you plan things properly, its a very, very comfortable way to ride around see Europe properly: slow enough to grok the landscape.
I've done Krakow to Prague and Prague to Zurich and both of those were fantastic experiences. I've also done Verona to Paris which I would rate less highly - the Thello is significantly more expensive for a less comfortable train, additionally we were stopped and all passengers checked on the French border, which hadn't happened entering either the Czech Republic or Switzerland.
I spent a year in Germany circa 1999 and then overnight trains were all the rage. For instance, Dresden to
Amsterdam was an easy and inexpensive trip. Going east you
could get to Budapest, going south to Innsbruck, etc.
At that point an American in Europe would ride the train as much as he could, but the Europeans I knew thought taking a plane was cooler and it was a good experience because the plane had competition from the train.
Just like with flights, you have to book early enough and check different times, and then additionally get the discount cards, and then you're looking at comparable prices quite often.
If you time your travels right, it often makes more sense to compare prices of sleeper trains to the price of a flight + one night at a hotel instead of the flight alone. Also trains often get you to city centres while most low cost airlines will take you to an off-center airport which is also worth something.
Importantly, petroleum taxes are usually leveraged on consumers e.g. diesel and gas prices in europe are mostly special taxes (+ VAT), train operators pay taxes on electricity (possibly diesel as well, not sure about that one) but kerosene (and possibly bunker fuel) is free of both VAT and petroleum-specific taxes. And that's despite planes generally producing more CO2/passenger/km than cars by a factor of 30~50%.
Sadly, aviation is often exempt from fuel taxes and even VAT. I don't know the situation in Sweden, it seems they started taxing aviation recently. I don't know how much though.
In most EU states, there are VAT exemptions for the fuel used in domestic and intra-EU flights, while no similar exemptions exist for the fuel used in trains (and cars). Likewise, there exist VAT exemptions for plane tickets.
At least in Portugal, querosene is also exempt from the ISP (tax on the petroleum products). VAT and ISP make up more than half of the retail price of diesel and is almost 2/3 of the price of gasoline. Interestingly, the VAT rate of 23% is applied to the price with ISP included. So you effectively pay a tax on the tax. Finally, there's the fact that we're emitting free 2009/29/EC directive carbon allowances for aviation.
Here in the Netherlands 1 liter of gasoline was very low a few months ago at about €1,55. Now back up to €1,60 if you do your best or €1,78 on the highways. Portugal is not that bad :)
I remember reading that EasyJet and Ryanair get subsidies from regional Airport authorities. They also regularly threaten to shut down their bases at said airports when they don’t get their way with pilot unions and so on.
It's an informal subsidy at best in that local policymakers create these regional Airports in the first place, then struggle to find Airlines without large numbers of existing traffic. So they reach out to the likes of EasyJet and Ryanair, which are happy to book slots if the price is cheap enough. Their added volumes of traffic alone can make up for other costs an airport incurs (operations etc.) in that they can rent retail space for example. And it's a chance at attracting other carriers as well.
Every shopping mall (or new district) works the same way: Without anchor tenants (who attract large amounts of traffic) it's hard to get the venue off the ground. Which is why these anchor-tenants get huge discounts (for instance in German inner-city locations an ALDI gets to pay 3€/sqm, whilst the hair salon next door pays 20€/sqm).
The question of course is: Do these regions need Airports? Or is it morally flawed for urbanites to condemn flyover-people wanting to become better connected?
If an airline is using an airport cheaply and said airport continuously requires government money to not go bankrupt, that is a fairly clear subsidy. The "rent retail space and chance at attracting other carriers" doesn't work that reliably in practice, since those other carriers can play the same game of "we only come if we don't have to pay the actual costs", and can quickly shift to other airports if one stops playing ball. Sometimes it seems attracting airplane maintenance facilities is the most reliable source of income for such airports.
Especially since in many areas, long-distance air travel is pretty much a zero sum game: more small airports doesn't mean more people flying, it's just shifting people around between airports.
In truly remote areas I believe that's different and worth supporting (paying for infrastructure so people can travel more easily, when it'd otherwise be a day or two in the car to get to an airport), but e.g. in Germany there's a bunch of places that have good train connections to bigger airports, but regional airports with extremely limited air connections are still funded. E.g. one example I'm thinking of is less than 2 hours by train from 2 big airports, but apparently needs an airport that serves a few holiday flights each week. Every few years there's big announcements of new airlines coming in, which either get cancelled again after a few years, the airline goes bankrupt or ... While the running subsidies aren't that high, the initial investments were and IMHO would have been better used for other infrastructure.
"If an airline is using an airport cheaply and said airport continuously requires government money to not go bankrupt, that is a fairly clear subsidy."
Yes. But based on EU regulation this won't be allowed anymore in the near future. (2020? 2022?)
> A lot of the time, trains between cities in western Europe are annoyingly long for a day trip, but slightly _too short_ for overnight trips - almost like an NYC->London red-eye, where you arrive just after you fall asleep.
Yeah, the sweet spot is definitely 8+ hours en route.
