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Excited about this idea. I wanted to do an overnight train in a Europe trip I did last year, but the timing and quality never quite worked out. A lot of the tim

Excited about this idea. I wanted to do an overnight train in a Europe trip I did last year, but the timing and quality never quite worked out. A lot of the time, trains between cities in western Europe are annoyingly long for a day trip, but slightly _too short_ for overnight trips - almost like an NYC->London red-eye, where you arrive just after you fall asleep. The couple of overnight trains I saw that seemed like they'd work out timing-wise, like Paris to Venice, had really poor reviews, but I assume that's down to the various companies running these services, who probably haven't invested much in them lately as budget airlines continue to compete so heavily. Sweden seems perfectly set up to invest in overnighters, though, as the article notes some theoretical routes. Norway and Denmark would benefit too, I think; at one point I was investigating doing a trip that would involve going from Oslo to Copenhagen, and the only reasonable non-flight options were an overnight _ferry_ (which, all things considered, was surprisingly cheap, though I'm sure they gouge you on food and the on-ship shopping mall), or a 7 and a half hour train trip that'd take all day. If Sweden were running overnight service along that route through Gothenburg, connecting those countries, it'd be a pretty awesome way to get between places.

robin_reala 8y ago
There’s a coach from Oslo to Malmö. Not sure if it goes on to Copenhagen, but it’s easy enough to walk to the train platform and be at Copenhagen in 40mins.
- gpvos 8y ago
  I can't stand to be in a bus for more than about an hour and a half (or on a plane at all), while I can be in a train all day and enjoy the ride. YMMV.
jasonkester 8y ago
That Venice train is great. Living near Paris, we can do a weekend in Venice with two full days on the ground but only one night in a hotel (which is handy since rooms start at around $400/night there.) It’s a shame that they killed off the dozen other night train destinations from here over the years. If Sweden and Norway open up as possibilities, I’ll be dragging the family up there the first sunny weekend.
- bosie 8y ago
  completely off-topic but you could stay in mestre and take the very cheap train into SL; takes 11 minutes. for example Best Western Plus Hotel Bologna is right next to the station and when i went there in october was 84 euros a night...
- avolcano 8y ago
  Huh, I came _very_ close to doing it, but saw enough negative reviews to put me off. To be fair, most of them seemed to be people who had bad experiences in the shared (hostel) sleepers, though, most of which seemed to not really be the fault of the train (just lots of complaints about snoring and such, which, like, is why I always have ear plugs when I travel), but some complained about broken AC and busted toilets which sounded like... well, a normal Amtrak experience, but not something I really wanted on my vacation.
- bogomipz 8y ago
  Sorry which train is that from Paris to Venice? How long does it take?
  - saryant 8y ago
    https://www.seat61.com/thello-train-from-paris-to-italy.htm https://www.seat61.com/thello-train-from-paris-to-italy.htm
Symbiote 8y ago
You write "_ferry_" like it's something weird, but it's a completely normal transport option for a huge number of Europeans -- usually for longer journeys, but sometimes to cover a short distance in 20-30 minutes. There are many ferry connections across the Irish, North, Baltic and Mediterranean seas. Ignoring the price, I'd choose an overnight ferry over an overnight train. The worst room on a ferry is probably as large as the best room on an overnight train. The food menu for Oslo-Copenhagen is [1], the prices seem in-line with what I'd expect to pay at a restaurant in either city, though I don't know what the quality is like. [1] https://www.dfdsseaways.co.uk/onboard-our-ferries/copenhagen-oslo/eating https://www.dfdsseaways.co.uk/onboard-our-ferries/copenhagen...
- matwood 8y ago
  I'll second that overnight ferries can be great, and not just for Europeans. I've been on the one from Bari, Italy to Dubrovnik, Croatia which worked out really well. Another time I took one from Helsinki to Stockholm. If you take the ferry in the summer time you get an hours long never ending sunset. Then of course there are the local ferries like you mention. IMO, one of the best ways to visit Venice is to stay in Rovinj, Croatia and ferry over for the day.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
  I took DFDS overnight from Sweden to Lithuania last summer and found it quite enjoyable. The tickets, including transport for your car, are reasonably priced (about the same price as plane tickets), we got to take the dog in the room with us and had a private shower. There's also a nice community of people to chat with out on deck during the night, everyone else is stuck on the ferry with you so you can have nice little parties. Cell signals (at least in the Baltic) apparently travel super far over the water so you also get cell service for a freakishly longer time than you would expect. I think we had ours for about 3-4 hours after we left and 3-4 hours before we arrived back at shore. Food was not great by any means, but edible. The other kind of hilariously infuriating thing is that they wake you up at 7 am with an incredibly loud announcement that they are serving breakfast with an intercom piped directly into your room. And you can't turn it off. Was more funny than anything, though I can imagine that if it was a multiple-day endeavor that I could learn to hate it pretty quickly.
