13 ms·
The Man in Seat 61
- matricaria 3y agoI recently went to India and was looking for recommendations for traveling by train. Found this site and was amazed by the information on there. Great site!
- miniwark 3y agoThanks for the nice discovery, i know now how to go to Siracuse by train.
- opjjf 3y agoHow the internet should be. A guy sharing his hobby, providing useful information.
- tosbourn 3y agoI was just coming on to say this. I live somewhere where travelling by train is limited to basically local journeys, but love when I see this site get mentioned anywhere, because it reminds me of what the internet can be!
- ant6n 3y agoIt's a little bit more than a hobby for this guy...
- opjjf 3y agoTrue! But it certainly started out as a hobby and still has that feel to it.
- tathagatadg 3y agoThis is one of my favorite sites - I came to know about during my first trip to Europe and used it the next time to get information on even which side of the train to get the seats on for better view and a table. I am so glad it has retained its look and not become like every site on the internet that require a GPU to load.
- luzojeda 3y agoSame here. Travelling to Europe for the first time from South America and it's been a godsend. Naively thought that train travelling was simpler than it really is (which is completely understandable that's why I say I was being naive). Eurail community posters pointed me to that webpage and didn't need anything else. Love the simple design too, a godsend nowadays.
- ghaff 3y agoI often say that train and transit travel often seems to assume that you're a local who knows what they're doing rather than a potentially first-time visitor who doesn't speak the language.
- bombcar 3y agoMost transit systems (and leaking into trains) are oriented toward commuters, because that's the vast majority of the ridership. The most common "concession" to visitors is often a (slightly overpriced) day or week pass that lets you ride anything anytime.
- ghaff 3y agoOh, I understand the reason. At least with transit, just tapping a credit card is becoming more common which generally reduces the need to dig into how payment works.
- Tijdreiziger 3y agoBasically, the reason that it’s not simple is that every country has its own rail operator.
- rconti 3y agoOr more!
- dougmwne 3y agoOne of the best sites remaining from the old internet. I am always happy to learn it’s still going.
- FridgeSeal 3y agoAn invaluable resource. I’ve used this before for travelling around Europe by myself for the first time, and it immediately took the stress out of planning “what can I even do” and “how do I even do anything”. The trivia about recommended sides to sit on to get the best view in certain directions is added fun.
- noneeeed 3y agoLikewise. When we went to Spain last year I was trying to understand how to book tickets and this site was invaluable in explaining how it was all set up and what we could and couldn't do online or in advance.
- marsvin 3y agoI love this site! Certainly helps to find and travel the beautiful routes like Sarajevo-Mostar or Bar-Belgrad.
- sph 3y agoI love the comment about a similar hobby website that was posted a few weeks ago (the one about the gates of Hell found all over England [1]) saying that it's part of the British culture to become obsessed with quirky and frankly underwhelming hobbies. I adore stuff like this, I think it's nerdy and a bit daft yet the world is much richer thanks to gentlemen like these. This is what the Internet is about, let's not lose our founding culture. --- 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39356066 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39356066
- ghaff 3y agoFor a number of years, I toyed with building a site about US lighthouses with maps. Then I discovered this guy's site who has visited every one with photos, maps, and descriptions. I decided I'd find another project :-) https://www.lighthousefriends.com/index.html https://www.lighthousefriends.com/index.html I love all the essentially remnants of the old Internet that obsessively chronicle some niche thing.
- petesergeant 3y agoClassic site, and used to be the only way to find out anything sensible about train travel in Thailand. I wonder how hard it'd be to throw an LLM interface on top of it for natural-language queries
- imurray 3y agoI've found advice from seat61.com useful a few times. He recommends https://raileurope.com/ https://raileurope.com/ -- When I used them back when they were loco2, I was impressed by the customer service. I needed to change my train ticket, so emailed them and they sorted it all out for me with minimum fuss, emailing me replacements. At the time it was a lot easier than dealing with the local railway companies in countries where I didn't speak the language. I don't know if they would be as good now that they aren't a startup though. History of loco2/raileurope: https://www.seat61.com/websites/who-are-raileurope.htm https://www.seat61.com/websites/who-are-raileurope.htm
- gmac 3y agoSince Loco2 became Rail Europe I've found the website has gone heavily downhill. I now find thetrainline.com often more efficient and more likely to find viable routes at a reasonable price.
- roggy 3y agoGlad you like it :) During my days as a systems engineer I build the underlying SAN, compute, network and the VM itself. ...about 8 yrs ago I did say it should probably be behind cloudflare and on azure/aws etc...looks like its still on the machine I built!