I took a fantastic service from Nice to Paris which ran about twelve hours, which was plenty of time to sleep. It was weirdly cheap at €87 for a first-class sleeper car, or €157 including an extra €70 supplement to be guaranteed to be the only occupant in a room with four berths. The service started at Nice (8pm), made a few local stops to pick up more passengers, finally got to Marseilles (10:29pm), then ran nonstop from 10:30pm Marseilles to 7:38am Paris.
I had been expecting a very low-key cut-rate service designed for locals to travel comfortably overnight in dedicated beds but got a very modern train instead -- apparently operated by Russian Railways (RZD) with 2014-built passenger carriages that RZD also uses for their Paris to Moscow service (same equipment as the "sleeping cars" shown here). The onboard shower was an unexpectedly nice touch and it was an awesome ride.
The logistics can work out really well. My calculus was that (1) I was in Nice visiting family and wanted to stay as long as possible, but I needed to catch a 10am flight out of CDG the next day; (2) it would have cost €300+ to book a flight NCE-CDG and an airport hotel, and departing the city center at 8pm let me see the city for longer than heading to NCE in the late afternoon.
Unclear if it was a good deal from a point of view of national priorities. My trip kept one person from taking one domestic flight -- is that a good deal considering the externalities of shorthaul plane rides versus train rides? I have no idea.
Once upon a time there was a night train Florence-Paris.
It left Florence (Santa Maria Novella station, in the centre) around 19:00-20:00 and arrived in Paris (Gare de Lyon) if I recall correctly around 9:30 the morning after.
The plane required:
1) being at the Pisa airport (which is a 1:30 hour train/bus away from the center of Florence) 1:30 before departure
2) roughly 1:30 boarding and flight
3) 15-30 minutes to collect luggage (if any)
4) 40-60 minutes from the Charles De Gaulle Airport to the centre of Paris
All in all 5-6 hours total.
Choosing the train (which - depending on the arrangement could also be cheaper, including the dinner, than the plane) was a no brainer for me.
Next time take the ferry. The so called Danskebåten is an experience all by itself. Many Norwegians do round trips just for the party. Also you will be able to buy duty free and save a fortune (assuming you drink alcohol).
I have visited every country in the EU, a lot of which by train, it has been a thing my friends and I have done over the last 10 years, going to a few countries each year, trying to use public transport where it is reasonable. Along the way, I have been on a number of overnight trains and a number of overnight ferries and I personally highly rate the experience. There is something almost romantic about falling asleep one place and waking up somewhere else. But also the social aspect, head down to the bar cart on the train, have a beer, chat to other people, most people are a lot more open to chating than normal and you find out about their life, their reason for travel and sometimes even end up seeing them once you arrive at your destination. On top of that, planes are typically really noisy (from the engine), cramped, and just difficult (okay, business class is a fair bit better and I can only assume 1st class even more so) where as the train is quiet and just a nice way to relax either on the way back from somewhere on to build the excitement when heading somewhere!
Then again, I have also travelled the length of the Trans-Mongolian railway (St Petersburg to Beijing) and across the States (California to New York) by sleeper train!
I did it about 10 years ago when I was a student, I left the day before, with a backpack, a rough idea of the itinerary and a few tourist guide books, and visited in the course of 3 weeks Bruxelles, Bruges, Amsterdam, Lubeck, Copenhagen and Berlin (and a small stop in Cologne).
Definitely something I would recommend to any student in Europe.
I took the ferry often as a kid, and a couple of years ago took it from Crete to Athens. It was excellent. Leaves around 9pm, gets in around 7am, and a private berth for two costs about the same as a hotel or flights, but you're essentially getting both in one.
I've read that travel on the Malmö-Stockholm sleeper is on the rise, especially by business travelers. Unfortunately I can find the source, but I think it was covered in SvD. I often travel Malmö-Stockholm for work, but quite often I'm not able to get a ticket because it's sold out.
I traveled from Stockholm to Malmö almost 5 years ago. I had a sit instead of a sleeping coach. It was a good experience. I got really early to Malmö without the stress of flying.
As I read the article, the "revival" is more about the government trying to get people to reduce their carbon footprint when travelling, and less about popular demand.
That being said, I remember taking the sleeper from Stockholm to Elsinore in Denmark as a kid. Boarding the ferry while on the train was pretty awesome to a ten year-old. :P
In my limited experience trains are both ridiculously expensive and impossible to find in Europe.
Let’s say I want to travel from Stockholm to Hamburg. It will cost an arm and a leg. And it will require a ridiculous amount of layovers (5 IIRC, with bus travel between some trains) if you can a website to actually plan such a route properly.
It gets even more ridiculous the farther you travel.
Hasn't been since 2014 or so. But taking the night train from Stockholm to Malmö, then a local train to Copenhagen and the intercity to Hamburg works great.
I just plugged those two cities into the Deutsche Bahn website, and can now buy a ticket for a train leaving Stockholm in 8 hours (6:25 local time).
2 transfers (although routes exist with only one), 11:37 travel time. Saver fare still available: 99,90 € (regular would be 225 €). And it's not the only connection tomorrow.
