Buying train tickets in Venice. Photos by Tom Meyers

Two regular contributors to EuroCheapo respond to a good question posed on our blog.

Victor posted on March 11, 2010:

“Hi, three of us have planned a trip to Europe from 27th June 2010 to the 10th July 2010. Our itinerary will take us from London to Paris, Amsterdam, Rome, Venice, Vienna, Berlin and back to Paris and London.

We wish to travel extensively by rail. Please help us make a schedule that would enable us to touch all or most of the cities as planned above and at reasonably priced rates. We are all adults above 40 years of age and most likely do not qualify for any discounted fares. Please also inform us when and where rail bookings could be done in the UK. Thanks.”

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Reply from Susanne Kries and Nicky Gardner of hidden europe:

Hi Victor,

We cannot help you with all you ask, but we can venture a few comments that will perhaps inform your thinking, as you and your friends plan your journey. In responding to your question, we hope these thoughts will also be of broader interest to folk here on EuroCheapo.

The key thing here is to think very carefully quite what you and your two traveling companions want to get out of your upcoming journey. Is the journey the centrepiece or are your hearts set on getting to know the various cities you plan to visit? We rather sense the latter.

1. Too packed an itinerary

Europe is a lot larger than many outsiders imagine, and your itinerary touches only a small part of western Europe. You have fourteen days for your explorations (including your days of arrival in and departure from Europe). Let’s assume that you spend at least a couple of nights in London after flying in, and you want to be back in London on the eve of your departure. That brings the time available for the round trip through continental Europe down to ten nights.

Taking the fastest trains, your itinerary from London to Rome and back (as specified) would take 75 hours. Are you really thinking of spending six or seven hours every single day on trains? If you use slower night trains, you can sleep from one city to the next, but your 75 hours travel becomes closer to 100 hours.

Our view is that this could so easily turn out to be the trip from hell. Of course, you could use night trains for some legs, but you are still spending much time travelling. At the pace you propose you have only one day to see some cities. Yes, that is do-able, but how much can you see in that time?

Let’s take an example. You could leave your hotel in Rome before 7 AM and be in the middle of Venice in time for lunch. You could sightsee in Venice for the afternoon, and catch a night train at 9 PM direct to Vienna. You would be in the middle of Vienna by 9 AM next morning – great if like us you sleep very well on night trains. But if you don’t sleep perfectly, you could arrive shattered and it’ll be too early to be able to check into a hotel.

The sequence in which you have ordered the cities is very sensible, but the entire itinerary is too condensed. Over a couple of months it could be fun. Packed into a few days, it might become an ordeal. You could possibly shift Amsterdam towards the end as it could easily be accommodated en route from Berlin to London, assuming you had no real wish or need to go back through Paris a second time. So the home stretch back to London would now look as follows:

Berlin to Amsterdam: 7 hrs by day (with one train change en route at Amersfoot)
Amsterdam to London: 5 hrs by day (with one change at Bruxelles Midi)

Moving Amsterdam to later in the sequence then frees you up to take the Palatino night train direct from Paris to Rome. Departure is around 6 PM each day. Lovely train – you can enjoy dinner on board as the countryside south of Paris slips by outside the window. It is a super way to spend a summer evening.

Bear in mind that our aggregate travel figure is time on the actual trains. Add in transfers in each city from hotel to train and vv, and your time for sightseeing is even more eaten up by travelling.

Our feeling is that each city on your list deserves a week – not just a few hours. At the very least, you need two full non-travel days in each city just to begin to scrape the surface. That implies three nights in each city. With the time you have you could perhaps pack in three cities on the continent (ie. apart from London) but surely not more.

2. What kind of Europe

Europe is a continent of countryside and small towns. The places you propose to visit are busy, cosmopolitan, and (dare we say) much favoured by international tourists. They are spots you can be sure of finding Starbucks, crushed ice and waiters who speak English.