- sph 3y agoWhy should it be behind AWS or CloudFlare? Can't anybody maintain their own servers in 2024, especially when everything works and doesn't crash after a HN spike? Not to pick on you in particular, but I hate this laziness trend from sysadmins that are the cause of the whole centralisation of the Internet. If you have the knowledge to build a SAN and entire architecture yourself, teach that to the youngbloods, instead of just telling them to get AWS credits. Make the Internet decentralised again. --- Don't give a junior dev a cloud server, but teach them to administer a UNIX machine and they won't need free credits from anyone. - Confucius
- rconti 3y agoIt seems very unlikely that it's the sysadmins pushing stuff onto AWS. Devs who don't want to be sysadmins, managers who don't want capex maybe.
- Fripplebubby 3y agoNot the OP, but the thing that springs to mind is to make it resilient to DOS attack and similar. As you say, it didn't crash after the HN spike, but it seems likely that a motivated attacker would not have trouble bringing it down. Also the request latency is quite bad, which doesn't bother me a bit for the type of site that it is, but that's solved easily enough since it should be super cacheable.
- roggy 3y agoInteresting...my thoughts are that moving to the cloud is not lazyness. Cloudflare is for DDOS protection, AWS is so I can focus on the servers not the hardware. I really do like your point on teaching young bloods I had assumed much like the knowledge about steam trains it was old knowledge that is becoming not needed.
- ydant 3y agoThis is impressive. I poked around and for the (few) routes I'm aware of it has excellent information. I can see using this for future planning/dreaming. I've found train travel sites can be fairly hard for non-locals to find / navigate through and you get waylaid by third parties that aren't as good for the actual booking as the less SEO optimized first-party carrier sites. Ends up being frustrating. I appreciate this site just gives you the facts rather than trying to do everything. Everything about this is tastefully "old school". So much information density, and none of life story fluff most train travel blogs throw in. I appreciate the advertising through fairly non-intrusive banners/links embedded in the pages (seriously, coming back in the HTML and not injected by JavaScript - who does that anymore?) that bypasses the adblocker. I was curious enough by the ones I saw that I disabled my adblocker to see if that was it - unfortunately there are also Google ads on top, but at least not cranked up to ridiculous levels. I've "pinned" it in Kagi so now it comes up when I'm searching for train travel in the future.
- ghaff 3y agoI've used it quite a bit on a number of trips as I'd much rather travel by train within Europe than deal with airports. Train travel in Europe is pretty good but can also be a bit arcane if you're not familiar with the ins and outs of the country in question; this applies double if you're traveling around multiple countries. As you say, it's often not even clear where you should be doing your bookings.
- deeel 3y agoDefinitely. But Seat 61 is absolutely the best source for at least trying to make it easy. The site has saved me hundreds of hours of research.
- jcul 3y agoIt's an amazing resource. I used it a lot when I was younger and traveled more. That was years ago, I wonder if it has been kept up to date. No small task, especially for one man, which is the impression I get.
- ricardobayes 3y ago
- DominikPeters 3y agoThe whole website is apparently all static hand-edited HTML files (https://twitter.com/seatsixtyone/status/1679954215588823040 https://twitter.com/seatsixtyone/status/1679954215588823040), so any train company policy changes involve a large-scale find-replace operation (https://twitter.com/seatsixtyone/status/1671815739236401153 https://twitter.com/seatsixtyone/status/1671815739236401153).
- ydant 3y agoHe should add AI to his site! Not really - the site is great as-is and there's nothing wrong with this approach. It looks like it works really well for Mr. 61. But I'd imagine it'd be pretty helpful to write tools to help with maintaining the site which do leverage LLM models. Do a combination of search + AI to rewrite + reviewing the individual edits (e.g. through selective git adds). That's actually a plus in favor of flat files - it's all just code and the tools are plentiful. It's very "Unix" and hacker friendly. I'm imagining a tool like https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider (which I haven't tried yet, but it looks useful for this kind of effort).
- Nevermark 3y agoA tuned chatbot wouldn’t be a bad idea. The data/knowledge is there in high density. Someone is going to scrape this site and benefit themselves, travelers, and travel providers - would be nice if it was its creator. There are few organizations or useful sites with immunity to AI’s impact.
- mplewis 3y agoThe site has a perfectly functional search bar. There’s no need for AI here.
- Nevermark 3y agoI feel like making a comment about how yesterday that viewpoint is. But I won't. [0] We are increasingly going to take for granted that we can talk with information. Sometimes we just need some facts. Search is great for that. Other times we need to find solutions for problems that span multiple information areas. Which isn't something search excels at. Like finding a set of travel arrangements and dates for several friends to come together at some location, given each persons travel context involves different challenges or factors. A plethora of schedules and travel advice only gets you so far on a problem like that. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophasis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophasis
- brenschluss 3y agoI looove this site. This helped me plan a Trans-Siberian/Mongolian train trip almost 15 years ago. So many people I met on the trains used Seat 61, too. An absolute classic.