That said, your point somewhat stands: it really depends on the route if good options are available, I've also looked at trips that seemed possible but I couldn't make work at all. Biggest problem is often the lack of overnight connections/night trains, which mean you're limited to what you can do during the day unless there's one of the exceptions on your route. Not fun if the only overnight "connection" means spending 2:30am to 4:45am on some train station.
bahn.de has an English version fwiw. But yeah it's non-obvious that it's the de-facto pan-Europe rail search engine. Other European train companies generally have pretty spotty cross-border information, while DB has almost everything. Even with tickets it can't book for you, it still usually has timetables and can show you an itinerary.
Interesting that they don't support that at all, but yes, getting the data (and more importantly, the ability to book) shared across companies and network has been annoyingly slow and incomplete.
The best option should have one change, since there are direct trains from Stockholm to Copenhagen, and from Copenhagen to Hamburg (this train goes on the ferry). I would expect an additional change in Malmoe could reduce the cost and increase the time.
If you search for "now", it's 22:52, so you may get odd connections as the journey planner tries to make an overnight journey.
Wow, how does a train go on a ferry? A full, long train with many cars? Then the ferry would have to be that long too, which seems unlikely. Or is it that one or a few cars of the train go on each trip of the ferry, and the cars are all connected back together when back on land?
Interesting, didn't know. It felt like high-tech to me, anyway, since I had not seen or heard of train ferries before, although I did know about ferries that can take cars (automobiles) on board. Been on one such ferry in Goa, and my parents had been on some while visiting the US and Canada, I forget in which city.
seat61.com will tell you which site to use for which route.
reiseauskunft.bahn.de knows several languages, including of course English.
There are also some pan-European booking sites, like loco2.com, happyrail.com and a few others. But these don't always manage to find the saver tickets, so you're sometimes stuck with full price.
But wait. If you plan to travel a LOT with a train within Europe, and you are a European resident, check out the Interrail passes.
For non-residents, check out Eurail instead.
I've no experience with Eurail but Interrail worked fine back in the days and saved a lot of money, too. As horribly cliché as it may sound, it truly was a great eye-opening experience which made me appreciate Europe (culture, people, cuisine, geography, history, and so on) more than I did before.
My cousin (Indian) had toured Europe a lot, cheaply, back in the day, on Eurail, when working for the Indian Tea Board in Brussels for 3 years.
>I've no experience with Eurail but Interrail worked fine back in the days and saved a lot of money, too. As horribly cliché as it may sound, it truly was a great eye-opening experience which made me appreciate Europe (culture, people, cuisine, geography, history, and so on) more than I did before.
It would be great to see more night trains but having taken several before, I've never really been able to fall asleep. I would love to see technical improvements to reduce rumbling and promote sleep.
Agree with you. I took a night train from Venice Italy to Paris. The next day in Paris I had essentially prolonged motion sickness where I felt as if I was still on the train rocking with the rhytmn of the tracks about to fall out of the top bunk I had tried to sleep in.
I'll believe it when I see it. Sleeper trains have been on the out for a while now, because they're much cheaper and often much more convenient than high speed rail. Don't want cheap and good to compete with overpriced and profitable, do we now?
With the addition of the Fehmarnbelt Tunnel potentially coming in 2028, it would be much more attractive for people in all the Nordic countries to take an overnight train into central Europe and vice versa. It looks like construction will begin this fall in Denmark.
Overnight trains are awesome and I am glad they are making a resurgence but is $5.3mm really "a major shot in the arm for Europe’s night trains overall"? That's not very much money for infrastructure. Perhaps the important thing here is that the Swedes are publicly announcing that they're spending money on this, in general.
The cooler night train story is what is going on in Asia -- lots of projects in the works such as an Istanbul-Baku luxury sleeper train and major new Chinese routes such as Dushanbe-Kashgar and Lhasa-Yunnan.
Sleeper trains are doing fine in Central and Eastern Europe, despite having to contend with some long running times. Sweden is trying to revive them through Denmark, which hasn't hosted night trains since 2014 [1].
There's two viable, existing routes for trains between the Central Sweden and Northern Germany. One's through the Fehmarn Belt rail ferry, and another is the long way through Jutland. Both ways take a long time compared to the distance covered. Stockholm is already ~5 hours by fast train from Copenhagen -- this segment of the journey stays the same. It's after that things get complicated and slow. Operational issues remain with changing voltages and train protection systems (ETCS Level 2 will be built out in a few years), or with the ferry.
A Fehmarn Belt fixed link would be a boon for such a service, like the article says. But it remains to be seen whether that will be built.
Re: Central and Eastern Europe, I took an overnight (sort of, 5AM to 5PM) sleeper train from Lviv to Budapest a couple years ago. It was quite pleasant and they managed the journey in a way I never would have expected. Instead of passenger layovers and shuffling between trains at subsequent stations, they just designated a whole car bound for Budapest and then detached & reattached it to different trains along the way. Made the long ride a surprisingly pleasant and restful experience.
They're called though coaches (Kurswagen in German) and used to be quite common. In fact, quite a few night trains are split and recombined during the night, but usually in chunks of three or four cars.
One of my most pleasant travel snooze memories is waking up in a very comfortable bunk bed, looking out the window to the morning sun rising over the Danube, a castle and some vineyards and fruit gardens rolling off into the distance, slowly coming to a two hour halt and having a mountain valley full of green life splayed out for the breakfast picture.