But there is another Europe – the Europe favoured by many Europeans. If you could throw in a dose of small town Europe, you would find out so much more about our continent, our lives and our varied cultures. And if you are to travel so fast, then it is easier to get the flavour of a country in a smaller place. Better Bergamo than Rome; better Potsdam, Görlitz or Quedlinburg than Berlin; better Shaftesbury, Lavenham or Cambridge than London.

Why not drop some big cities in favour of smaller places? Relax. Take time and watch the sun set behind the mountains in the Alps. Less might be more.

3. Advance booking is the way to deep discounts

You suggest that you may not qualify for any discounted fare. This is not the case. Anyone in Europe can qualify for a discounted fare.

Let us take Vienna to Berlin as an example, using the only direct trains that link the two cities. These all run via Prague and Dresden (yes… more temptations Victor, we know, for now you’ll surely want to pack in an afternoon in each of those two cities as well).

If you just pitch up in Vienna and buy the Berlin ticket on the day (and that is always possible), the regular one-way fare is €117. If you purchase the ticket well in advance (we always recommend 10 to 12 weeks), then you can ride the same route on the same trains for €29. Even with the cheapest fares, you can still break your journey (in Prague, Dresden or anywhere else on the way), but you have to specify that at the time of booking. With the full fare you do not need to pre-specify stopovers.

If you book slightly in advance, say just a week or two before travel, you will still get a ticket for way less than €117, but it will no longer be €29. For a midweek off-peak day, booked a week in advance, you might pay €49. For a peak summer travel day, you might pay €99. But chances are that you will still get a discount.

But it is not as if students or seniors can somehow get privileged access to the rock bottom €29 fare. You can secure the most heavily discounted fares if you book well in advance. Advance booking is the key to cheap travel – not age.

4. Night train fares and the Eurail pass

If you take our suggestion above of using the Palatino train from Paris to Rome, bear in mind the fares structure. We give this as just one further example of how much fares can vary. That run can cost as little as €76 per person if booked in advance (using the Artesia Depart+Go fare). Or as much as €265 each if you book at short notice and opt for the highest class of accommodation (ie. sole occupancy of a sleeper compartment).

Be wary of rail passes sold outside Europe. If you are doing a very packed itinerary, spending hours each day on trains, they may be great value. But check the small print. For many routes they may not offer entirely free travel.

Let’s go back to our Artesia example above, using the Palatino night train from Paris to Rome. Book now, and as we said you could get tickets for €76. If you have a rail pass that includes either France or Italy, you might imagine you would ride for free. But actually not – a Eurailpass valid in France or Italy will give you a €6 discount on the €76 Depart+Go fare. So you pay €70 in all.

5. More information and booking

Web sites are great for travel planning, and you can book most or even all these tickets online now – even before you leave the US. We would advise that, rather than waiting (as you imply in your question) until you arrive in the UK to book tickets. 

And remember that the best deals will always be on the websites run by the rail operators - not those run by agents outside Europe. To get the best from those websites, use the native language versions of them.

Once your exact itinerary is clear we can advise you the best site to book each leg. You could end up using such a variety of services, that you might be looking to a mix of train companies for your bookings: Eurostar, DB, Thalys, Artesia, SNCF, Trenitalia, SBB, ÖBB and more besides.

With a packed itinerary like this, and so many trains, there will surely be a hitch or two along the way. In such cases, there is no substitute for a printed timetable – and it is good at the planning phase too. We suggest you purchase the current (ie. March 2010) issue of the Thomas Cook European Rail Timetable. Details are available on the Thomas Cook website. That will be a great asset in planning.

You might also consider getting the June issue in due course too – just to ensure that the schedules you have with you on the actual journey are bang up-to-date.

6. Apologia

So, Victor, we fear we have not answered your questions quite as you would have wished. But we hope that in these words there is something that will assist you in your travel planning. We wish you and your two traveling companions a fun time as you journey through Europe.

Susanne and Nicky run a Berlin-based editorial bureau that supplies text and images to media across Europe. Together they edit hidden europe magazine. You can read more of their writing in their regular e-brief and in the Notes section on their website.

Popularity: 2% [?]

The Eurostar train at St Pancras Station. Photo by garybembridge.

