I've been on this train. The sound of the train being pulled onto the ferry did wake me up to say the least. It was dark outside and the blinds were shut in our sleeping coach. I remember feeling a bit of a weight, being in bed, in a closed coach, inside a large train, deep inside this massive ferry with many floors above us. It wasn't until much later that I realized that the train was open-air and not that big at all. You then wake up a few hours later near Palermo where the train runs just by the ocean – that was lovely.
I've also been on the second-to-last train of this type a few times (Snälltåget from Sweden via Denmark to Germany). That one also got canceled for the same reason – mega bridge construction (Fehmarn Belt). There, you used to get off the train to go up to the canteen for lunch with the truckers.
It was trains from Hamburg to Copenhagen used to run on the Fehmarn Ferry until the line was shut for reconstruction, they now run via Padborg.
The Snalltaget sleeper train from Berlin to Malmo used to run on the ferry from Sassnitz to Trelleborg avoiding Denmark altogether, that stopped because the ferries don't run on that route any more, and the train also runs via Padborg.
I'm struggling to come to terms with the depth of anti-modernity sentiment in the West, that it's considered normal (and not mortifying) to read a BBC piece praising a twenty-hour rail journey as a thing of "lyrical beauty", quoting authorities like a "philosophy researcher". Who elevated this flowery nonsense over the common sense of the masses of sane people, with lives and goals and needs and places to be?
As the article states, they’re planning to build a bridge. You can have an efficient option and a scenic/nostalgic option on the same route. This is just a bit of sentimentality about a cool train journey that might be replaced, not “anti-modernity sentiment.”
The "mega bridge" is one of the most politicized and polarizing projects I've ever seen in my life.
My family lived in Messina for a while and it seems that in the last 100 years no one was actually interested in building nor genuinely stopping the project for good, just using it to bash whoever is on the opposite side of the argument.
- On the left it's seen as the biggest ecological issue they have in Italy, despite the ferry company handling the passage is a well known mafia-owned monopoly whose ferries leak tons of garbage and oil on the sea every single day.
- On the right they've gone with the most ridiculous, expensive and unachievable version of a project in order to to make sure they can siphon as much money as they can before declaring that the project has to be stopped or whatever.
Every summer I go back to my mother's family and when the topic comes out it's as they're basically stuck in a time loop.
> when the topic comes out it's as they're basically stuck in a time loop.
Fellow Italian here. The whole country is stuck in a time loop. Have you noticed that even the crime pages of the newspapers are filled with articles about investigations on murders of twenty or thirty or even forty years ago? And that on tv, people debate furiously terrorist acts that took place almost 50 years ago- when they also don't get updates from eternally ongoing investigations and trials? In politics, the same reforms that were proposed at the beginning of the '90s are brought up by each new government, generating new controversy and division, until they're forgotten or, sometimes, rolled back by Italy's supreme court. These days there's even a debate going on about the opportunity of introducing sexual education in schools for 6-8 graders, when I remember we had it already in the late '80s.
They seem to have missed one key detail in the title: this is the last European passenger train that travels by sea - or rather, the last ferry crossing that carries passenger carriages (I doubt that they carry the engine across by ferry?). There are (AFAIK) several other ferry lines that carry freight carriages, among them the Rostock-Trelleborg line served by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Sk%C3%A5ne
> I doubt that they carry the engine across by ferry?
I don't know about this specific instance, but the Germany-Denmark train-on-a-ferry carried the whole Diesel-powered train, engine and all. It drove onto the ferry on its own, and left it on its own as well.
> In August, the Italian government revived long-standing plans to build a vast €13.5bn (£11.7bn) suspension bridge over the strait – one of the world's most ambitious engineering projects.
What makes it particularly ambitious? The strait of Messina is two miles across, and I don't think that even cracks the top 100 of the world's longest bridges.
> "...building a suspension bridge of this scale poses significant engineering challenges. The Strait of Messina is known for strong winds, seismic activity, and deep waters, all of which complicate construction and long-term stability. Engineers will need to ensure the structure can withstand earthquakes, which aren't unheard of in the region, while addressing corrosion from the salty marine environment."
I remember reading an article, posted here on HN, that went into much more depth about why this was all unusually challenging, but I haven't found it again.
On a not totally unrelated topic, this gem in Aomori Japan, well off the beaten track, is amazing. It's the last train-carrying ship that used to sail between Honshu and Hokkaido (a particularly dangerous stretch of sea), before they built the Seikan Tunnel for trains.