If I remember correctly, a night train from Stockholm to south Europe implies a change of train in the middle of the night in either Malmö or Copenhagen - which sort of ruins the the concept of sleeper trains.
I don't see why that would be necessary. They might have to switch locomotives a couple of times during the journey, but they can just do that with the same set of carriages, with the passengers sound asleep during the switches.
I took a first-class sleeper train from Budapest to Amsterdam 20 years ago and loved every second of it. It's saddened me that it's become too expensive: something I afforded as a recent graduate at short notice now requires you to either to shell out a lot of cash or book far ahead, like a tourist? At least, Austria still offers affordable sleepers. The sound of the train lulling you to sleep is a wonderful thing.
As of 25 years ago this was THE way for a backpacker with a Eurail pass to see the continent during the summer. The cheap cars (ie 6 beds/room) were basically a youth hostel on rails. It was a fantastic way to meet other travelers and explore new cities together.
Yup, I did this for a month back in my student days - the ticket is called Inter-Rail if you buy it within Europe. I was incentivised to basically visit a different country every day because every night spent on a train was one you didn't have to pay for a hostel! Also, some places like Florence had a free campsite with wooden shelters, you just had to bring a sleeping bag, and the month's rail ticket included an overnight ferry from Italy to Greece. Happy days!
I take this train 3-4 times a year going from stockholm-luleå and it's great. You can get a 6 person cabin when travelling in a company of 4 which is great when you have small kids. This way you a whole cabin for them be pains without disturbing anybody else and it's much more of an adventure and much more cosy. I would love to have more good alternatives to travel by night trains because I really dislike airports and flying. One of the problems is that it's much more expensive to travel by train than the flying alternative.
Swedish railways have been staggeringly mismanaged and neglected since the 1990s. I wouldn't be surprised if they're one of the worst managed railway systems in the entirety of what used to be known as the developed world.
But it would be wonderful to have them restored and have international overnight services added. Hoping, with some skepticism, that the politics translate to reality here.
You are right but it's not likely to be fixed. On the contrary, the government has extracted billions upon billions in dividends from the state railway company, in order to shore up the budget.
I took an overnight train in Sweden from Stockholm to Åre a couple of years ago. My experience was average at best, but possibly not good data. I was in a 6 person room (3 beds stacked on each side), and I ended up on the top bed.
It was pretty hard to fall asleep on a slowly, but slightly rocking train, then add in other strangers you are sleeping around, and it makes it even less comfortable.
I ended up just sleeping in 30 minute intervals, woken up by the rocking of the relatively smooth train. I would imagine it might be a good experience if friends/family took a cabin together, but with strangers it's not very comfortable (although some might disagree). Additionally, being on the top bunk made me subject to wider rocking then the people below me. I can imagine the experience being terrible if you don't have completely silent bunkmates like I got lucky with.
I think it might catch the attention of people who haven't done it before, but I didn't think it was anything to write home about.
> I was in a 6 person room (3 beds stacked on each side)
That sounds like a couchette (i.e. no real mattress, just a bunk). My experiences with those are also quite bad. A bed in a real sleeper cabin (with an actual mattress) is much more comfortable.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadThat train departed late evening, got us there in the daytime. I figured if I'm paying to sleep, I might as well be moving. I only wish that there was bunks on that train.
https://www.sj.se/en/about/about-sj/our-trains/sj-night-trai...
I took the sleeper from Stockholm to Kiruna in Lapland not too long ago. Definitely takes a while but it was a really nice experience!
To me, the 140EUR would be very much worth a private room, bathroom, and shower. It's travel + hotel, or some decent approximation. If you booked other forms of travel and an overnight hotel, you'd surely spend as much money and more time.
What trains have you found that offer this? As an American unaccustomed to such trains, I'd be super interested to try them.
> What trains have you found that offer this? As an American unaccustomed to such trains, I'd be super interested to try them.
Just FYI, we have those in America on Amtrak long-distance trains; the Bedroom and Bedroom Suite (on both Viewliners and Superliners) have these features, as does the Accessible Bedroom on Viewliners. Roomettes don't have the shower (or the bathroom, on Superliners.)
The only problem is that the schedule is kinda of aspirational. The train from NYC attaches in Albany, and the times often don’t line up.
When the economy is good, the westward tracks are busy with frieight traffic so you wait.
I enjoyed the trip though and got a lot of work done.
If there's a change in leadership and some changes in US mentality regarding trains vs cars/planes, there might be hope for Amtrack in the future. If not, then I would expect more services being eliminated until there's nothing left.
I’m built like a gorilla and airplane seats are often pretty tortuous for me.
The train experience is pretty cool in many ways, despite with the problems that exist. Even in NYC, I can show up 5m before the train leaves and be good to go, while airports have all sorts of bullshit to deal with. It’s a shame that the circumstances of the mid 20th century prevented us from having good, integrated transportation for passengers.
I mean yeah, the trains themselves are slow as shit and might not go where you want, but superliners and viewliners have some interesting accommodations.
Sleeper cars are great—I have fond memories of travelling up the coast of Norway in 1990, as well as travelling in the seventies in Sweden with my father.
