Ok, now I’ve got that in your heads for the rest of the day, let me do a bit of blegging/moaning. I’m off to a conference in the Ruhrgebiet later this month and, feeling vaguely guilty about my carbon footprint, decided to go by train. It wasn’t all that easy to get a good deal online. The best way of planning a route and buying a ticket is from the “Deutsche Bahn”:http://www.bahn.com/i/view/GBR/en/index.shtml website, but instead of getting a price and a ticket you have to purchase blind (having supplied your credit card details and agreed to pay!), only later getting a “er, here’s what it will cost, is that ok with you – phone us” email. DB have now mailed me a set of tickets (starting in Bristol) which I anticipate causing “interesting” conversations with the conductor between Temple Meads and Paddington. I now have to work out and pay for a route from Leuven to rural station in Normandy on a Sunday: SNCF, SNCB and DB all give me totally different accounts of which trains are running and when. So one national company might sell me a ticket for a service in another country which the domestic operator claims doens’t exist. So why, oh why ….
Why oh why isn’t there an integrated, user-friendly pan-European booking service for continental rail travel, selling tickets at prices that compete with the airlines? Until someone makes this happen, we’ll all be burning a lot more carbon than we need to.
{ 22 comments }
Chris Williams 08.10.10 at 8:38 am
Did you check out Seat61 first?
Chris Bertram 08.10.10 at 8:41 am
Yes, but Seat61, though a useful site, just illustrates the lack I’m complaining about.
Patrick Tomlin 08.10.10 at 9:26 am
Hi Chris. We recently booked tickets from Brussels to Paris and then (overnight) Paris to Madrid. We used raileurope.co.uk, which seemed good, though I don’t know if it works for the trips you’re thinking of.
Chris Bertram 08.10.10 at 9:36 am
Thanks Patrick. It looks like that may be the answer. Still, it doesn’t work that well as it tries to route me via Paris and charge me >£100 , but when I broke up the journey into little steps I could do better.
JK 08.10.10 at 9:45 am
Of course better integrated railways would be great.
But if you feel you want to do something through your individual spending decisions why not spend the time researching. for example, solar-energy to fuels start ups and invest the money you are prepared to put toward carbon offsets?
des von bladet 08.10.10 at 10:03 am
Ah, so you have the Deutsche Bahn thing going already. Rail Europe just failed to tell me how to get from Copenhagen to Groningen, on the grounds that it can’t book more than three(3) legs per trip.
Seems to me that:
* an ITA Orbitz style thing for European trains could make money for someone; and
* Rail Europe isn’t it.
Alex 08.10.10 at 10:05 am
In my experience, RailEurope (and the VoyagesSNCF website – they are skins over the same system) is a nice idea but doesn’t work very well (it frequently can’t find trains that are in the timetable and queryable from Eurostar or bahn.de) and, being SNCF’s booking system, would always like you to travel through France. DB (and the Austrian railways’ OEBB.at) are good if you want to query the timetable, but it’s incredible that they can’t really sell you a ticket. Still.
What is good, however, is the RailEurope *call centre*. The website misses stuff, crashes, and is horribly ugly, but if you ring them up they will try very hard to solve your problem.
Harald Korneliussen 08.10.10 at 10:55 am
My impression of DB is that their route planner is one of the better ones. However, it would not surprise me at all that they have trouble coordinating stuff across all borders.
I went for the all-you-can-eat buffet last time. Interrail. Perhaps not ideal for your purposes, but a magnificent invention nonetheless.
Jacob Christensen 08.10.10 at 1:16 pm
Not solving your problem (I managed to get from Odense/Copenhagen to London and back thanks to a travel agent, btw) but considering the question
This goes deeper than just passenger travel: If you compare the US and Europe with regard to freight, Europe comes out badly (yes, I know about the absence of serious passenger services in the US) because of the lack of coordination between national railways. Different technologies, signalling systems and whatnot.