By Nicky Gardner and Susanne Kries—

Some arrivals are just too good to miss. Dropping down out of the skies to land at some of Europe’s trickier airports can be challenging for even the most experienced pilots. And, even from the passenger cabin, the steep glide down into the airstrips at Innsbruck (Austria) or Lugano (Switzerland) can be very impressive. Funchal airport in Madeira is also fun, with passengers often alarmed that their plane is landing on the Atlantic waves—the runway extends over the ocean, supported by concrete pillars.

Whether you’re traveling by boat, train, or rail, the eager anticipation at arriving to a new destination in Europe often makes us miss the best bit of the entire journey—the moment of arrival.

Arriving by boat

Some of Europe’s finest arrivals are by sea. There may be no great drama in arriving in Iceland on the Smyril Line ship Norröna from Denmark. Instead, there is the sheer beauty of the lonely eastern fjords and the knowledge that this is how the first settlers arrived on the island over a thousand years ago.

And Venice is really at her best arriving on a summer morning after a long ferry journey up the Adriatic. Last time we took the Minoan Lines ferry from Corfu, it crept into Venice at about eight in the morning, the giant ship dwarfing the buildings on the famous Venetian skyline. Never did San Marco look so good.

Approaching London by train

Arrivals by train offer their own peculiar theater. London has not just one but two of the very best in Europe. The last half hour of Eurostar’s run into London from the Channel Tunnel is rich in dramatic aesthetics.

The railway skirts Kentish hop fields, dives under the North Downs, crosses the Medway on a spectacular viaduct, before a tantalizing series of tunnels bring the railway back above ground for a graceful, seemingly endless, curve into London’s St Pancras station – now handsomely restored to reclaim its status as easily the most elegant of London’s railroad termini.

Speeding into Paddington

If there is a rival to the  Eurostar run into London, it is the fifteen-minute hop on the Heathrow Express from London’s principal airport into Paddington station.

The run out of Heathrow is unremarkable, and gives no hint of what is to come. But free of the airport tunnel, the 12 mile journey on Brunel’s Great Western route into Paddington is a fabulous feast for the senses. The train storms past Victorian water towers and canals. There are art deco factories, a magnificent Sikh temple, eerie wastelands, and the back gardens of endless terraces of small houses. All of English life is laid bare for the traveler arriving in London.

True, the Heathrow Express costs a little more than the tube, but it is worth the premium fare. Few other such short journeys by train are so richly entertaining. And speed brings its own benefits. Last time we used Heathrow Express, we were enjoying a beer in our hotel room at Lancaster Gate less than half an hour after boarding the train at Heathrow.

Susanne and Nicky run a Berlin-based editorial bureau that supplies text and images to media across Europe. Together they edit hidden europe magazine. You can read more of their writing in their regular e-brief and in the Notes section on their website.

Popularity: 3% [?]

A train in Görlitz, Germany on one of the routes featured in the book.

By Nicky Gardner and Susanne Kries in Berlin—

What train routes might make it into a list of Europe’s greatest train journeys?

The book that inspires us to ask this question is published next month by Time Out Guides Ltd. Great Train Journeys of the World is edited by Andrew Eames who pulled together a team of leading luminaries on rail travel to write the book. (Full disclosure: Andrew was good enough to ask us to contribute prose and images for a number of routes across Europe.)

The routes: Classic long-distance and branch lines

Europe makes a good showing in this global compendium of journeys worth making. Of course the book includes many classic itineraries such as the Trans-Siberian and the posh tourist train Orient Express. But the joy of the volume is the neat way in which unexpected tiddlers are pushed into the limelight. For example, the book includes a rural run through the Cévennes area of southern France, a branch line that crisscrosses the border between Germany and Poland, a rural route in Catalunya, and a line that cuts through the heart of the Bosnian countryside.

This is not just a book for train buffs. It is pitched at the general reader who is looking for hints about journeys that might be worth taking. Some cutting-edge European express trains are celebrated for their speed, such as the Eurostar link from London to Paris, Germany’s ICE services, the TGV in France and the AVE routes in Spain.