ljf 8y ago
The Serbia to Croatia overnight train was fun, clean, vintage and reasonably priced. One to try?
elamje 8y ago
The ferry isn't too bad, I've taken it between Stockholm, Tallinn, Helsinki, and St. Petersburg. It's not like an all inclusive, nice experience like American cruises, but more minimalist (taking people, cars, and trucks). It's extremely cheap in the baltic sea and way cheaper than flight + hotel. It's a good experience all in all. Prices on board for food and shopping weren't bad at all. The ferries are also known as booze cruises since Scandanavia has such high alcohol tax/gov. monopoly on alcohol, people buy a ton of it from the duty free store on board.
- matwood 8y ago
  > The ferries are also known as booze cruises since Scandanavia has such high alcohol tax/gov. monopoly on alcohol, people buy a ton of it from the duty free store on board. I've been on a few of these ferries and remember what looked like locals buying suitcase carts full of beer and liquor. On the ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn I met a nice couple who explained how it was cheaper to take a day trip to Tallinn to shop than it was to shop in Helsinki. Much like when Americans drive to the outlet stores.
  - pimeys 8y ago
    It is such a phenomenon in Finland there is a great TV-series called M/S Romantic made out of the people going to the cruises. If you get the cheapest tickets, some fights, noise, sex and/or vomit is something you'd expect... Of course you need to be very drunk to do that.
njepa 8y ago
It takes too long to get out of Sweden by sleeper train. High speed trains from major cities, as well as Oslo, and good regional routing that gets you to Copenhagen in ~3 hours would be a much better bet. Unfortunately that isn't happening anytime soon.
fit2rule 8y ago
>Western Europe Try Middle Europe. Take a train from Prague to Vienna to Zurich and on to Paris .. or Berlin, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, I mean if you plan things properly, its a very, very comfortable way to ride around see Europe properly: slow enough to grok the landscape.
- bpye 8y ago
  I've done Krakow to Prague and Prague to Zurich and both of those were fantastic experiences. I've also done Verona to Paris which I would rate less highly - the Thello is significantly more expensive for a less comfortable train, additionally we were stopped and all passengers checked on the French border, which hadn't happened entering either the Czech Republic or Switzerland.
PaulHoule 8y ago
I spent a year in Germany circa 1999 and then overnight trains were all the rage. For instance, Dresden to Amsterdam was an easy and inexpensive trip. Going east you could get to Budapest, going south to Innsbruck, etc. At that point an American in Europe would ride the train as much as he could, but the Europeans I knew thought taking a plane was cooler and it was a good experience because the plane had competition from the train.
- jbverschoor 8y ago
  Train tickets are simply too expensive compared to flights. Sometimes over 3-4 times.
  - joelhaasnoot 8y ago
    Note also that kerosine and plane tickets are exempt from sales/value added tax, but train tickets aren't
  - kaybe 8y ago
    Just like with flights, you have to book early enough and check different times, and then additionally get the discount cards, and then you're looking at comparable prices quite often.
  - igrekel 8y ago
    If you time your travels right, it often makes more sense to compare prices of sleeper trains to the price of a flight + one night at a hotel instead of the flight alone. Also trains often get you to city centres while most low cost airlines will take you to an off-center airport which is also worth something.
contravariant 8y ago
Honestly if the unfair competition from budget airlines doesn't stop I don't see overnight trains coming back in any significant way any time soon. Edit: If you're wondering what I find unfair about it, I'm mainly concerned about the lack of taxes on kerosine.
- et2o 8y ago
  What makes it unfair? Just curious. Is it subsidized in some fashion that trains are not?
  - lolc 8y ago
    Depends on what externalities you count in. Is not taxing fossil fuel a subsidy?
    - et2o 8y ago
      I believe fossil fuel is taxed pretty highly in all European countries, let alone Sweden?
      - adrianN 8y ago
        Not highly enough to account for its externalities.
        masklinn 8y ago
        Importantly, petroleum taxes are usually leveraged on consumers e.g. diesel and gas prices in europe are mostly special taxes (+ VAT), train operators pay taxes on electricity (possibly diesel as well, not sure about that one) but kerosene (and possibly bunker fuel) is free of both VAT and petroleum-specific taxes. And that's despite planes generally producing more CO2/passenger/km than cars by a factor of 30~50%.
      - lolc 8y ago
        Sadly, aviation is often exempt from fuel taxes and even VAT. I don't know the situation in Sweden, it seems they started taxing aviation recently. I don't know how much though.