You get what you pay for. There was probably an option of a 4-person compartment (2 double bunks), or perhaps even a first-class option with a two-person compartment. FWIW, I personally have never had a problem sleeping even in the 6-person cars; people are generally respectful of each other.
> with the passport checks at border crossings, it's difficult to get a good night's sleep.
Where was this with passport checks with border crossings? Were you somewhere in Eastern Europe? There is plenty of room for overnight trains within Schengen where passports are not generally checked at border crossings.
Don’t worry, MEPs won’t do anything more than talk about it.
https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/what-we-do/policies/border...
But before that, it was stop for Croatian exit controls, deal with Slovenian EU immigration, then Slovenian/EU customs, then Schengen once entering Austria.
A lot of interruption for an overnight train when travelling solo.
Then the equipment problems where I had to board a coach train and transfer to a bus before getting on the sleeper some hours later.
Ugh.
- The 4 or 6 person compartments (couchettes) are quite cramped indeed, but the good part is they only cost 10 or 20 euros extra compared to a plain seat. https://www.vagonweb.cz/fotogalerie/SK/WSBA_Bvcmbz.php
- The actual sleeper wagons with 1 to 3-berth compartments cost more, with their prices around a hotel stay, but are quite comfortable in my opinion. https://www.vagonweb.cz/fotogalerie/A/OeBB_WLABmz-7290.php
Sleeper trains to Scandinavia were a thing not so long ago. When German DB scrapped their CityNightLine system around year 2014, Copenhagen was being served with a sleeper train that had carriages to Basel, Amsterdam and Prague. The carriages were shunted between trains somewhere in Germany. It only takes few hours to reach Copenhagen from most inhabitated parts in Sweden - actually Copenhagen's airport is the main airport for many leisure travellers in Sweden. Nevertheless, a decade or two earlier there was a similar sleeper service that reached Stockholm.
I'm finding it hard to believe that sleeper services are not economically feasible since Europeans think of them quite fondly but of course, if they were feasible they would not have lost to discount airlines and even buses. Maybe sleeper trains could be operated more efficiently or marketed and priced more aggressively? In addition, it's currently a lot easier to buy a plane ticket than to plan a long railway journey and figure out which companies will sell the tickets.
There's still a Stockholm-Malmö-Berlin sleeper, though only in the summer. There's also a year-round Stockholm-Malmö sleeper, and in Malmö you just take a 20-minute ride by Öresund train to hop over to Copenhagen.
There was a Wall Street Journal article about it recently.
Sorry the link is Apple News, but that's where I bookmarked it from: https://apple.news/AdFPGWf-GTmOabJK30Za0ZQ
"In Europe alone, several new affordable options have materialized too, running more utilitarian services (no guided excursions, just overnight schedules). In 2017, the United Kingdom’s Great Western Railway (GWR) relaunched the Night Riviera, traveling between London and Cornwall, one of England’s sunniest corners. Also in 2017, Italy’s Trenitalia-owned Thello debuted new sleeper cars with en suite showers on their Paris to Venice route. And in June 2019, Scotland’s Caledonian Sleeper will debut highly anticipated new cars with routes from London to Glasgow and Edinburgh and Highlander routes to Aberdeen, Inverness and Fort William with en suite showers, double beds and plenty of whiskeys in the bar car."
I used both of these trains as a student (late 2000s), so I'm not convinced that they weren't affordable before the relaunch.
It sounded much better to me than spending an actual day commuting to/from far away airports and waiting in queues.
Unfortunately such train does not exist, but neither does the platform that would allow searching and booking such trips across Europe.
Conversely, there are some trips that are best booked online on the web site of the national railway of a third country. For example, the site of the NMBS (Belgian Railways)[0] knows about some Dutch fare reduction cards that the DB (Germany) doesn't know about, while it also knows about more German stations than the NS (Netherlands) does, so some (admittedly fairly obscure) tickets from the Netherlands to Germany can only be bought online on their site.
[0] https://www.b-europe.com/
You had to lookup the schedule on another website (oui.sncf) to do the booking.
Then Iberia airlines kept showing a different date at the top menubar, which was a day before what I was actually booking. Thankfully the date in the body was correct.
Edit: 1994! The page: https://www.remote.org/frederik/projects/railserver/history.... , and it was just an email address where you could send an email with a special syntax
and you'd get a reply telling you the train connections. From a cronjob that ran twice a day!The (German) how it worked page is even more fascinating: https://www.remote.org/frederik/projects/railserver/technik....
"If we are at step 4 for a long time, I'm probably personally at the machine and doing some tinkering.". I love that there's no separation between a developer and productive system.
There's no official (government/public run) website, so Seat 61 is probably the best resource.
https://www.seat61.com/paris-moscow-express.htm
https://www.rome2rio.com/ can come in handy as well.
> Rail doesn't seem prepared to international travel.
There is some truth to that. You used to be able to buy a single ticket from Lisbon to Kiruna, and travel leisurely all the way, knowing you would arrive there even if you missed a train somewhere; you could just take the next one. Nowadays, you can't. You'll have to split up your trip into several tickets, and if your first train is delayed and you miss the train on your second ticket, you cannot just jump on the next train with it: each ticket is treated as a separate trip.