But the lure of Europe’s greatest rail journeys is not generally in their speed, but in the way that trains trundle through the countryside both by day and by night. The book has a little Hungarian rhapsody in an account of a 12-hour journey by day that takes in four European capitals, and a Highland fling with a super essay on the Caledonian Sleeper night train from London to the Scottish Highlands.

A firm favorite: the Caledonian Sleeper to Fort William

Editor Andrew Eames comments in the book that the night train from London to Fort William in Scotland (often dubbed “The Deerstalker”) was the service that every one of the two dozen authors really wanted to write about - no matter how many times they had taken the train before. In the end, Eames himself wrote about that particular journey.

Bargain berths, too

Rail travel on some of Europe’s classic rail routes need not be impossibly expensive. Some of the journeys in the book are brief and cost no more than a few euros. And bargain berths on that overnight train to the Scottish Highlands can still be booked for dates later in 2009 for as little as 39 pounds sterling - all inclusive in the comfort of a sleeping car with crisp linen sheets.

Susanne Kries and Nicky Gardner are based in Berlin and write regularly for EuroCheapo. They contributed to “Great Train Journeys of the World” with articles and pics on rail routes in central Europe and Scandinavia. Nicky and Susanne are editors of hidden europe magazine, about which you can find out more on www.hiddeneurope.co.uk.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Blink and you can easily miss a thousand changes to European rail schedules. We’ve been taking a look ahead to next year’s timetables, just to see what Cheapos can look forward to in 2009. All the new services mentioned here come into effect on December 14, 2008.

Prague routes

Prague, which just this year benefited from a new night train from Amsterdam (which stays in the 2009 schedules), gets a further upgrade in the 2009 timetables with a new daily night train to Zürich (like many other central European night trains named after a heavenly constellation, in this case Canopus). And Prague gets a new direct daytime train to Belgrade, the EuroCity Avala service.

Paris to Berlin; Berlin to Bratislava/Budapest

The long-standing Paris to Berlin night sleeper service run by Deutsche Bahn is entirely recast in the 2009 schedules, departing from Paris Est (rather than Paris Nord, as at present) and no longer serving Brussels. No great loss, we might add, for the train’s Brussels stops were in both directions at such inconvenient hours that no sane traveller made use of them. Berlin secures new direct night services to both Bratislava and Budapest, as well as a revised service with improved capacity to Warsaw.

Across the Alps; Austria; Budapest to Munich; Amsterdam to Berlin

New Cisalpino trains bring great improvements to cross-Alps services in 2009 with reduced travel times on routes from Geneva and Zürich to Milan, Florence and Venice. And new trains across Austria too, where Railjet will introduce a new premium service linking Budapest with Munich via Vienna.

International train services from Amsterdam Schiphol Airport (great for travellers arriving off long-haul flights) get more prominence with a doubling of frequency of trains heading east towards Hanover and Berlin.

British routes

In Britain, services on the route out of London Euston get a boost with increased frequencies to both Birmingham and Manchester and a new hourly service to Chester. But it’s not all gain, for direct services from Gatwick Airport to the West Midlands and Manchester are axed after December 13, 2008. Thereafter, red-eyed passengers arriving early at Gatwick off overnight flights will need to change trains at Watford Junction or Reading for connections on to Birmingham and northwest England.

Eurostar service from London

In the winter 2008-09 timetables some thirty Eurostar trains each day will link London with Brussels, Paris, Lille, the Marne valley and the French Alps. With fares starting from €77 from Paris return and €80 return from any station in Belgium to London, we wonder why anyone still bothers to fly for short hops across the English Channel.

Fuller details of 2009 rail schedules for Europe will be available in mid-November 2008. To keep abreast of developments, just get hold of the latest issue of the Thomas Cook European Rail Timetable.

About the authors

Nicky Gardner and Susanne Kries, the authors of this post, are the editors of hidden europe magazine. The current issue of the magazine, published on September 4, has a feature on the Eurostar rail route linking France and England.

Popularity: 19% [?]

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!

Popularity: 6% [?]