There's something about trains

Exactly 25 years ago today I said goodbye to my parents and set off for a summer adventure in Europe. Carefully tucked into my money belt were my dark blue passport, an assortment of Eurocheques (remember them?) and my first ever Interrail ticket (bought as a result of successfully listing my 10 speed racer bike and my beloved table-top snooker table in the Classified Section of the Nottingham Evening Post). I had just finished my A level exams and left my Saturday job at B&Q, thanks to which I’d saved around £500. This hard-earned money would now be carefully spent and made to last as long as possible.

My father had dropped me off at Nottingham station in the afternoon and had topped up my already bulging backpack with a dozen cheese rolls – little did he know at the time that I would eat nothing else until I arrived in Oslo several days later.

Carrying my backpack was no small effort for a tall, wiry teenager little used to physical exercise. As well as the sleeping bag and bright green ground sheet that was an obligatory part of the Interrailer’s paraphernalia, I had nine of my favourite tapes, two dozen batteries for my Walkman, a Thomas Cook rail timetable and the chunky Europe by Train guidebook. I’d also packed my camera, an indestructible Zenit EM; as sturdy as a Soviet tank and only marginally lighter in weight.

With barely any plans I would change my mind many times on a whim over the next month as to which train to catch and where next to visit. Eastern Europe was strictly off-limits although the journey behind enemy lines to West Berlin was a guaranteed adventure.

Sitting on a railway station, got a ticket for my destination...

25 years on and I’m looking forward to yet another European rail journey. Over the years my backpack has become thankfully lighter and smaller. I’m travelling with my wife and we stay in guest houses and hotels to rest our heads in favour of concrete station floors and pull-out seats in musty carriages. The rail pass is no more, with the astronomical rise in the cost of an Interrail ticket now meaning that buying individual tickets makes financial sense for all but the most intensive itineraries. As for the cheese rolls, they are thankfully no longer a must-have travel accessory.

As always, there will be unexpected highlights, places that disappoint, surprising encounters, missed connections, great meals, supermarket lunches as well as those uncomfortable moments that we’ll grin and bear in the knowledge that they’ll sound almost glamorous when they’re spun into a dinner-table yarn back at home. The journey may be smoother than it once was, but thankfully the sense of anticipation of travel is as strong as ever.

Europe by train, then and now is a post from: 501 Places

Later this month we will be travelling overland from Lisbon back to London. From the point where we reach the Spanish city of Merida, a little east of the Portuguese border, our journey will be made exclusively by train.

Seeing that we will be crossing two large countries and spending three days making lengthy train journeys in each, my initial reaction was to look into getting a rail pass. Being a veteran of three InterRail journeys in my teenage years I found the idea of getting another rail pass a very tempting one, if driven mainly by my own nostalgia. So I started to do my research and it didn’t take long for me to find that the numbers simply didn’t stack up.

The options for buying rail passes now are far better than they once were. Rather than just a flat fee for a month you can now choose to pay for a set number of days of travel within a given time period (for example 5 days within a month), so that you only pay for travel days and not for those times when you’re actually visiting wherever it is that you’ve bothered to come all that way to see.

Our trip is simple – 3 days across Spain (Merida-Cuidad Real-Zaragoza-Girona) and 3 across France (Spanish border-Montpellier-Nice-Paris) with a Eurostar back to London.

The cost of a one country rail pass to include 3 days of travel is £155 (£106 for those lucky enough to have celebrated less than 26 birthdays). So for us we would buy one for France and one for Spain. In addition we would need to book reservations on some of the trains – these would cost €36 in Spain and €5.50 in France, and £57 for the Eurostar to London – a total of £404 each.

I have chosen to book these tickets using the Renfe and SNCF websites and my total tickets costs (per person) for Spain are €138 while for France, including the Eurostar, the total is €131. A total of €269, or £238. I have booked in advance only those journeys where I could secure a good discounted fare. Where there is little difference between the walk-up fare and the web fare I’ve left it for us to book on the day.

So £238 for self-booking against £404 for using the InterRail pass system (£306 had I been a few years younger). I was quite surprised to find this difference particularly as, when I had been a young InterRailer there was no question that I was getting outstanding value on my investment in a one-month pass.