If your destination is Messina or even Catania, you can can save some time leaving the train in Villa San Giovanni (last stop before the train will be loaded into the ferry) and, literally, jump on the first ferry that is starting, so you save all the time needed to load and unload the train.
No one will ask you for a ticket (no one will ask for anything, actually). Or at the least it was like this some twenty years ago when I did it.
This summer I took the ferry from Hirtshals, Denmark to Seydisfjordur, Iceland. 2 full days, over 48 hours of travel time. And back.
Relatives and friends thought my wife and I were crazy - or at least eccentric. Why would you waste 4 full days (+ 2 days to get to and from Denmark by car).
Turns out, travel time is still travel. And what a beautiful time that was!
There is no stable Internet conncetion on the ferry itself (no cell connection AT ALL at sea), plus you have to pay for it a pretty hefty fee. So from observing other people, +95% did not have Internet access at all.
The ferry itself is not huge, it is not a cruise ship. But large enough to be entertaining and fun to explore. Kids had a few attractions, including a tiny cinema. They sold popcorn though, that's all kids cared about besides the Minecraft movie.
For us, adults, there were a few bars, restaurants to hang out. Even a little library, a corner with board games, couple shops.
Because people were not glued to their phones, you could actually meet and talk to other people, have non-trivial conversations. People would read books, have a sip of coffee, walk around.
Not once did I get bored, not once did I not know what to do. Sure enough, I would pull out the iPhone from my pocket only to see it is completely offline. What was also fun: if I went out with the kids, there was no way I could let me wife know we would be late or any other matters. Same the other way.
Life felt slower, but somehow more real?
Anyway, I can only recommend a travel experience like this, at least once in your lifetime. For us, it became part of the memories we made, besides visiting Iceland itself. I can imagine the same being the case if you travel long distances by train.
Took a train from NYC to Chicago and it was so nice. Similar amount of time, about two days I think all in all. And just rolling on the plains, got myself a bunk, was more expensive than the plane ride home but 25 times more enjoyable and fulfilling.
Ditching my phone as much as possible has been the best decision I've ever made. Life always feels a little slower when you're not constantly inundated with outside noise.
I still pay attention, but instead of constantly paying attention and doing nothing, I pay attention a good amount, and do things instead.
I've done a number of long distance walking holidays now. Weeks straight of walking every day. Pilgrims walk ~800km in ~6 weeks on the Camino de Santiago in Spain throughout the year. I've done shorter routes both in Spain and elsewhere. It's really a great way to switch off. Your whole life becomes the Way. How far do you have to walk? Where are you going to eat? Do you need to carry food? What's the weather looking like? Going back to being stationary afterwards is quite jarring actually.
As a sort of counter anecdote - we took a ferry from Portsmouth to Bilbao once, it was also just over 2 days on the sea. But oh boy, I regularly take ferries from UK to Netherlands, but I've never seen sea as rough as this. We were pretty much stuck in the cabin, sea sick, for the entire two days. I decided to brave the neausea and attempt to go for some food, but in the main buffet plates were literally sliding off the tables.
On the way back we decided to drive through france and skip the ferry.
But yes, on the Newcastle to Amsterdam crossing my favourite thing is being completely cut off from the internet, can finally sit down with a book without the compulsive need to check my phone every 5 minutes.
I took the train from Copenhagen to Stockholm a few years back. I remember getting on the train and then all of a sudden we were boarding a boat, and got kicked out of the train while they transited the across the ocean.
I really liked it, was a cool experience, and an easy way to get on a boat.
IDK if it's still like this. I hope it is.
I had checked google maps before the trip and saw a bridge so figured the train would go over that, but looks like it's car only bridge. Was a pleasant surprise.
The funny part of this is, you just described not only travel, but all of life prior to about 2003ish (at least in the United States). This is when, in my social circles, we transitioned to most people having cell phone access and the ability to "let people know if you would be late." Still a long time before smart phones became ubiquitous.
So this was "just life" in the 90s and beforehand. The upside you describe was also sometimes the downside. E.g. my mother was traveling for work when one of my brothers was injured in a way that required a trip to the ER for stitches (he's fine). My dad was getting us all (4 kids under 7) into the car as she called from her hotel and he basically had to answer and say that we were on the way to the hospital, and she just had to wait for an update once we got home many hours later.
And yet, I would still agree that "Life felt slower, but somehow more real?" and that we haven't yet found the right equilibrium for always being connected in a way humans were never able to be before. I'm glad experiences like this are still possible.
