I wish they would restore stopover functionality on the international booking site (https://www.international-bahn.de/). I remember back when you could book a London to Berlin fare (for example) with Eurostar included, with stopovers up to 48 hours along the way. Amazing value for tourists - often you could visit multiple Belgian/German cities for not much more than what a Eurostar fare would cost alone.
The standard bahn.de site still allows stopovers, but since the pandemic you can no longer book Eurostar segments through it. Sad face.
As a train loving Dutchman the German bahn.de website is my go-to destination for any travelling from the Netherlands to Germany. It's just so much more convenient than the Dutch NS website.
Fun loophole with those minimum transfer times, was it patched since? It's not something I would use; I don't mind paying a fair price for what is a form of transport much more sustainable than air travel, although I do like to figure out economically frugal routes.
Having to have an argument with a conductor isn't my idea of leisurely travel either. I could manage in Germany, but I once had an Italian train conductor who didn't understand the (valid and very popular) Interrail tickets we had and just got annoyed. She gave up thankfully and move on in a huff.
Until just a few years ago international train tickets were valid for two weeks. That was really useful, since as long as you travels towards a destination you could get quite cheap tickets for tours through Germany or Europe with multiple stops.
I particularly enjoyed the German Rail Pass when I was there recently. Something like 240€ got me 3 days of unlimited travel within a month on the ICE trains (and S-Bahn) around Germany and to Brussels, which worked out fantastic for my travel plans - from Frankfurt to Hamburg, Hamburg to Brussels, and then Brussels to München. Worked out a lot cheaper than flying and the time cost was about comparable. Mostly it was far more comfortable too - apart from the bit where I caught the train from Köln to Brussels at the end of the weekend and ended up sitting on my bags by the toilets because it was so crammed.
Yes, and international trains are not where the European network shines. It's getting better, but it has historically been hard to even figure out how to buy a ticket involving multiple countries. Deutsche Bahn is one of the better ones. If you originate or terminate in Germany, their booking engine can figure out how to get you to a neighboring country (and they actually have these countries' timetables in their system, too). But if you want to go through Germany, say from France to Poland, good luck getting that booked, unless you split it into two tickets, each terminating in Germany.
Specific through services make it easier a few routes, such as the CityNightLine sleeper services, since there is one train and one operator for the whole route.
DB is quite good at these through tickets to and from Germany, though it seems to be underutilised. A few months ago I booked a through ticket, with missed connections protected, from London to Berlin (Eurostar + Thalys + DB ICE) for €70, the day before departure.
> The real issue is that I'm very unlikely to choose this option, no matter how convenient the booking
It's broader than just convenient booking, it's also integrated servicing, scheduling and infrastructure. With integrated scheduling you can get better connecting trains.
> > bahn.de will sell me (through an international website to which they redirect) a ticket from Frankfurt to London via Paris, an 8h40m trip costing 182 EUR one way for a date ~2 weeks out.
Frankfurt to Brussels is 3 hours, Brussels to London is 2 hours. It could be a 5 hour trip if the trains connected, very competitive to the 4-5 hours you mentioned. (And with existing technology the durations could be cut down by 30%). But if there's no connecting trains between the German-Belgian track, and the Belgian-UK track, then it will indeed take 8-9 hours.
I'd definitely rather sit on a train. Relative to airplanes you typically get:
- quiet
- cheap/available wifi
- spacious (leg room, work space)
- large windows
- easy access to your luggage (for work, food and recreation)
- boarding experience that's less frustrating
- boarding in a city centre as opposed to a peripheral airport
Price remains an issue, but it's also an issue of scale and value proposition. The Italian trains I've been on were simply vastly superior experiences to whatever flight I ever took and quite cost-competitive. Take Bologna to Napels, it's a 600km route that is 3h 20m by train for just 38 euros, central station to central station. Flights certainly don't win out here. By comparison, Frankfurt to London is 640km as the bird flies. It seems once things start crossing borders and you get into disconnected international tracks, scheduling, ticketing, infrastructure, prices and connections start to suck. But that's in part a solvable issue that can be largely mitigated. If Italy can do a 600km track for 30 euros in 3.3 hours, that should be a attainable across Europe with the proper strategy and investments within 20 years.
There's also the point of pricing in externalities for air flight, not doing so makes them unduly competitive. That's unlikely to last. Some countries are adding 10-20 euros to flight prices this year alone as a start, making 1-2 hour flights less interesting vs trains. Although I've read reports both ways (how flights are undertaxed, as well as how trains are already very subsidised) so I'm not sure on this point.
Will check it out. Until last year, you could use a neighbor country to buy train tickets to and from Germany. Since you did not have to start using the ticket in the first station but can basically board the train wherever you feel on the booked trip, you were able to buy all bullet train tickets for about 20 Euros (e.g. Berlin>Hannover, Leipzig>Cologne etc.). Best thing: Not bound to a specific train on that day and they were reimbursable until 24h before your trip started. Good times. But all good times come to an end :-(
Just for a comparison: These 20 Euro rides would set you back 150 Euros otherwise.
bahn.de now, Paris to Berlin eight hours one change TGV then ICE around 120 euros. They used to do £50 tickets from London to Germany that were actually quite competitive time and price rise to flying. And of course there is always the night bus from Berlin to London....