mherdeg 8y ago
> A lot of the time, trains between cities in western Europe are annoyingly long for a day trip, but slightly _too short_ for overnight trips - almost like an NYC->London red-eye, where you arrive just after you fall asleep. Yeah, the sweet spot is definitely 8+ hours en route. I took a fantastic service from Nice to Paris which ran about twelve hours, which was plenty of time to sleep. It was weirdly cheap at €87 for a first-class sleeper car, or €157 including an extra €70 supplement to be guaranteed to be the only occupant in a room with four berths. The service started at Nice (8pm), made a few local stops to pick up more passengers, finally got to Marseilles (10:29pm), then ran nonstop from 10:30pm Marseilles to 7:38am Paris. I had been expecting a very low-key cut-rate service designed for locals to travel comfortably overnight in dedicated beds but got a very modern train instead -- apparently operated by Russian Railways (RZD) with 2014-built passenger carriages that RZD also uses for their Paris to Moscow service (same equipment as the "sleeping cars" shown here). The onboard shower was an unexpectedly nice touch and it was an awesome ride. Sadly the train I took no longer exists -- when I took it in July 2016, the French government had already begun to withdraw subsidies for the service (https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2016/may/10/france-waves-goodbye-to-sleeper-trains https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2016/may/10/france-waves-... , https://www.seat61.com/lunea.htm https://www.seat61.com/lunea.htm ) and it vanished. The logistics can work out really well. My calculus was that (1) I was in Nice visiting family and wanted to stay as long as possible, but I needed to catch a 10am flight out of CDG the next day; (2) it would have cost €300+ to book a flight NCE-CDG and an airport hotel, and departing the city center at 8pm let me see the city for longer than heading to NCE in the late afternoon. Unclear if it was a good deal from a point of view of national priorities. My trip kept one person from taking one domestic flight -- is that a good deal considering the externalities of shorthaul plane rides versus train rides? I have no idea.
- jaclaz 8y ago
  Once upon a time there was a night train Florence-Paris. It left Florence (Santa Maria Novella station, in the centre) around 19:00-20:00 and arrived in Paris (Gare de Lyon) if I recall correctly around 9:30 the morning after. The plane required: 1) being at the Pisa airport (which is a 1:30 hour train/bus away from the center of Florence) 1:30 before departure 2) roughly 1:30 boarding and flight 3) 15-30 minutes to collect luggage (if any) 4) 40-60 minutes from the Charles De Gaulle Airport to the centre of Paris All in all 5-6 hours total. Choosing the train (which - depending on the arrangement could also be cheaper, including the dinner, than the plane) was a no brainer for me.
hdfbdtbcdg 8y ago
Next time take the ferry. The so called Danskebåten is an experience all by itself. Many Norwegians do round trips just for the party. Also you will be able to buy duty free and save a fortune (assuming you drink alcohol).
scraft 8y ago
I have visited every country in the EU, a lot of which by train, it has been a thing my friends and I have done over the last 10 years, going to a few countries each year, trying to use public transport where it is reasonable. Along the way, I have been on a number of overnight trains and a number of overnight ferries and I personally highly rate the experience. There is something almost romantic about falling asleep one place and waking up somewhere else. But also the social aspect, head down to the bar cart on the train, have a beer, chat to other people, most people are a lot more open to chating than normal and you find out about their life, their reason for travel and sometimes even end up seeing them once you arrive at your destination. On top of that, planes are typically really noisy (from the engine), cramped, and just difficult (okay, business class is a fair bit better and I can only assume 1st class even more so) where as the train is quiet and just a nice way to relax either on the way back from somewhere on to build the excitement when heading somewhere! Then again, I have also travelled the length of the Trans-Mongolian railway (St Petersburg to Beijing) and across the States (California to New York) by sleeper train!
- kakwa_ 8y ago
  Traveling by train across Europe, specially if you are going from one city to the next, is quite nice. On great way to do that is to buy an interrail pass: https://www.interrail.eu/en/interrail-passes/global-pass https://www.interrail.eu/en/interrail-passes/global-pass I did it about 10 years ago when I was a student, I left the day before, with a backpack, a rough idea of the itinerary and a few tourist guide books, and visited in the course of 3 weeks Bruxelles, Bruges, Amsterdam, Lubeck, Copenhagen and Berlin (and a small stop in Cologne). Definitely something I would recommend to any student in Europe.
matthewowen 8y ago
I took the ferry often as a kid, and a couple of years ago took it from Crete to Athens. It was excellent. Leaves around 9pm, gets in around 7am, and a private berth for two costs about the same as a hotel or flights, but you're essentially getting both in one.