Yeah, if you actually walk around outside of your cabin. I took this ferry last summer, pretty much didn't leave the cabin (except to look at Shetland Islands), only just before arriving. Having plenty of food, movies and games with me... yeah
If you take this ferry, make sure to do the stop in Faroe Islands, it's absolutely amazing.
I plan to sail this route again next year.
Side note: was it just me or this ferry or route is particularly rough? I crossed Baltic like 20 times by ferry (18h crossing), never got sea sick, until this one.
Paul Theroux talks about this a bit in one of his books, about how it’s about the journey and not the destination basically. I think it was The Old Patagonian Express.
At least in the past trains went by ferry also between Helsingborg (Sweden) and Helsingör (Denmark). Could not find if they have been stopped. So the Italian train might be not be there only one in Europe.
I can see why this is worthwhile for a freight train, it takes a long time to unload goods onto a boat and offload them the other side. But why does it make sense for passengers? Is it just because they were doing it with freight already?
It's easy to frame the bridge as "progress," but it risks bulldozing over the kind of slow, sensory-rich travel that people are increasingly craving again
I took that train many years ago. At least back then it was faster to get off the train in Calabria, hop on whatever local ferry was next, and then grab another train in Sicily, depending on your destination. In my case it was Catania to visit a friend.
The first ever night train I went, about 25 years ago, on was from Berlin to Malmo. Early morning, I woke up to the feeling of my bed swaying and looking out of the window realised 'hang on, they've put the train on a ferry'.
I had no idea that trains got put on ferries, although I had been puzzled by the way the route on the route map crossed the sea but had assumed it was just to make the diagram simpler. It was quite a surreal thing finding myself unexpectedly on a train on a ferry. It was nice though as you could go and wander round the ferry and it was quite fun seeing it go off the ferry which had special train tracks on it onto the normal train tracks on the land.
I took this train or another one that crossed to Sicily in the early 90s. It was at night, so there wasn’t much to look at while the mechanics of being transferred from the wharf to the boat and then back to land took place. But I do remember the friendliness of the Sicilian people on that train. I only spoke a little French and some high school Latin, but it was enough to have a basic conversation and even a few laughs.
My family is from Sicily, and I remember taking this train every year when I was a kid. After several years, I took it again last summer and was bufflled at how inefficient the whole ordeal was... Basically you have to wait for the train wagons to be detached and reassembled on the other side, you easily waste a couple hours.
Now, I don't really mind this, it's a bit of a tradition if you want, but I asked a relative of mine who used to work for the Italian national train company, and he told me that this train works like this cause in the past all the Sicilian migrants would travel with a lot of luggage, and it would be very impractical for them to transfer all of that twice. Nowadays this is not really the case anymore.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 71.2 ms ] threadI've also been on the second-to-last train of this type a few times (Snälltåget from Sweden via Denmark to Germany). That one also got canceled for the same reason – mega bridge construction (Fehmarn Belt). There, you used to get off the train to go up to the canteen for lunch with the truckers.
The Snalltaget sleeper train from Berlin to Malmo used to run on the ferry from Sassnitz to Trelleborg avoiding Denmark altogether, that stopped because the ferries don't run on that route any more, and the train also runs via Padborg.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BA_2p5RUbe8
My family lived in Messina for a while and it seems that in the last 100 years no one was actually interested in building nor genuinely stopping the project for good, just using it to bash whoever is on the opposite side of the argument.
- On the left it's seen as the biggest ecological issue they have in Italy, despite the ferry company handling the passage is a well known mafia-owned monopoly whose ferries leak tons of garbage and oil on the sea every single day.
- On the right they've gone with the most ridiculous, expensive and unachievable version of a project in order to to make sure they can siphon as much money as they can before declaring that the project has to be stopped or whatever.
Every summer I go back to my mother's family and when the topic comes out it's as they're basically stuck in a time loop.
Fellow Italian here. The whole country is stuck in a time loop. Have you noticed that even the crime pages of the newspapers are filled with articles about investigations on murders of twenty or thirty or even forty years ago? And that on tv, people debate furiously terrorist acts that took place almost 50 years ago- when they also don't get updates from eternally ongoing investigations and trials? In politics, the same reforms that were proposed at the beginning of the '90s are brought up by each new government, generating new controversy and division, until they're forgotten or, sometimes, rolled back by Italy's supreme court. These days there's even a debate going on about the opportunity of introducing sexual education in schools for 6-8 graders, when I remember we had it already in the late '80s.
https://youtu.be/ei-bG4XfB4s
I don't know about this specific instance, but the Germany-Denmark train-on-a-ferry carried the whole Diesel-powered train, engine and all. It drove onto the ferry on its own, and left it on its own as well.