If we look at passenger travel, my guess is that the railways were simply overtaken by the airlines in the 1970s onward – following deregulation (…ducks…), flying became cheaper and much more flexible while railways (at lest in the Nordic countries) have almost given up international traffic concentrated on commuter and regional traffic instead.
True, the French and the Germans have to some extent responded with TGVs and ICEs in domestic connections (and yes, you can take a train from Stockholm to Copenhagen these days) but getting what was and is essentially national bureaucracies to cooperate has been too big a task.
Maybe things will change if SNCF and Deutsche Bahn AG take over all passenger transport in continental Europe even if I’m not sure that we would really want to depend on DB AG in its present form.
With two countries (say: Denmark and Sweden/Germany) involved you could be in partial luck but with three countries complexities multiply.
Metatone 08.10.10 at 1:59 pm
It’s not going to happen any time soon. The costs of setting up a functional cross-national booking system are not small – and who will pay?
Not to mention that 90% (at least) of all journeys that include the Eurostar are automatically more expensive than a plane ticket…
Are Ryanair et al integrated into flight bookings yet?I have the impression that the same “who pays” problem exists there…
zamfir 08.10.10 at 2:38 pm
About the difficulty in buying from DB: this might be a leftover from a much deeper difference between the ICE and TGV systems. The ICE was roughly set up as a normal train but faster, with the intention that you should be able to just go to a station and expect to find an empty seat at standard price.
The French aimed from the start at replacing air traffic, with a stronger expectation that people book in advance, like they do with planes.
Of course the systems have grown to resemble each other more, but there is a definite institutional bias remaining. You see similar effects in train speed and number of stations. The Germans have a scaled system including slower ICEs, and they connect smaller cities to the system.
So as a foreigner replacing a flight, you are closer to the TGV model customer than to the German model customer. If you were going somewhere today right away, and you were considering whether to take the Audi or the train, the ice system feels more welcoming.
Chris Crawford 08.10.10 at 3:09 pm
I was caught up in the Great Ash Cloud Disaster in Europe, stranded in Milan trying to get to London. At one point, while in Basel, we found a ticket to Brussels — but it had to be picked up in Brussels! Now, if only we could find a way to get to Brussels to pick it up, then we’d have a ticket from Basel to Brussels!
I profited from the chaotic structure of the European train system; I got out of Milan by virtue of knowing that there’s a train from Milan to Basel, something few others knew about (and the insolent Italian ticket agents weren’t about to give away to the stranded hordes). In Basel, we were lucky enough to find a helpful ticket agent who worked with us, found a train from Strasbourg to Paris, and then figured out how to get us to Strasbourg. However, once we got to Paris, we were well and truly stranded: the French train workers decided to do their bit to help out by going on strike. So we rented a car for the cut-rate price of $1500 and drove to Calais, took the ferry (a mere $200), and thence to Heathrow, thereby saving an enormous amount of money in Parisian hotel costs.
Ted Lemon 08.10.10 at 3:17 pm
I’m puzzled as to why you didn’t just take the Eurostar to Belgium or Paris and then get another train from there. I just made a similar trip (London to Maastricht) on the train, and had the same problems you had, but it turned out that I really should have just got tickets piecemeal–the advance purchase information Eurorail had wasn’t particularly accurate, although it did get me where I was going.
My in-country connections I just winged–there’s really no need to purchase an advance ticket to get to London, when train service is as good as it is (speaking as an American–I’m sure you folks aren’t as enchanted by it). The train from Brussels to Maastricht wasn’t really what Eurorail thought it was going to be, but the ticket they got for me worked.
As for why there isn’t a better system, it’s hellishly complicated, and things change. Keeping all that information in one *accurate* database would be very challenging. And apparently there isn’t that much demand for it. I suspect regular train travelers just wing it, and do fine.
