It’s a sunny Friday here in NYC, but in France and Germany, commuter moods are clouded with continued rail strikes. Here’s the latest:

France

The rail strike entered its third day on Friday. The BBC reports a slight increase in the number of trains and metros running across the country, and a significant decrease in the number of workers participating in the strike.

Only 200 of 700 TGV trains across the country are running.

In Paris, the Metro is running with delays, although two lines are not running at all. One third of the city’s buses are not running.

Rail workers voted to continue the strike over the weekend, although support seems to be thinning.

Germany

On Friday, the second day of passenger rail strikes has affected millions of commuters’ journeys. 3,000 workers have walked out since the strike began.

The BBC reports that suburban and inter-city transportation is hit the hardest, with most intra-city transportation systems running smoothly.

The strike is set to end at 1 AM Saturday morning. The union, however, is threatening to strike again over Christmas and New Years holidays if conditions aren’t met.

We wish our friends and fellow Cheapos in France and Germany good luck with their commutes. See you on Monday!

It seems like half the world is “striking out” the last few days. Broadway stagehands and TV comedy writers have walked out, and now French and German rail employees are taking to the picket lines.

Here’s the latest on the European rail strikes:

France Rail Strike

Day Two of strikes, affecting national trains, regional trains, and metro. Strikes expected to continue into tomorrow (Friday).

The French government announced Thursday that the rail unions are willing to negotiate.

150 national TGV trains (out of 700) ran on Thursday, which is better than the 90 that ran Wednesday.

6 out of 16 Paris Metro lines were out of service on Thursday. (There seems to be a little light at the end of the metro tunnel.)

German Rail Strike

On Thursday, passenger train drivers joined a larger rail strike begun Wednesday for higher wages and better working conditions in Germany.

Deutsche Bahn (German National Railways) calls the strike the biggest in its history.

“Heavily reduced” services have meant that the number of trains running is cut in half in most places, leaving travelers and commuters in a bind.

Service delays in Berlin (20-40 minutes) on commuter lines.

Service expected to resume Saturday morning.

To be continued tomorrow… (hopefully with happier news on the transportation front!)

We’re psyched that the new and improved St. Pancras train station opened this week in London. The depot, rebuilt and improved with a $1.7 billion budget, boasts more than just slick rails. Indeed, St. Pancras Station boasts the longest champagne bar in Europe, its own underground shopping mall and—most importantly—the fastest Eurostar journey to date from London to Paris. (Trains also leave the station for Brussels and Lille.)

We’re not, however, completely sold on the station’s PR: A daily farmer’s market in the downstairs arcade promises to be “Where the best of the British meets the flavours of the continent.” (Well, they’ve had their plates full.)

We recommend taking a virtual tour of the station.

On this side of the Atlantic, more “rail good” news as the U.S. House of Representatives last week approved $1.4 billion to keep Amtrak chugging along and improve track conditions. We’re glad to know our government, too, is finally taking note of the necessity for rail travel in an age of mass congestion and high fuel prices. Too bad Mr. President has promised to veto the bill.

Politics aside, we remain enthusiastic about the new station. And eager to try out that champagne bar. Toot, toot!

Yesterday, the European Union’s Consumer Protection Commissioner Meglena Kuneva condemned “misleading advertising and unfair practices” pursued by European sites selling airline tickets. The Consumer Protection Commission investigated 446 Web sites and found that a whopping 226 did not respect EU consumer protection law, on grounds of unfair pricing, hidden charges, and/or improperly translated conditions and terms.

Consumers should be empowered to know from the get-go how low a fare actually is. The last second taxes and charges smoke-and-mirrors-effect does no one any favors; low-cost carriers may not realize it now, but this investigation will actually strengthen them in the long run, by giving consumers a more realistic sense of what they’ll actually be paying for their flights.

Best of all, the Commission’s statement has teeth. Airlines and other vendors have four months to clean things up. If sites do not manage to do so, they’ll be fined or even be forced to close.

It’s a Tuesday, the sun is shining, and there’s a snap in our step. What’s on our minds? Thanks for asking.

1. Flybe is apparently looking for another acquisition. It looks as if the purchase of BA Connect has only whetted the airline’s desire to grow.

2. We’re Georgia mad, again, thanks to Kate Weinberg’s Georgia travelogue in the FT this past weekend. Horseback riding, check. Mountainous terrain, check. Involved toasts at mealtimes, check.

3. And in the New York Times, also this past weekend, Sophia Kishkovsky teases us with a suggestive description of Moscow’s enormous All-Russian Exhibition Center, an olio of Soviet triumphalism and fairground amusements.

Today, Ryanair announced the “sale” of half a million free flights. Good for travel on Mondays through Thursdays in December and January (with a “limited availability” quasi-blackout period from December 18 through January 8), these fares are on sale through midnight tomorrow.