- nsypteras 3y agoBack in high school, I spent a good chunk of time reading the guides on this site purely just to fantasize about doing the trips myself one day. What a cool blast from the past, particularly given that the site hasn't changed!
- SuperNinKenDo 3y agoAustralian prices are suitably insane. Disappointing, but not unexpected.
- ghaff 3y agoThe listed trips are pretty long trips with sleepers. Amtrak would probably be in the same ballpark for similar trips in the US.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- SuperNinKenDo 3y agoUnfortunately long-distance train rides in Australia are made unnecessarily expensive by our legacy infrastructure. We're an almost entirely "flat" country, but our train lines curve around on themselves constantly. The trips could be shorter and cheaper, but alas, nobody can afford to travel like this unless they're wealthy. I can't comment on Amtrak too much, but I've heard it's fairly poorly run?
- thriftwy 3y agoA honorable mention of less hobbyist, more automated https://www.rome2rio.com/ https://www.rome2rio.com/
- fabioborellini 3y agoRome2rio is a lot less accurate. The company just doesn’t care, some of the connections it finds are imaginary. Maybe automation doesn’t solve everything.
- Tijdreiziger 3y agoThis website is the real deal. International train travel can be daunting, but the author has amazingly compiled all the knowledge you would ever need or want about this topic, in an easy-to-understand format, and with frequent updates (as timetables change). There is no other resource that compares!
- criddell 3y agoWhat a great site! My wife and I want to do the Toronto-Vancouver trip. The private sleeper room is something like $5000 which is doable with a little planning. Looking at the photos on that site make me excited for the trip. I wonder if the railways support this site in any way? It seems like they should. He does a great job promoting what’s great about travel by rail.
- Tijdreiziger 3y ago> I wonder if the railways support this site in any way? It seems like they should. Amazingly, the author of the site doesn’t take donations, but he encourages donations to his fundraiser for UNICEF https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/seatsixtyone https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/seatsixtyone
- yakshaving_jgt 3y agoOne of my all time absolute favourite websites. The information is wonderfully detailed and all makes sense in context. Many are saying you could stick some AI on top of this, but I'm glad this is done manually. There are other websites for travel planning with more automation, and in my experience the information is typically junk.
- bloat 3y agoThis site helped me take the family from London to Rome via the beautiful Bernina Pass between Switzerland and Italy. Invaluable! https://tickets.rhb.ch/en/pages/bernina-express https://tickets.rhb.ch/en/pages/bernina-express
- folli 3y agoNow must be a good time to do the Bernina Express. A lot of snow in the mountains and spring-time in the South. You basically get two seasons for the price of one.
- bpye 3y agoThe Bernina Express is probably my favourite rail journey to date. I used this site a lot when planning an Interrail trip back in 2017.
- PopAlongKid 3y ago>On-time performance. Bear in mind that these trains [Amtrak California Zephyr] run for over 2,000 miles, although they often arrive on time or perhaps half an hour late, they can sometimes arrive an hour or two late or more, so don't book any tight connections. This needs updating. The Zephyr trains can be 8-12 or more hours late (you thought you would arrive at 14:00 but instead it's 01:00 -- this happened to me twice, once in each direction, in the middle of summer). This is just due to normal work-hours restrictions, poor management, etc. Then add in snow storms and rockslides on the tracks, and your trip might just be canceled at Denver or Salt Lake City, leaving you stranded.
- alexose 3y agoI used to sometimes catch the previous day's Coast Starlight when I'd travel from Salem to Seattle. The passengers already on board never looked too happy.
- bombcar 3y agoThat's the real trick and problem - by the way https://www.amtraktrains.com https://www.amtraktrains.com is a great forum if researching - you CANNOT use averages for 'one time' trips. If you're talking about your commuter to work, you can use averages to get "good enough" because you take it often enough that the averages will mostly work. But these long distance trains might on average be two hours late - but if they're 24+ hours late, you might have ruined everything (unless the connection was another Amtrak train, then they will work with you). For those types of trips, if you want to take them, treat them as land cruises and either be on one train to your destination OR plan to have a mini vacation at each connection, staying a day or two and seeing the sites. (I have had two long distance trains die on the rails and become busses, which is amusing if you're not in a rush. Seven charter busses descending on a Subway in some infinitely small town for dinner amusing. They had everyone get off the train onto busses, we drove to where the train that was coming the other way was, and got on it, because the rails were blocked by a corn train flipping over.)
