InterRail: rail travel through Europe !
Booking a long train trip in Europe is arduous!
For this summer, you may want to book a ticket travelling across Europe. It can be an exciting experience, but prepare yourself, buying tickets can be an enormous hassle. Advance purchases are possible, but when you want to combine many routes together, it becomes complicated.
For touristic purposes, you can easily come up with a few cities and pick up tickets as you go. The operators even boast that finding a seat is seldom or never hard. You must book a seat for many routes, even after you have a rail pass.
Between the close cities, it is a breeze.
Cities where the train operator services both, or all, cities you want to pass, the process can be a breeze. Getting past many cities and countries becomes very complicated since train operators are national. Thankfully, you can find one train operator covers some routes through several countries. Hamburg to Stockholm is one example of where Snälltåget operates night trains.
Joining many trips with a tool, not so much!
There are pages, see below, that give you a suggested route to take for longer trips. You can also buy a railcard, if you are European, which pays for all the tickets but not assigned seats. You can find places to buy them on The Train Line and on other sites. This is a great service for hopping around Europe on holiday. The cards give you unlimited travel for a specified number of days over a certain period. For example; you can get 7 travel days over a month. This does not include assigned seats, which are compulsory on some routes. The price of a seat can be as low as a very reasonable €7.
Here is an example:
Imagine you want to travel by train from Athens, Greece to Stockholm, Sweden! Your first step is to get a EUrail pass!
At first, you browse around the web and find this site: Railsite.cc . It quickly produces a list of routes, you pick the best one for you and buy the tickets… Wait, not so fast! Finding someone who sells a bunch of tickets for such a journey is near impossible. Sure, there are services that sell tickets for almost every trip in Europe, but are they the best?
In reality, the page has an enormous banner stating
“The route consist of more than one step. You have to buy several train tickets.”
This is where it starts! You can now find links to the different train operators to buy your tickets from each one of them.
Thankfully, you have services where you can collect your tickets using an application. You still need to buy from the different operators, though!
One service is Interrail, the other is Omio. If there are more, and which one is better still eludes the writer of this piece.
Interrail — with a map!
If you chose Interrail, you can use a map to help you choose the legs of the trip. From Athens to Thessaloniki is the first leg. Next is multi-choice and changes according to season. Travelling north from Thessaloniki in summer, you have the option of taking an overnight train to Belgrade.
Continuing from Belgrade, the first list suggested to go straight to Budapest, but the line is under construction. The site suggest you travel via Zagreb and then go back to Budapest. If you wanted to go to Munich, you have to start over again and figure it out yourself. Rail.cc gives you a listing if the trains available but you cannot order from their site. Instead, they redirect you to Interrail, Omio or the local train operator.
Omio — Collecting tickets.
With Omio, you get an app for your smartphone where you can collect the tickets for your entire trip. Great, but not all legs are supported if you cross the entire continent.
Conclusion
Travelling by train in Europe is exciting and varied. Yo can go slow or use the Inter city express trains to get neighbouring cities. If you want to go further, the train will be slower and harder to navigate than to fly. Some routes are covered by high speed trains though. From Milan to Paris, the Frecciarossa takes you fast, though not faster than flying.
The biggest problem right now is to buy the tickets. The speed of going across continents is very hard to overcome, unless you are a staunch believer in the HyperLoop!