These flights are utterly and completely gratis—no taxes and no fees. It’s a serious giveaway. And while it’s not available on all routes, some available routes include London Stansted-Glasgow, Girona-Basel, Frankfurt Hahn-Forli.

At the very least, this sale is worth checking out. Move quickly.

It’s not often that we feel compelled to essentially offer advertising copy for another publication, but we’ve fallen in love with Time Out’s Country Walks Volume 1, a compendium of 53 walks (one for each week of the year plus one reserve) within a short distance of London.

The country walks listed in the book were honed over several years by an informal group of London area walking enthusiasts. The book, originally edited by Nicholas Albery and first published in 1997, is quite palpably a labor of love. Suggestions for lunch and tea are made for each walk. Length of walks, transportation information, and a toughness scale for each walk give prospective a sense of what to expect.

We admire the volume’s sheer enthusiasm and attention to detail—sections on lyme disease, the suggestion that walkers invest in “a compass with a swivelling rim marked in degrees,” maps, and its careful descriptions of walks and potential hazards (”exclamation marks in square brackets —[!]— mean ‘pay careful attention to the route here, it is easy to go wrong’”) are all super informative and helpful.

There’s also a second volume, which we haven’t yet checked out.

Behold, the return of our SkyEurope/Ryanair statistical face-off.

In October 2007, Ryanair carried 21 percent more passengers than they did in October 2006, and managed a modest increase in load factor—the number of seats filled on planes flying throughout the month—of 2 percent (from 83 percent to 85 percent) also against October 2006 numbers.

SkyEurope, by way of contrast, enjoyed an impressive 34.4 percent hike in passenger numbers in October 2007 against October 2006. Despite this, the airline’s load factor in October 2007 was .5 percent (75.3 percent to 74.8 percent) in comparison with October 2006 stats.

Against this backdrop, Ryanair launches eight new routes from Shannon today, and seven from Bristol—with another five more inaugurations to follow by the end of the week. SkyEurope, still consolidating after its base contraction, has announced plans to sell two Boeing 737s. Thanks to AirScoop for alerting us to the sale.

Even the most seasoned European traveller can be caught unawares by rail schedules changes. Most European rail companies introduce major timetable changes over the second weekend in December, and this year there are some big alterations in the offing.

There is no more civilised way of making a big hop across Europe than on a night train, and the new schedules see a whole raft of new night train services. Take Amsterdam for example. The Dutch city has always featured on Europe’s night train schedules, but for 2008 Amsterdam secures new daily services to Copenhagen, Dresden, Milan, Minsk, Moscow, Prague, and Warsaw.

For the first time for many years Switzerland and Bavaria will benefit from direct overnight trains to Poland and points east, with new direct night sleeper services from Basel SBB and Munich to Warsaw and Moscow. Fixed fares apply for travel on most European night train routes, often with little advantage for railpass holders. A one-way journey in a shared sleeper costs from €69. For those on a budget, couchettes are priced from €49 and a one-way overnight in a reclining seat begins at €29.

The changes are of course not limited to night train services. New for 2008 are a daily direct train from both Vienna and Prague to Stralsund on Germany’s Baltic coast, a very handy new daytime train from Kraków to Budapest (less than nine hours on a beautiful route through the mountains that straddle the Polish-Slovakian border), a new fast direct daytime service from Paris to Munich (just over six hours) to supplement the long-standing Paris-Munich night train, a new direct Berlin to Copenhagen link (where the entire train gets shipped on a ferry between Denmark and Germany), and a new direct once daily train from Geneva Airport to Venice.

Rail travel in Europe can challenge even the most competent travel planner. Web sites like those of the Deutsche Bahn can help. But there is really no substitute for the Thomas Cook European Rail Timetable, a gem of a book updated each month. For many savvy European travellers, it is required bedtime reading.

This is the fifth in a series of fortnightly blog posts by the editors of hidden europe.

A few months ago, we were waiting with bated breath for launch announcements from Fly For Beans, a new Cardiff-based low-cost carrier. It’s not that we’re impatient, exactly. It’s more that we’re wondering if the airline will ever actually lift off. FFB has the pre-launch marketing all sewn up. They’ve got a perky site full of typical low-cost carrier bravado, in a reddish hue not particularly easy on the eye, either—a sure sign that they’ve done their market research.

In a “bean blog” entry written by Director of Flight Operations Brian Bibb last week, we learned that the airline’s route map will include one destination that Mr. Bibb himself, a pilot of two decades’ standing, has never flown into. Where might said destination be? We’ve come across some completely unverifiable rumors suggesting that one or another airport in Bulgaria will appear on the FFB route map. We can only dream.