- ghaff 3y agoYeah, based on everything I've heard, I'd never take a long distance Amtrak unless I were staying in the destination city for a few days and was arriving a good day before any event of importance (or pre-booked tickets etc.) Things can happen with air travel too of course but the probability of a major delay is almost certainly much higher with Amtrak.
- chpatrick 3y agoExcellent website, I used it a lot when travelling in India.
- ta1243 3y agoOnce you leave Europe it's depressing how badly the world has fallen since the site started - routes via Syria are out, Sudan is a no-go area, Russia is closed to westerners, ferries across the Med to Israel and Egypt have vanished, So many long distance routes simply no longer doable.
- seabass-labrax 3y agoIn what way is Russia closed to westerners? Last I checked a few months ago, there were no restrictions on entry for British citizens like myself, although a land entry via one of the Baltic states would be necessary, and cash would be difficult to legally exchange.
- iso8859-1 3y agoIs it not possible to enter through Turkey? Turkish Airlines has a pretty expansive network.
- flemhans 3y agoYes or Belgrade. But I'd not recommend it. You can also just stay in Belgrade which has become mini-Russia
- multjoy 3y agoThe FCO advises against all travel to Russia, which means you're on your own if you get swept up in a wave of arbitrary detention and find yourself on a truck to the frontline in Ukraine.
- nerdbert 3y agoThere's all kinds of amazing new trains in Asia, there's ONCF's sparkling clean TGV from Tangier down to Casablanca, even in infrastructure-phobic USA there are some improvements and more on the horizon.
- shermantanktop 3y agoThis site is the reason I and my family took the overnight sleeper train from Georgetown to Bangkok in 2014. An incredibly valuable experience. Hundreds of miles of palm oil plantations, shantytowns by the tracks, people living their lives…like brightly lit scenes in my memory. We talk about it as a family years later. Man in seat 61, thank you!
- idop 3y agoI took the sleeper from London to Edinburgh (and back) with my father in 2017 because of this website as well. It is clearly a labor of love.
- raldi 3y agoI just discovered this site a few days ago, when trying to plan overnight rail travel in Europe. Everyone else (including the rail companies!) had missing or outdated information and often sites that were simply broken, and then this guy had like seven different options with all the details and links, everything fully up-to-date, and even recommendations for hotels for the options that included a layover. Absolute godsend. I hope he got my referral-link bonus.
- tudorw 3y agoPlease think about looking tomorrow, HN is flooring that site and it's so great and been around so long.
- Tijdreiziger 3y agoEh, the site has been going for at least 16 years and still gets updated regularly, I’m sure it’ll survive some traffic :)
- tudorw 3y agoyou do you!
- skywhopper 3y agoThis is an incredible site that I've used multiple times over the years when planning European train travel from the US. Lots of practical advice on stations, routes, seating layouts, parking/walking, how/where/when to buy tickets, etc. An invaluable site, straight out of the late 90s/early 2000s when people used to build high quality websites that actually solved problems for people. No idea how all the data gets kept up as well as it does, but I hope this site can continue for decades into the future.
- monooso 3y agoIIRC, there is (or possibly was) a "The Man in Seat 61" book. I made good use of it when travelling around Europe about 15 years ago.
- javier_e06 3y agoNo info for trains in Mexico. Mexico just inaugurated one section of the Tren Maya. It will connect Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche, Yucatán and Quintana Roo. Someday.
- thunfisch 3y agoNice to see this here. I've stumbled on this page while researching my stop and train change in Brussels on the way to Config Management Camp. This is the internet that I remember from the very early 2000s. Just plain information, a person happy to share their own interest and carve some space out in this sea of webpages. This is what I want to see more of in the internet.
- dalf 3y agoPrevious post from 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18895833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18895833 (there are other posts with one or very few comments)
- dang 3y agoRelated: The Man in Seat Sixty-One - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20983137 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20983137 - Sept 2019 (16 comments) The Man in Seat Sixty-One - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18895833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18895833 - Jan 2019 (117 comments)
- system2 3y agoI love the design still looks like early 2000s.
- huangc10 3y agoBrowsed through to see what the hype is. I think it needs more timestamps. "Updated at ...". Readers need to know how up to date the information is and if it's still trustworthy. I understand railway systems don't change much but it's still helpful to keep track of time and dates.
- orf 3y agoThis is so laughably incorrect/out of date for the UK travel section that I doubt the rest is of any value. The majority of the advice can be distilled down to “use Trainline”. Call national rail for travel times? What??