Also, if you buy your ticket online, you will probably have to visit multiple web sites to buy the separate parts of your trip. International ticket offices in most countries on the continent can book an entire trip for you, but will charge you extra booking costs for that.
Actually, for really long trips it's probably best to buy an Interrail/Eurail pass.
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You wake up at Gare du Nord. At least you think it's Gare du Nord. This can't be Paris, surely?! You think to yourself. You quickly leave the train to try and find out what horrendous 3rd world shithole your wrong train has taken you to... You immediately step in dog shit. You try to hop on one foot and clean it off. An tour group barge past you and knocks you over. A commuter flicks his cigarette toward the floor, hitting you in the face. He doesn't see you. Or maybe he just doesn't care. You can't tell. 'I need to get back to civilisation' you think to yourself as you get up and dust yourself off. You go to grab you suitcase. It's not there. It's in the hand of a Romanian running off down the platform. Welcome to Paris.
Sweden seems perfectly set up to invest in overnighters, though, as the article notes some theoretical routes. Norway and Denmark would benefit too, I think; at one point I was investigating doing a trip that would involve going from Oslo to Copenhagen, and the only reasonable non-flight options were an overnight _ferry_ (which, all things considered, was surprisingly cheap, though I'm sure they gouge you on food and the on-ship shopping mall), or a 7 and a half hour train trip that'd take all day. If Sweden were running overnight service along that route through Gothenburg, connecting those countries, it'd be a pretty awesome way to get between places.
It’s a shame that they killed off the dozen other night train destinations from here over the years. If Sweden and Norway open up as possibilities, I’ll be dragging the family up there the first sunny weekend.
Ignoring the price, I'd choose an overnight ferry over an overnight train. The worst room on a ferry is probably as large as the best room on an overnight train.
The food menu for Oslo-Copenhagen is [1], the prices seem in-line with what I'd expect to pay at a restaurant in either city, though I don't know what the quality is like.
[1] https://www.dfdsseaways.co.uk/onboard-our-ferries/copenhagen...
Then of course there are the local ferries like you mention. IMO, one of the best ways to visit Venice is to stay in Rovinj, Croatia and ferry over for the day.
Cell signals (at least in the Baltic) apparently travel super far over the water so you also get cell service for a freakishly longer time than you would expect. I think we had ours for about 3-4 hours after we left and 3-4 hours before we arrived back at shore.
Food was not great by any means, but edible.
The other kind of hilariously infuriating thing is that they wake you up at 7 am with an incredibly loud announcement that they are serving breakfast with an intercom piped directly into your room. And you can't turn it off. Was more funny than anything, though I can imagine that if it was a multiple-day endeavor that I could learn to hate it pretty quickly.
In contrast, overnight ferry has been mostly a delight. The room are smaller than hotel but much better than train, they don't shake (and I only appreciate a gently rocking movement of the ocean), and unless you buy the cheapest tickets you tend to get a mostly quiet night (the ac can be a bit loud through). The only drawbacks is that it is much slower than air travel, and the food prices in the restaurants are about as atrocious as those on planes and trains.
Sadly ferries is basically limited to traveling over the Baltic sea and Norway. I would very much like the option to travel to other costal nations in EU, even if it would take a day or two, but there simply isn't any lines.
I've been on an overnight snabbtåg (SJ) from Köpenhamn to Stockholm to Norrköping and it wasn't that bad (however, I was the only one in my [train] car).
Overnight ferries are quite nice, I'll concede, such as from Holyhead to Dublin or Dublin to Cherbourg; however, that falls to the wayside when the seas are quite rough. In that sense, I would prefer the rickety train to the heaving ship.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogelfluglinie
Until then, I wasn't so sure I wasn't in a rail yard or sci-fi movie.
I really liked the ferry experience. The ferry part is only about 40 minutes, but it's just enough time to have a quick meal in the on-board restaurant. Unsurprisingly it's not exactly a bargain price for a buffet, but it did break up the train journey nicely. It's pleasant to sit in a comfortable booth and stare out at the sea for a bit.
The pickings seemed pretty slim for vegetarians, though, which took me by surprise as nearly every restaurant these days has at least one vegetarian option. I ended up having some plain fries with ketchup.
Also a really cool view if you take the bridge from Denmark to Sweden, windmills in the sea almost as far as the eye can see.
Was the portion over the Oresund Bridge by bus then? It is indeed an impressive bridge. You get a good glimpse of it flying out of Copenhagen as well.
If you take a ferry up from Washington state to Alaska, they have sleeper cabins of course for the rich but you are also allowed to pitch a tent on top in a designated area.
Tents all go on deck, looks like duct tape is used.
Since the ferries travel mostly between the coast and islands, it isn’t anywhere as windy as the open sea.
The ferries are also known as booze cruises since Scandanavia has such high alcohol tax/gov. monopoly on alcohol, people buy a ton of it from the duty free store on board.
I've been on a few of these ferries and remember what looked like locals buying suitcase carts full of beer and liquor. On the ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn I met a nice couple who explained how it was cheaper to take a day trip to Tallinn to shop than it was to shop in Helsinki. Much like when Americans drive to the outlet stores.
