"I’d arrive in a new city each morning feeling refreshed because of the train’s sleeping accommodations."
Aeh, where were you travelling? Many countries did not have sleeper trains. Don't get me wrong. I did the same, travelling at night in trains, and it saved me a night in a hotel. But I did not arrive well rested, I arrived train wrecked.
I traveled by sleeper train in india, around 2010. They had beds, but every time I woke up, there were 3-4 Indian dudes that had come into our cabin and climbed on my bed to get some shut eye.
It wasn't threatening or anything, just a wild experience and insightful lesson in cultural differences
It's less invasive, but still crazier than it sounds.
Indian railways changed the base sleeper cars into free-for-alls by changing sleeper cabin classifications and stopping verifying tickets. Now you have people buying the cheapest tickets (unreserved general) and swarming the "reserved" sleeper cabin berths. [0] They're just over-cramming the trains.
I spent a couple weeks travelling by train across Europe a few years ago on an Interrail pass. I found sleeper cabins were generally pretty comfortable, though you do have to pay extra for them.
If you were just sleeping in a seat then yes I can believe you felt awful the next day.
That sounds like my experience on Russian trains (traveling between Moscow and Vilnius) except the men were drunk. As a ten year old kid traveling with his mom, it was threatening!
I travel by train regularly in the UK and it isn't unusual to take up to 8 hours to get anywhere :)
The closest I've been to a sleeper in recent decades has been five hours on a cold station because cancellations & delays have meant missing the last onward connection of the day so waiting for the first morning service (there are supposed to be provisions for that by way of providing accommodation or replacement taxi service, which do sometimes work, but at that time of night there isn't always someone available & reachable to enact such policies).
I’ve had my fair share of poor UK rail experiences, especially during holiday periods. Standing on the train from London Paddington most of the way towards Exeter is never fun.
In the case you couldn’t reach someone, doesn’t every platform have a phone as well?
In the sleeping cabins I can sleep fine, but they're usually really expensive. In the couchettes I can sleep about 50-60% of the time. In the seats, not at all.
So I go for couchettes. One time in Sweden I found that the sleepers were only 10 euro more than the couchettes, so then I took one.
There's a map to prove you wrong. I counted 26 from the UK to Turkey and from that bit of Spain to Ukraine (a different gauge doesn't mean you can have nighttrains). The solid lines have sleeper wagons. Which are useless anyways if you are taller than 190cm. https://back-on-track.eu/night-train-map/
You don't have to be younger than 26 to buy one, not anymore, but it is cheaper if you are. If you are a EU citizen, it gets you free, unlimited travel by train in most European countries. If you are not a EU citizen, there is the Eurail pass that is similar.
But that's the theory. In practice there are important limitations:
- You can't use it in your home country, except for a single round trip: in and out.
- If you make a reservation, you will have to pay reservation fees, and many long-distance and high-speed trains only have reserved seats.
- Not all seats are available to pass owners, if you want to travel in these seats, you will have to pay full price.
And considering that the pass itself is not that cheap, you really have some planning to do to see if it is worth it. In many cases, it isn't.
Or no planning at all, as I did 26 years ago. Meet some people in a cafe in Paris, agree to all go to Amsterdam for 2 days, grab your bag and then find a hostel when you arrive. I spent 2 months without knowing where I was going to wake up the following day.
No mobiles, only lifeline home being a pay phone call every week.
Not the same stores in every city as it is today.
Life was beautiful back then and we did not know it.
I understand what you are talking about, and you can still do that, but it is going to be expensive. Or at least, expensive for a typical 20-something heading out to explore the world.
Times have changed, and now like it or not, we are in the internet and smartphone age. The best travel deals are online, the cheapest accommodations are also found online. The Interrail pass is a bit of a relic, it can still be useful, but if you have no plan and limited cash, you are probably better off chasing last minute deals on your trusty smartphone.
And yes, I think we have lost something, disconnecting is hard, and stores tend to be all the same these days, and finding something interesting to bring back home is becoming a difficult task now that you can order everything online.
But I also think we gained something. The language barrier is breaking down. More and more people speak decent English as a secondary language, smartphones come with pretty decent translators, plane tickets are ridiculously cheap if you are not too picky. Getting in touch or keeping contact with people on the other side of the planet is almost too easy, great for exchange. When travelling in a group (even a temporary group), having mobile phones cuts down on the time waiting for people to gather, and offers more freedom than "let's meet at a precise place at a precise time", which is one of the most annoying parts of travelling in a group.
Now, I talked a lot about "cheap". That's because while travelling, I consider using money to be like cheating. You can do everything (well, almost) with money. Want to do a smartphone-less trip, randomly hopping into trains? You can, with money. Finding a ho(s)tel without price-checking online first? Sure, with money. Cheapening out is a good way to keep a "no plan" travel unplanned. But yeah, now there are smartphones involved.
And life is still beautiful. In my opinion, more beautiful than it has ever been, but in different ways.
> while traveling, I consider using money to be like cheating
And even on the cheap, let's keep in mind that money is central to the luxury that any tourism is. In my 90's youth, I figuratively littered the map with pushpins in countries off the path beaten by Westerners, impressing family and friends. But really, I just happened to have the privilege of taking a few months for clueless wandering with no worries about means and the knowledge that if the affair turned sour I could at any point arrange a safety net. Sure, I was a fairly cheap backpacker, but still there was no glory in such adventuring - just money. I still recommend it to anyone who can, and that experience has shaped a large part of my later life in unforeseen ways, but I have long stopped gloating about it.