A pass does give the user several benefits – the main one is the flexibility of being able to get on any train and to change your plans at short notice. We have an itinerary that has several fixed points within, meaning that we could sacrifice this flexibility for the cost savings we are making.

But this little bit of research has left me wandering: for a person aged between 26 and 60, can a rail pass ever be a financially better option? Is it likely that you would travel so much in 3 days in one country that you would run up over £155 in fares? The only scenario that I can imagine it would pay is if you would otherwise do no planning or pre-booking and you just paid the walk-up rate for a few of the most expensive high-speed trains.

Have you bought a full-fare InterRail and got value for your money? If so, it would be great to see a travel itinerary that made these rail passes prove to be a good purchase.

Europe Rail Pass: value for money? is a post from: 501 Places

There’s something magical about travelling by train. Perhaps those who witnessed the demise of steam engines some 40 years ago would have predicted that the romance of rail would been blown away by the hard uncompromising diesel and electric monsters that followed. Yet the last few decades have shown that there is clearly more to the excitement of a railway journey than the mere sight of the puffing steam train.

In a few weeks we will fly to Lisbon and then make our way back home overland. We’ll have two weeks to do it and will use a mix of trains and buses, although I expect 90% of the distance will be covered by rail. The plan is to break the journey in a few of the lesser known towns and cities of Spain and France, but much will be left to the whim of the moment. This is my kind of trip.

There’s a lot to love about Europe and my greatest memories on the continent are inextricably linked to rail travel. The three solo Inter-rail journeys I took as a 1980s teenager were epic adventures, covering tens of thousands of miles from above the Arctic Circle to Istanbul, the Bosphorus and my first taste of Asia. New friends, lucky escapes, mishaps and severe discomfort that became an honourable rite of passage by virtue of nostalgia; a lifetime of travel was by then inevitable.

Travelling to visit family in Poland always involved crossing the country by train. Eastern European stations in the early 1990s had an eerie magic that few could forget. Traders from east and west would meet at 2am, exchanging cigarettes, leather jackets and deutschmarks under a cloud of smoke; part diesel but mainly the product of cheap local cigarettes. The stations were often the most ornate and spacious constructions in town, and were perfect for a curious backpacker who was happy to sit on the floor in a dark corner and just watch the world go by.

Three years ago on the spur of the moment I bought us a flight for the next day to Gibraltar and a Eurostar home from Paris four days later. We had a wonderful time visiting Gibraltar, Ronda, Granada and Barcelona, even managing a whole day in Paris thanks to the excellent Spanish overnight trains.

These days it is easy to check train times on the various rail websites, although it is always dangerous to rely too much on them. I travel enough by train in the UK to know how quickly the timetable can become a work of meaningless fiction. Yet despite the planning that I can and will do before we set off, I will arrive in Lisbon with the same sense of excitement at the journey in front of us that I experienced 25 years ago when I first experienced the joys of travelling by train across Europe.

Europe by train: why the magic never dies is a post from: 501 Places

I set off on my first InterRail journey in 1987. It was long before the days of blogging, and the few notes that I recorded in a notebook are now long gone. Yet I did recently dig out some of the assorted junk that I’d brought back in my rucksack.

At the time I must have been mad to have carried all of this paper waste half way around Europe. But now, nearly a quarter of a century later, it’s a real treat to dig through the old timetables, place mats and tickets and reminisce, not just of a personal past that is a distant memory, but also of a Europe that is now so different to the one I explored with such recklessness.

I’ve attached a few of these mementos, and wonder if anyone recognises any of these original 1980s European artefacts:

Inter Rail Ticket

Inter Rail ticket 1988

A 5Kr Norwegian burger voucher - still valid?

My Youth Hostel Association 'passport'

National Museum of Belgrade- entrance 200 Dinar

McDonalds goes Chinese in German

East German transit visa

Proof that I stayed in Munich's famous Tent - still going, 23 years later!

Map of Ljubljana - not sure why I have this - my train didn't stop here

An expensive hotel bed in Florence

The last resort: playing my flute for my supper outside Notre Dame in Paris

InterRail memories from before the internet age is a post from: 501 Places