If you get the cheapest tickets, some fights, noise, sex and/or vomit is something you'd expect... Of course you need to be very drunk to do that.
Try Middle Europe. Take a train from Prague to Vienna to Zurich and on to Paris .. or Berlin, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, I mean if you plan things properly, its a very, very comfortable way to ride around see Europe properly: slow enough to grok the landscape.
At that point an American in Europe would ride the train as much as he could, but the Europeans I knew thought taking a plane was cooler and it was a good experience because the plane had competition from the train.
Edit: If you're wondering what I find unfair about it, I'm mainly concerned about the lack of taxes on kerosine.
At least in Portugal, querosene is also exempt from the ISP (tax on the petroleum products). VAT and ISP make up more than half of the retail price of diesel and is almost 2/3 of the price of gasoline. Interestingly, the VAT rate of 23% is applied to the price with ISP included. So you effectively pay a tax on the tax. Finally, there's the fact that we're emitting free 2009/29/EC directive carbon allowances for aviation.
If they did't extempt kerosene, Spain would get its share of its tourists.
Compared: https://autotraveler.ru/en/spravka/fuel-price-in-europe.html
It's an informal subsidy at best in that local policymakers create these regional Airports in the first place, then struggle to find Airlines without large numbers of existing traffic. So they reach out to the likes of EasyJet and Ryanair, which are happy to book slots if the price is cheap enough. Their added volumes of traffic alone can make up for other costs an airport incurs (operations etc.) in that they can rent retail space for example. And it's a chance at attracting other carriers as well.
Every shopping mall (or new district) works the same way: Without anchor tenants (who attract large amounts of traffic) it's hard to get the venue off the ground. Which is why these anchor-tenants get huge discounts (for instance in German inner-city locations an ALDI gets to pay 3€/sqm, whilst the hair salon next door pays 20€/sqm).
The question of course is: Do these regions need Airports? Or is it morally flawed for urbanites to condemn flyover-people wanting to become better connected?
Especially since in many areas, long-distance air travel is pretty much a zero sum game: more small airports doesn't mean more people flying, it's just shifting people around between airports.
In truly remote areas I believe that's different and worth supporting (paying for infrastructure so people can travel more easily, when it'd otherwise be a day or two in the car to get to an airport), but e.g. in Germany there's a bunch of places that have good train connections to bigger airports, but regional airports with extremely limited air connections are still funded. E.g. one example I'm thinking of is less than 2 hours by train from 2 big airports, but apparently needs an airport that serves a few holiday flights each week. Every few years there's big announcements of new airlines coming in, which either get cancelled again after a few years, the airline goes bankrupt or ... While the running subsidies aren't that high, the initial investments were and IMHO would have been better used for other infrastructure.
Yes. But based on EU regulation this won't be allowed anymore in the near future. (2020? 2022?)
Yeah, the sweet spot is definitely 8+ hours en route.
I took a fantastic service from Nice to Paris which ran about twelve hours, which was plenty of time to sleep. It was weirdly cheap at €87 for a first-class sleeper car, or €157 including an extra €70 supplement to be guaranteed to be the only occupant in a room with four berths. The service started at Nice (8pm), made a few local stops to pick up more passengers, finally got to Marseilles (10:29pm), then ran nonstop from 10:30pm Marseilles to 7:38am Paris.
I had been expecting a very low-key cut-rate service designed for locals to travel comfortably overnight in dedicated beds but got a very modern train instead -- apparently operated by Russian Railways (RZD) with 2014-built passenger carriages that RZD also uses for their Paris to Moscow service (same equipment as the "sleeping cars" shown here). The onboard shower was an unexpectedly nice touch and it was an awesome ride.
Sadly the train I took no longer exists -- when I took it in July 2016, the French government had already begun to withdraw subsidies for the service (https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2016/may/10/france-waves-... , https://www.seat61.com/lunea.htm ) and it vanished.
The logistics can work out really well. My calculus was that (1) I was in Nice visiting family and wanted to stay as long as possible, but I needed to catch a 10am flight out of CDG the next day; (2) it would have cost €300+ to book a flight NCE-CDG and an airport hotel, and departing the city center at 8pm let me see the city for longer than heading to NCE in the late afternoon.
Unclear if it was a good deal from a point of view of national priorities. My trip kept one person from taking one domestic flight -- is that a good deal considering the externalities of shorthaul plane rides versus train rides? I have no idea.
It left Florence (Santa Maria Novella station, in the centre) around 19:00-20:00 and arrived in Paris (Gare de Lyon) if I recall correctly around 9:30 the morning after.
The plane required:
1) being at the Pisa airport (which is a 1:30 hour train/bus away from the center of Florence) 1:30 before departure
2) roughly 1:30 boarding and flight
3) 15-30 minutes to collect luggage (if any)
4) 40-60 minutes from the Charles De Gaulle Airport to the centre of Paris
All in all 5-6 hours total.
Choosing the train (which - depending on the arrangement could also be cheaper, including the dinner, than the plane) was a no brainer for me.