robin_reala 8y ago

There’s a coach from Oslo to Malmö. Not sure if it goes on to Copenhagen, but it’s easy enough to walk to the train platform and be at Copenhagen in 40mins.

gpvos 8y ago
I can't stand to be in a bus for more than about an hour and a half (or on a plane at all), while I can be in a train all day and enjoy the ride. YMMV.

jasonkester 8y ago

That Venice train is great. Living near Paris, we can do a weekend in Venice with two full days on the ground but only one night in a hotel (which is handy since rooms start at around $400/night there.) It’s a shame that they killed off the dozen other night train destinations from here over the years. If Sweden and Norway open up as possibilities, I’ll be dragging the family up there the first sunny weekend.

bosie 8y ago
completely off-topic but you could stay in mestre and take the very cheap train into SL; takes 11 minutes. for example Best Western Plus Hotel Bologna is right next to the station and when i went there in october was 84 euros a night...
avolcano 8y ago
Huh, I came _very_ close to doing it, but saw enough negative reviews to put me off. To be fair, most of them seemed to be people who had bad experiences in the shared (hostel) sleepers, though, most of which seemed to not really be the fault of the train (just lots of complaints about snoring and such, which, like, is why I always have ear plugs when I travel), but some complained about broken AC and busted toilets which sounded like... well, a normal Amtrak experience, but not something I really wanted on my vacation.
bogomipz 8y ago
Sorry which train is that from Paris to Venice? How long does it take?
- saryant 8y ago
  https://www.seat61.com/thello-train-from-paris-to-italy.htm https://www.seat61.com/thello-train-from-paris-to-italy.htm

Symbiote 8y ago

You write "_ferry_" like it's something weird, but it's a completely normal transport option for a huge number of Europeans -- usually for longer journeys, but sometimes to cover a short distance in 20-30 minutes. There are many ferry connections across the Irish, North, Baltic and Mediterranean seas. Ignoring the price, I'd choose an overnight ferry over an overnight train. The worst room on a ferry is probably as large as the best room on an overnight train. The food menu for Oslo-Copenhagen is [1], the prices seem in-line with what I'd expect to pay at a restaurant in either city, though I don't know what the quality is like. [1] https://www.dfdsseaways.co.uk/onboard-our-ferries/copenhagen-oslo/eating https://www.dfdsseaways.co.uk/onboard-our-ferries/copenhagen...

matwood 8y ago
I'll second that overnight ferries can be great, and not just for Europeans. I've been on the one from Bari, Italy to Dubrovnik, Croatia which worked out really well. Another time I took one from Helsinki to Stockholm. If you take the ferry in the summer time you get an hours long never ending sunset. Then of course there are the local ferries like you mention. IMO, one of the best ways to visit Venice is to stay in Rovinj, Croatia and ferry over for the day.
SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
I took DFDS overnight from Sweden to Lithuania last summer and found it quite enjoyable. The tickets, including transport for your car, are reasonably priced (about the same price as plane tickets), we got to take the dog in the room with us and had a private shower. There's also a nice community of people to chat with out on deck during the night, everyone else is stuck on the ferry with you so you can have nice little parties. Cell signals (at least in the Baltic) apparently travel super far over the water so you also get cell service for a freakishly longer time than you would expect. I think we had ours for about 3-4 hours after we left and 3-4 hours before we arrived back at shore. Food was not great by any means, but edible. The other kind of hilariously infuriating thing is that they wake you up at 7 am with an incredibly loud announcement that they are serving breakfast with an intercom piped directly into your room. And you can't turn it off. Was more funny than anything, though I can imagine that if it was a multiple-day endeavor that I could learn to hate it pretty quickly.

ljf 8y ago

The Serbia to Croatia overnight train was fun, clean, vintage and reasonably priced. One to try?