What makes it particularly ambitious? The strait of Messina is two miles across, and I don't think that even cracks the top 100 of the world's longest bridges.
> "...building a suspension bridge of this scale poses significant engineering challenges. The Strait of Messina is known for strong winds, seismic activity, and deep waters, all of which complicate construction and long-term stability. Engineers will need to ensure the structure can withstand earthquakes, which aren't unheard of in the region, while addressing corrosion from the salty marine environment."
-- https://www.iflscience.com/worlds-longest-suspension-bridge-...
I remember reading an article, posted here on HN, that went into much more depth about why this was all unusually challenging, but I haven't found it again.
https://en.japantravel.com/aomori/memorial-ship-hakkoda-maru...
No one will ask you for a ticket (no one will ask for anything, actually). Or at the least it was like this some twenty years ago when I did it.
Relatives and friends thought my wife and I were crazy - or at least eccentric. Why would you waste 4 full days (+ 2 days to get to and from Denmark by car).
Turns out, travel time is still travel. And what a beautiful time that was!
There is no stable Internet conncetion on the ferry itself (no cell connection AT ALL at sea), plus you have to pay for it a pretty hefty fee. So from observing other people, +95% did not have Internet access at all.
The ferry itself is not huge, it is not a cruise ship. But large enough to be entertaining and fun to explore. Kids had a few attractions, including a tiny cinema. They sold popcorn though, that's all kids cared about besides the Minecraft movie.
For us, adults, there were a few bars, restaurants to hang out. Even a little library, a corner with board games, couple shops.
Because people were not glued to their phones, you could actually meet and talk to other people, have non-trivial conversations. People would read books, have a sip of coffee, walk around.
Not once did I get bored, not once did I not know what to do. Sure enough, I would pull out the iPhone from my pocket only to see it is completely offline. What was also fun: if I went out with the kids, there was no way I could let me wife know we would be late or any other matters. Same the other way.
Life felt slower, but somehow more real?
Anyway, I can only recommend a travel experience like this, at least once in your lifetime. For us, it became part of the memories we made, besides visiting Iceland itself. I can imagine the same being the case if you travel long distances by train.
Ditching my phone as much as possible has been the best decision I've ever made. Life always feels a little slower when you're not constantly inundated with outside noise.
I still pay attention, but instead of constantly paying attention and doing nothing, I pay attention a good amount, and do things instead.
On the way back we decided to drive through france and skip the ferry.
But yes, on the Newcastle to Amsterdam crossing my favourite thing is being completely cut off from the internet, can finally sit down with a book without the compulsive need to check my phone every 5 minutes.
I really liked it, was a cool experience, and an easy way to get on a boat. IDK if it's still like this. I hope it is.
I had checked google maps before the trip and saw a bridge so figured the train would go over that, but looks like it's car only bridge. Was a pleasant surprise.
So this was "just life" in the 90s and beforehand. The upside you describe was also sometimes the downside. E.g. my mother was traveling for work when one of my brothers was injured in a way that required a trip to the ER for stitches (he's fine). My dad was getting us all (4 kids under 7) into the car as she called from her hotel and he basically had to answer and say that we were on the way to the hospital, and she just had to wait for an update once we got home many hours later.
And yet, I would still agree that "Life felt slower, but somehow more real?" and that we haven't yet found the right equilibrium for always being connected in a way humans were never able to be before. I'm glad experiences like this are still possible.
If you take this ferry, make sure to do the stop in Faroe Islands, it's absolutely amazing.
I plan to sail this route again next year.
Side note: was it just me or this ferry or route is particularly rough? I crossed Baltic like 20 times by ferry (18h crossing), never got sea sick, until this one.
My wife got a bit sea sick on the 2nd day on our way back, I didn't notice any difference. But sure enough, depends on how steady your stomach is...
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854834
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44817863
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43427008
I had no idea that trains got put on ferries, although I had been puzzled by the way the route on the route map crossed the sea but had assumed it was just to make the diagram simpler. It was quite a surreal thing finding myself unexpectedly on a train on a ferry. It was nice though as you could go and wander round the ferry and it was quite fun seeing it go off the ferry which had special train tracks on it onto the normal train tracks on the land.
Now, I don't really mind this, it's a bit of a tradition if you want, but I asked a relative of mine who used to work for the Italian national train company, and he told me that this train works like this cause in the past all the Sicilian migrants would travel with a lot of luggage, and it would be very impractical for them to transfer all of that twice. Nowadays this is not really the case anymore.