> But I also think we gained something. The language barrier is breaking down. More and more people speak decent English as a secondary language, smartphones come with pretty decent translators
Is that really something that was gained? As we lose more and more languages we start to lose unique cultural features right? It’s like “we gained McDonald’s in every city - my comforting home food is available everywhere”.
> When travelling in a group (even a temporary group), having mobile phones cuts down on the time waiting for people to gather
Kind of the same thing. It’s a focus on efficiency. Speed run through life experiences. Why even go to the Louvre when you can throw on your Meta headset and do it from your couch?
I’m not a travel elitist or anything like that, I just think these “benefits” come with a lot of drawbacks too. As the world gets smaller and more efficient it becomes homogenized and travel starts to become pointless.
Connectivity/smartphones do make things "easier" but they also tend to make them less spontaneous and serendipitous. And, yes, while a lot of it is that I'm trying to declutter my house and I like to travel light, I also find that I have pretty much zero interest in shopping abroad.
There are some home country limitations for Interrail, but I’m not really sure why the passes are still kept separate beyond that. It seems Eurail and Interrail are mostly identical beyond the residency/anti-residency requirements.
Last summer Spain’s Renfe offered huge discount for a pass for people under 31. Only for paper version though which is slightly less convenient but worth it anyway.
I guess other eu countries could have similar seasonal discounts.
The word "free" is being ruthlessly abused here, surely...
If I follow the link there, it costs 239E for a 5-day pass, where each of the 5 days must be used in a 1 month period. That's not "gratis", that's 47.8E per day the train is used?
I travelled Europe on night trains almost exactly 20 years ago as well, and I was not an EU citizen back then... I guess I just paid more than with interrail? Just wanted to mention it was possible, and must've been pretty cheap as I was broke as hell at the time.
I thought the same as I was reading the comment you're responding to. Arriving rested after public transport? Get a load of that guy :) Not sure how anyone does that, but of course it would be nice to learn this dark magic.
"sleeper train" is the key here. Another keyword to search for is "couchette", I think that's how it's called in some places. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Couchette_car and the map.
I've used the Caledonian Sleeper a couple of times. The first time it worked reasonably well, I got a reasonable amount of sleep. The second time not so much, not really any fault of the train, I just didn't relax enough to get a reasonable amount of sleep.
Both times I'd say well rested would be a stretch. The first time felt a bit like a magic carpet in that I got somewhere while using up no useful hours but it still wasn't perfect.
That’s exactly what I mean. I never sleep much better than I would sleeping in a car.
I suppose it’s the novelty of sleeping in a moving vehicle, my flight attendant friend said it took them a while to start sleeping well on long haul flights.
Perhaps with a lot of benzodiazepines or drowsy anti-histamines I could attempt to sleep well in a sleeper train, but not normally. Happy for those who can of course.
Gotcha. It's the same for me on an airplane (I think maybe because I'm unable to fall asleep on my back), but I didn't have problems on the sleeper train.
Do you think it's the noise for you, the movement, or something else (like lack of privacy)? I started taking earplugs with me for any kind of trip now, they are a godsend.
Yeah, you can stay on it for a bit longer after they arrive but you'd have to be very asleep not to notice the lack of movement and noise of the station around you. Funny enough the best night I had on it, it was delayed by a few hours (normally a horrible thing on the train but perfect on a slightly too short sleeper!).
Sleeper train can be a great experience. Unfortunately, this was not an option when I was young either due to pricing or due to availability. At least in Europe with the InterRail ticket.
Sleeper trains and being young help a lot. I always chose 10h sleeper over 5 hour bus or car when I had to do the trip between Odesa and Kyiv in my 20ies.
Being short is probably the biggest decider - I went around the indochinese peninsula on sleepers a few years ago, and my wife, pretty much on par with the average height for the region, slept like a tot, found her bunk spacious, while I, several SDs above the average, awkwardly wedged myself into my coffin and encountered every jolt through my bones - and believe me there were a lot of jolts. They stop everywhere, and there’s plenty of shunting.
But then again some sleepers (Shiki-Shima in Japan) are like being in a luxury hotel. Rather enjoyed having a soak in the tub in my suite.
I rode in a sleeper car in December 1999 in Australia, between Melbourne and Sydney, and it was an unpleasant experience. It was a jerky, bumpy, noisy ride, somebody kept going between the cars for smoke breaks and the smell wafted into our cabin, and there was a baby crying in the cabin next door.
I think this is a personal thing. Even at home we are not equal. I can sleep almost anywhere, and usually fall asleep in a very short time after lying down and closing my eyes. Some people can even fall asleep on a chair in a wedding party with loud mudic and bright lights without even being wasted. Some people can't. Some will always complain about the bed, even in the most luxury/premium hotel. My partner can't stand the slightest light going through blinds, a neighbor making noise or the drunktards making noise in the street at night. Yet she will fall asleep in a matter of minutes in a car.
So as an individual traveling alone, you know your limits and can pretty much figure out if that way of travelling works for you. For a family, you are pretty sure at least one member of the family will have a rough night and complain in the morning.
A sure way to spend good night while travelling is to be very active during the day. You sleep much better if you have walked for 15 to 20km around a city to visit it than if you have been idle most of the time and taken taxis and buses whenever you could. Most lazy people don't understand that rest has to be earned.
I often have trouble first night on a trip even when jet lag isn't involved although that, of course, makes things worse. Then I usually get into a rhythm.
And, yes, especially when time zones are involved, sticking to a schedule and getting exercise helps.
Aeh, where were you travelling? Many countries did not have sleeper trains. Don't get me wrong. I did the same, travelling at night in trains, and it saved me a night in a hotel. But I did not arrive well rested, I arrived train wrecked.