elamje 8y ago

The ferry isn't too bad, I've taken it between Stockholm, Tallinn, Helsinki, and St. Petersburg. It's not like an all inclusive, nice experience like American cruises, but more minimalist (taking people, cars, and trucks). It's extremely cheap in the baltic sea and way cheaper than flight + hotel. It's a good experience all in all. Prices on board for food and shopping weren't bad at all. The ferries are also known as booze cruises since Scandanavia has such high alcohol tax/gov. monopoly on alcohol, people buy a ton of it from the duty free store on board.

matwood 8y ago
> The ferries are also known as booze cruises since Scandanavia has such high alcohol tax/gov. monopoly on alcohol, people buy a ton of it from the duty free store on board. I've been on a few of these ferries and remember what looked like locals buying suitcase carts full of beer and liquor. On the ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn I met a nice couple who explained how it was cheaper to take a day trip to Tallinn to shop than it was to shop in Helsinki. Much like when Americans drive to the outlet stores.
- pimeys 8y ago
  It is such a phenomenon in Finland there is a great TV-series called M/S Romantic made out of the people going to the cruises. If you get the cheapest tickets, some fights, noise, sex and/or vomit is something you'd expect... Of course you need to be very drunk to do that.

njepa 8y ago

It takes too long to get out of Sweden by sleeper train. High speed trains from major cities, as well as Oslo, and good regional routing that gets you to Copenhagen in ~3 hours would be a much better bet. Unfortunately that isn't happening anytime soon.

fit2rule 8y ago

>Western Europe Try Middle Europe. Take a train from Prague to Vienna to Zurich and on to Paris .. or Berlin, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, I mean if you plan things properly, its a very, very comfortable way to ride around see Europe properly: slow enough to grok the landscape.

bpye 8y ago
I've done Krakow to Prague and Prague to Zurich and both of those were fantastic experiences. I've also done Verona to Paris which I would rate less highly - the Thello is significantly more expensive for a less comfortable train, additionally we were stopped and all passengers checked on the French border, which hadn't happened entering either the Czech Republic or Switzerland.

PaulHoule 8y ago

I spent a year in Germany circa 1999 and then overnight trains were all the rage. For instance, Dresden to Amsterdam was an easy and inexpensive trip. Going east you could get to Budapest, going south to Innsbruck, etc. At that point an American in Europe would ride the train as much as he could, but the Europeans I knew thought taking a plane was cooler and it was a good experience because the plane had competition from the train.

jbverschoor 8y ago
Train tickets are simply too expensive compared to flights. Sometimes over 3-4 times.
- joelhaasnoot 8y ago
  Note also that kerosine and plane tickets are exempt from sales/value added tax, but train tickets aren't
- kaybe 8y ago
  Just like with flights, you have to book early enough and check different times, and then additionally get the discount cards, and then you're looking at comparable prices quite often.
- igrekel 8y ago
  If you time your travels right, it often makes more sense to compare prices of sleeper trains to the price of a flight + one night at a hotel instead of the flight alone. Also trains often get you to city centres while most low cost airlines will take you to an off-center airport which is also worth something.

contravariant 8y ago

Honestly if the unfair competition from budget airlines doesn't stop I don't see overnight trains coming back in any significant way any time soon. Edit: If you're wondering what I find unfair about it, I'm mainly concerned about the lack of taxes on kerosine.

et2o 8y ago
What makes it unfair? Just curious. Is it subsidized in some fashion that trains are not?
- lolc 8y ago
  Depends on what externalities you count in. Is not taxing fossil fuel a subsidy?
  - et2o 8y ago
    I believe fossil fuel is taxed pretty highly in all European countries, let alone Sweden?
    - adrianN 8y ago
      Not highly enough to account for its externalities.
      - masklinn 8y ago
        Importantly, petroleum taxes are usually leveraged on consumers e.g. diesel and gas prices in europe are mostly special taxes (+ VAT), train operators pay taxes on electricity (possibly diesel as well, not sure about that one) but kerosene (and possibly bunker fuel) is free of both VAT and petroleum-specific taxes. And that's despite planes generally producing more CO2/passenger/km than cars by a factor of 30~50%.
    - lolc 8y ago
      Sadly, aviation is often exempt from fuel taxes and even VAT. I don't know the situation in Sweden, it seems they started taxing aviation recently. I don't know how much though.