People who didn’t buy train tickets in advance of the Maastricht meeting had very similar luck to mine, with my advance tickets, with two exceptions. First, international tickets sometimes must be bought during 9-5 business hours, which is a good thing to know in advance. Second, the Eurostar is popular in summer, and you can’t count on getting a ticket when you walk up, so you really should buy that one in advance. Otherwise you might wind up having to wait for a later train, or for another day.
urgs 08.10.10 at 3:27 pm
The major problem is the UK which insists not just to stay out of Schengen but even to threat channel tunnel passenger similar insane as plane passengers with all the searches,. There are a couple of other commical regulations aswell like that channel tunnel trains have to be of a particular sice which the regular TGVs and ICE dont have, a combination which makes it mandatory to use the channel train operator between Brussel/Paris/London. If it were up to Deutsche Bahn or SNCF, they would run direct trains connecting smaller towns aswell not since quite a while.
The Raven 08.10.10 at 3:45 pm
Surely this is the responsibility of the European Mobility and Transport Commission and the European Rail Agency?
Joe 08.10.10 at 10:08 pm
Right on all points about the limits of these website–for booking within the EU, that is. The real added value in the DB website is tracking journeys that don’t have matching English-language websites. Wanna know how to get from Odessa to Minsk? Look no further.
JamieB 08.11.10 at 11:33 am
I’ve travelled extensively by train in Europe over the last few years and I find it best to split up ticket purchases – it’s a bit more of a hassle having multiple tickets but seems to work well for me.
It also allows you to take the cheap off-peak Eurostar trains if you have a bit of flexibility as to when you travel (and I recommend building flexibility in to your trip if you can – make the most of the journey by stopping off at cities en route)
The problem in the past has been that different countries release their tickets at different points – usually 2 or 3 months in advance – making planning a challenge. Thankfully they’re going to be harmonising the high speed networks which should make things a lot easier:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railteam
http://www.railteam.co.uk
Alex 08.11.10 at 12:18 pm
insolent Italian ticket agents
Two experiences: first, the ticket machine that, if it can’t make change, automatically accepts your whole note and sells you a ticket. Thanks! Actually, in this case the receipt is a credit note good at any Italian Railways office, but you wouldn’t know that if you didn’t read Italian.
Second, the man from Sardinia and the last train from Calalzo. On said train. Man with huge box. Conductor wants to see his ticket; finds out he’s going to Padova. Train doesn’t go there. Where should he change? Conductor rants at him for several minutes in threatening manner. Eventually two railway police show up, armed, and he asks them. They suggest he changes in Mestre. He thanks them profusely and makes the point that it’s crazy he should need to ask a policeman when the conductor is standing over him. The police can’t handle this; they come over all ugly and demand his identity card, quizzing him on the details and what he’s doing here in the mountains, and spend a good ten minutes filling in a form as long as your arm.
(Later, it turns out they misinformed him as well, although not critically.)
Italian railways – on time, cheap, but don’t talk to the police!
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan 08.11.10 at 2:40 pm
We tried to go from London to Amsterdam via rail: $1200 for three people, versus $450 via plane.
We decided to fly and buy offsets instead.
Chris E 08.12.10 at 9:41 am
One other problem is that the change-over times that these sites allow for is frequently way too low.
I just tried to find a ticket between two european capitals, and it gave me a change over at Brussels with a four minute window to get from one train to the other. If you are not familiar with the station, even getting to the next platform (and verifying you have the correct train) is going to be difficult in that time. And they don’t necessarily tell you when you are buying a ticket for the train and when a ticket for the journey.
Omri 08.14.10 at 1:40 am
This post could almost be interpreted as saying that Europe should have the equivalent of Amtrak.
john b 08.24.10 at 5:15 pm
Old post is OLD. However, worth noting that the various major European high-speed railways spent US$20m trying to put together an integrated online ticketing system… and gave up when they realised there was no way they could possibly link it to their assorted back ends.
Comments on this entry are closed.