This depends on your train operator. Deutsche Bahn won't even tell you prices to most international destinations (especially those DB doesn't itself service) and asks you to come in in person to one of the few remaining ticket sales booths OR call a hotline.
They happily let you select a train ride from Madrid to Wladivostok, including all intermediary stations ... but you can't buy the ticket. Same for Berlin to Rome.
As an American, I can only dream of having convenient train fares of about USD$80 to go between somewhat-distant cities. Berlin to Brussels for GPB63.50 (about $80 right now) sounds downright cheap to me.
We found the same going from Munich to Paris a couple of years ago. I'd probably book a cheap hotel and first class daytime train ticket for the same journey now.
This is the pro-tip, a Bahn Card 25 reimburses itself in 2-3 trips and trains booked 6 weeks in advance (which is what I do for airplanes) or even 3-4 weeks in advances are inexpensive (like 30€ for a Hamburg Dammtor -Frankfurt HbF which is way more comfortable than going to both airports).
One thing I despise about trains in Germany and France is that the experience still feels way too old school. What happens when something is delayed or when a connection has an issue makes you feel back in the eighties. The Deutsche Bahn applications are a great way to see that, it's confused and overly complicated. I wish the UX of apps/websites like https://www.trainline.eu/ would be the standard by now.
You can still do Interrail! Me and my wife did it a couple of summers ago, a great experience. We weren't on a budget so we got to stay at a few nice hotels. Half a grand tour -- Copenhagen, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Vienna, Žagreb, Trieste, Florence, Milan, Venice, Zürich... I can warmly recommend it. We would have loved more night trains so I am eagerly awaiting the new Stockholm-Berlin sleeper.
Cheap buses shouldn't be too hard with the proliferation of Flixbus etc. (Amsterdam ? Berlin starts at €29), but as a 200cm Dutchman travelling by coach definitely does not fall within my definition of an acceptable mode of travel for leisure (neither does flying for that matter).
Finding cheap train fairs is indeed a puzzle sometimes! It helps a lot to have some familiarity with the major European train companies, the major high-speed connections, and how to book the discounted tickets in advance (incidentally, Amsterdam ? Berlin starts at €39,90 when booked two months in advance). Of course seat61.com is useful too as a general source of information.
What I really miss is a tool that shows me destinations that can be comfortably reached by a combination of day-time and sleeper trains on dates that still have discount tickets available. Nothing beats waking up early in the morning in Vienna or Munich in a sleeper train; it's like getting a free day of travel, and you arrive fairly well-rested instead of weary from travel. I'm not doing anything useful in my sleep (besides sleeping), so I might as well spend that time travelling.
As someone using the German railway for a large distance destination couple a weeks ago it was a total disaster, we got stranded in a unfamiliar German city. Deutsche bahn told us they didn’t have any of their (partner) hotel rooms left. Just arrange something yourself. That was very nice because all the hotels were full anyway. It took us another 2 hours of calling to find something. I was exhausted when I finally checked in somewhere at 1 am.
I try to avoid flying, but the German railway is giving me nightmares. I frequently travel through Germany and it is the exception if there aren’t any large issues.
The article itself is very thin when giving its reasons. I’m sure it’s oké for people without the money to spend, but I would rather pay more for increased reliability. If the German summers are similar to how the Dutch maintains their railways, I’m sure they will plan a ton of construction while the masses of people that usually take the trains for work are on holiday. So I’m inclined to see this promotional as compensation for bad summer train service.
The trick to Interrail is that you avoid Spain, France, and Italy - reservations are generally free or cheap outside of those countries. It's also handy if you need to get from somewhere aside from London in the UK into Europe - UK trains have no fees, and the Eurostar is 38 euros each way (it's extortionately priced otherwise), so even just hopping over to Berlin via Brussels becomes cheaper with Interrail most of the time.
Some yes, others not so much.
E.g. regarding France, using its regular online services DB will only sell tickets on the through trains from Germany, but nothing involving a connection in France, whereas conversely SNCF won't sell online tickets to stations in Germany not served by the direct trains from France.
> bahn.de will sell me (through an international website to which they redirect)
The problem with international-bahn.de is that what it sells aren't real through tickets, so if you miss a connection, you're depending on the goodwill of the operators involved to let you continue your journey without having to buy a (potentially very expensive) new ticket, or pay you a taxi respectively hotel accommodation if you've missed the final train of the day.
The only way to get proper through tickets involving connections both on the French and the German side (e.g. I luckily live near the Paris – Strasbourg – Stuttgart service, but technically I still need a connecting regional train for a few stations) is by buying them from a ticket office, but then again due to some obscure technical issues this hasn't been possible since the end of February.
European rail companies have claimed rail can be competitive for up to 4 hours, which matches my impressions of these journeys. London-Amsterdam and London-Frankfurt (which DB were talking about running at one stage before the problems with the new ICE models - don't know if that's still planned at some point or not) make sense, but that's about the limit tbh.
The standard bahn.de site still allows stopovers, but since the pandemic you can no longer book Eurostar segments through it. Sad face.
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