mherdeg 8y ago

> A lot of the time, trains between cities in western Europe are annoyingly long for a day trip, but slightly _too short_ for overnight trips - almost like an NYC->London red-eye, where you arrive just after you fall asleep. Yeah, the sweet spot is definitely 8+ hours en route. I took a fantastic service from Nice to Paris which ran about twelve hours, which was plenty of time to sleep. It was weirdly cheap at €87 for a first-class sleeper car, or €157 including an extra €70 supplement to be guaranteed to be the only occupant in a room with four berths. The service started at Nice (8pm), made a few local stops to pick up more passengers, finally got to Marseilles (10:29pm), then ran nonstop from 10:30pm Marseilles to 7:38am Paris. I had been expecting a very low-key cut-rate service designed for locals to travel comfortably overnight in dedicated beds but got a very modern train instead -- apparently operated by Russian Railways (RZD) with 2014-built passenger carriages that RZD also uses for their Paris to Moscow service (same equipment as the "sleeping cars" shown here). The onboard shower was an unexpectedly nice touch and it was an awesome ride. Sadly the train I took no longer exists -- when I took it in July 2016, the French government had already begun to withdraw subsidies for the service (https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2016/may/10/france-waves-goodbye-to-sleeper-trains https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2016/may/10/france-waves-... , https://www.seat61.com/lunea.htm https://www.seat61.com/lunea.htm ) and it vanished. The logistics can work out really well. My calculus was that (1) I was in Nice visiting family and wanted to stay as long as possible, but I needed to catch a 10am flight out of CDG the next day; (2) it would have cost €300+ to book a flight NCE-CDG and an airport hotel, and departing the city center at 8pm let me see the city for longer than heading to NCE in the late afternoon. Unclear if it was a good deal from a point of view of national priorities. My trip kept one person from taking one domestic flight -- is that a good deal considering the externalities of shorthaul plane rides versus train rides? I have no idea.

jaclaz 8y ago
Once upon a time there was a night train Florence-Paris. It left Florence (Santa Maria Novella station, in the centre) around 19:00-20:00 and arrived in Paris (Gare de Lyon) if I recall correctly around 9:30 the morning after. The plane required: 1) being at the Pisa airport (which is a 1:30 hour train/bus away from the center of Florence) 1:30 before departure 2) roughly 1:30 boarding and flight 3) 15-30 minutes to collect luggage (if any) 4) 40-60 minutes from the Charles De Gaulle Airport to the centre of Paris All in all 5-6 hours total. Choosing the train (which - depending on the arrangement could also be cheaper, including the dinner, than the plane) was a no brainer for me.

hdfbdtbcdg 8y ago

Next time take the ferry. The so called Danskebåten is an experience all by itself. Many Norwegians do round trips just for the party. Also you will be able to buy duty free and save a fortune (assuming you drink alcohol).

scraft 8y ago

I have visited every country in the EU, a lot of which by train, it has been a thing my friends and I have done over the last 10 years, going to a few countries each year, trying to use public transport where it is reasonable. Along the way, I have been on a number of overnight trains and a number of overnight ferries and I personally highly rate the experience. There is something almost romantic about falling asleep one place and waking up somewhere else. But also the social aspect, head down to the bar cart on the train, have a beer, chat to other people, most people are a lot more open to chating than normal and you find out about their life, their reason for travel and sometimes even end up seeing them once you arrive at your destination. On top of that, planes are typically really noisy (from the engine), cramped, and just difficult (okay, business class is a fair bit better and I can only assume 1st class even more so) where as the train is quiet and just a nice way to relax either on the way back from somewhere on to build the excitement when heading somewhere! Then again, I have also travelled the length of the Trans-Mongolian railway (St Petersburg to Beijing) and across the States (California to New York) by sleeper train!

kakwa_ 8y ago
Traveling by train across Europe, specially if you are going from one city to the next, is quite nice. On great way to do that is to buy an interrail pass: https://www.interrail.eu/en/interrail-passes/global-pass https://www.interrail.eu/en/interrail-passes/global-pass I did it about 10 years ago when I was a student, I left the day before, with a backpack, a rough idea of the itinerary and a few tourist guide books, and visited in the course of 3 weeks Bruxelles, Bruges, Amsterdam, Lubeck, Copenhagen and Berlin (and a small stop in Cologne). Definitely something I would recommend to any student in Europe.

matthewowen 8y ago

I took the ferry often as a kid, and a couple of years ago took it from Crete to Athens. It was excellent. Leaves around 9pm, gets in around 7am, and a private berth for two costs about the same as a hotel or flights, but you're essentially getting both in one.