Then again, I have also travelled the length of the Trans-Mongolian railway (St Petersburg to Beijing) and across the States (California to New York) by sleeper train!
On great way to do that is to buy an interrail pass: https://www.interrail.eu/en/interrail-passes/global-pass
I did it about 10 years ago when I was a student, I left the day before, with a backpack, a rough idea of the itinerary and a few tourist guide books, and visited in the course of 3 weeks Bruxelles, Bruges, Amsterdam, Lubeck, Copenhagen and Berlin (and a small stop in Cologne).
Definitely something I would recommend to any student in Europe.
That being said, I remember taking the sleeper from Stockholm to Elsinore in Denmark as a kid. Boarding the ferry while on the train was pretty awesome to a ten year-old. :P
It was a great experience, maybe not the most comfortable, but I thought it was worth it.
Let’s say I want to travel from Stockholm to Hamburg. It will cost an arm and a leg. And it will require a ridiculous amount of layovers (5 IIRC, with bus travel between some trains) if you can a website to actually plan such a route properly.
It gets even more ridiculous the farther you travel.
2 transfers (although routes exist with only one), 11:37 travel time. Saver fare still available: 99,90 € (regular would be 225 €). And it's not the only connection tomorrow.
That said, your point somewhat stands: it really depends on the route if good options are available, I've also looked at trips that seemed possible but I couldn't make work at all. Biggest problem is often the lack of overnight connections/night trains, which mean you're limited to what you can do during the day unless there's one of the exceptions on your route. Not fun if the only overnight "connection" means spending 2:30am to 4:45am on some train station.
So I need to somehow know that Deutsche Bahn ofers the search capability. True two to three train changes, 90 to 220 euro.
I guess I’ll use bahn.de from now on (and learn some German :) )
If you search for "now", it's 22:52, so you may get odd connections as the journey planner tries to make an overnight journey.
Wow, how does a train go on a ferry? A full, long train with many cars? Then the ferry would have to be that long too, which seems unlikely. Or is it that one or a few cars of the train go on each trip of the ferry, and the cars are all connected back together when back on land?
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:2017-08-22-ICE_TD_Puttga...
Larger ferries on other routes have multiple rails next to each other, and long trains are split up across those.
Whew!
>https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:2017-08-22-ICE_TD_Puttga....
High-tech.
>Larger ferries on other routes have multiple rails next to each other, and long trains are split up across those.
Great idea.
As the Wikipedia article says, there are very few routes left in Europe, although there used to be a lot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_ferry
reiseauskunft.bahn.de knows several languages, including of course English.
There are also some pan-European booking sites, like loco2.com, happyrail.com and a few others. But these don't always manage to find the saver tickets, so you're sometimes stuck with full price.
For non-residents, check out Eurail instead.
I've no experience with Eurail but Interrail worked fine back in the days and saved a lot of money, too. As horribly cliché as it may sound, it truly was a great eye-opening experience which made me appreciate Europe (culture, people, cuisine, geography, history, and so on) more than I did before.
My cousin (Indian) had toured Europe a lot, cheaply, back in the day, on Eurail, when working for the Indian Tea Board in Brussels for 3 years.
>I've no experience with Eurail but Interrail worked fine back in the days and saved a lot of money, too. As horribly cliché as it may sound, it truly was a great eye-opening experience which made me appreciate Europe (culture, people, cuisine, geography, history, and so on) more than I did before.
Cousin said the same about the experience.
http://www.globalconstructionreview.com/news/green-light-74b...
The cooler night train story is what is going on in Asia -- lots of projects in the works such as an Istanbul-Baku luxury sleeper train and major new Chinese routes such as Dushanbe-Kashgar and Lhasa-Yunnan.
There's two viable, existing routes for trains between the Central Sweden and Northern Germany. One's through the Fehmarn Belt rail ferry, and another is the long way through Jutland. Both ways take a long time compared to the distance covered. Stockholm is already ~5 hours by fast train from Copenhagen -- this segment of the journey stays the same. It's after that things get complicated and slow. Operational issues remain with changing voltages and train protection systems (ETCS Level 2 will be built out in a few years), or with the ferry.
A Fehmarn Belt fixed link would be a boon for such a service, like the article says. But it remains to be seen whether that will be built.
[1] https://back-on-track.eu/night-trains-to-europe-new-opportun...
But it would be wonderful to have them restored and have international overnight services added. Hoping, with some skepticism, that the politics translate to reality here.
It was pretty hard to fall asleep on a slowly, but slightly rocking train, then add in other strangers you are sleeping around, and it makes it even less comfortable.
I ended up just sleeping in 30 minute intervals, woken up by the rocking of the relatively smooth train. I would imagine it might be a good experience if friends/family took a cabin together, but with strangers it's not very comfortable (although some might disagree). Additionally, being on the top bunk made me subject to wider rocking then the people below me. I can imagine the experience being terrible if you don't have completely silent bunkmates like I got lucky with.
I think it might catch the attention of people who haven't done it before, but I didn't think it was anything to write home about.
That sounds like a couchette (i.e. no real mattress, just a bunk). My experiences with those are also quite bad. A bed in a real sleeper cabin (with an actual mattress) is much more comfortable.