Chamartín, tucked away in Madrid’s northern suburbs, is the poor relation. It is convenient for the Real Madrid stadium and not much else. Indeed Chamartín has a football theme. The station was built in the run-up to the 1982 World Cup which was hosted by Spain.

The Elipsos dining car. Photo © hidden europe

The 6:12 p.m. to Paris

So at six in the evening, while Atocha bustles with the commuter rush, Chamartín is sedate and relaxed. It is the boarding point for one of Europe’s most distinguished night trains. The Francisco de Goya is one of a suite of Elipsos hotel trains that link Spain with France, Italy and Switzerland. It leaves Madrid Chamartín early evening and arrives in Paris just after nine the following morning.

Across the sierra

There is a touch of theater about the Francisco de Goya. We used the train last week, leaving Madrid on a cool but perfectly clear spring evening. The first two hours set the mood for one of the best overnight rail journeys on offer. On the run north from Madrid the rail route tussles briefly with freeways before taking to the hills. The line climbs up past El Escorial, with a fine view from the train of one of Europe’s grandest Renaissance palaces.

Beyond El Escorial, the line climbs steeply over the southern flank of the rugged Sierra de Guadarrama. This is a part of Spain rarely visited by regular tourists, and the rail route gives a glimpse of difficult terrain where winter lingers till well past Easter. Snow fences protect the line from drifts. Away to the southwest, the last of the evening sun picks out the peaks of the Sierra de Gredos, the highest of them – the 2,600-meter Pico Almanzor – laced with pinkish cloud.

Spanish style

At eight we cruise without stopping past the walled town of Ávila, but by now the light has almost faded. For those whose biorhythms run to northern cycles, it is already time for dinner. The Spanish eat famously late, so the idea of sitting down to eat as early as eight is judged a northern delusion.

Spanish travelers on the Francisco de Goya won’t eat till ten or even much later, so the early sitting is the preserve of the English and a few other interlopers from northern Europe. Many of those who fill the restaurant car are British travelers returning home from Spain. It’s a wise choice for those who prefer not to fly. The onward connections from Paris to London with Eurostar are excellent, so it is perfectly possible to leave Madrid at six in the evening and be in London by shortly after noon the following day.

The restaurant car is civilized in that restrained way in which Spain excels. Stylish decor, snatches of well-known arias, a bone-dry fino or a sparkling cava…. yes, they know how to make you relax. Dinner includes salad, rabbit chasseur, a little cheese and fruit, all accompanied by the statutory Rioja. Haute cuisine it is not, but the entire show and setting is designed to make you feel good. The formula works.

Puccini with breakfast

We sleep perfectly, blissfully ignorant of the border with France, creeping by night past Biarritz and Bordeaux. When we awake and pull back the curtains in our sleeper we are sliding gently along the bank of the River Loire. A heavy overnight frost has left a ghostly white veil over trees and hedges while a light mist hangs heavy over the river.

It is an easy run north to Paris, but still time aplenty to shower and return to the restaurant car for breakfast. Puccini is the musical theme of the morning, always a sound choice for coffee and croissants, while a French nuclear power station drifts by beyond the carriage window.

Arrival in Austerlitz

All too soon, we arrive at Paris Austerlitz—an architectural disaster that for as long as we remember has been in the process of being rebuilt. In Spain, they know about style. Remember those tropical gardens at Atocha? At Paris Austerlitz they have squeezed a car park into the once handsome train shed. It makes us realize that Madrid Chamartín really did have a charm all its own.

Austerlitz is not a place to linger and the fraternity of travelers who rode the Francisco de Goya soon disperses. The English make tracks for Eurostar, a few smart business types head off to meetings. And us? We walk the banks of the Seine and wonder if it were all a dream. Did we really cross the wild sierra only last evening?

Elipsos facts

Elipsos run night trains from Madrid to Paris, and from Barcelona to Zürich, Geneva, Turin, Milan and Paris. All services operate year-round but not necessarily every night.

One-way summer-season fares start at €93. Various classes of on-board accommodation are available. For the top-of-the-range Grand Class sleepers, summer 2012 prices start at €186 per person. These sleeping compartments have en-suite facilities (including a shower) and Grand Class fare covers the full cost of dinner (including aperitifs, wines and spirits) and breakfast.

The post The Night Train from Madrid to Paris: The Elipsos experience appeared first on EuroCheapo's Budget Travel Blog.

Discontinued services

First the bad news. A number of services have been axed, notably:

1. The overnight trains or through carriages from Munich to Copenhagen, Warsaw and Moscow.

2. The overnight services from Prague to Zagreb and Zürich via Linz (although the long established City Night line service from Prague via Dresden to Zürich continues just as now).

3. The once daily direct train from Amsterdam Schiphol Airport to Szczecin in Poland.

New links and improvements

But in a Europe where rail travel is becoming ever more popular, there were many notable improvements to services that came with the introduction of the 2011 schedules last Sunday. Some of the highlights include:

1. Dramatic improvements to services between St. Petersburg and Helsinki using sleek new Allegro trains that trim about 90 minutes off the journey times between the two cities.

2. More trains and faster journey times between Paris and Geneva, as the Haut-Bugey high-speed link through the Jura came into operation.

3. Increased frequency and faster travel times on daytime services linking Warsaw with Berlin.

4. More frequent direct services between Brussels and Calais on the French coast.

5. An additional daily service on the busy Paris to Amsterdam route.

6. Entirely new services linking Prague and Dresden with Szczecin in Poland.

7. New direct trans-Alpine trains from Venice to Basel (via the Gotthard route) and to Munich (via the Brenner Pass).

8. Better links from Hamburg with a new overnight train to Paris, and a new daytime service from Hamburg to Vienna via Hannover and Passau (complementing the existing daytime service via Berlin and Prague which continues just as in 2010).

9. An extra daily fast train on the Budapest to Bratislava route.

10. A new direct daytime train between Warsaw and Budapest (complementing the existing overnight service which continues as in the past).

In the weeks ahead

While most of the 2011 schedules came into effect this week, there are a small number of outstanding changes that will be introduced  in the weeks ahead. They include:

Effective December 19: An entire new Spanish high-speed route opens linking Madrid with both Valencia and Albacete. This will dramatically transform travel in eastern Spain, slashing the travel time from Madrid to Valencia by more than half.

On the same date a new high-speed link across the French-Spanish border will open, initially with just twice daily TGV trains from Paris to Figueres, where passengers must change for onward travel to Barcelona. With much reduced journey times, the new link will give much improved daytime connections between Catalunya and cities such as Geneva and London.

Effective January 7: New direct ski season services from Belgium and Luxembourg to the Tarentaise region in the French Alps and to resorts in both the Tyrol and the Salzburg regions of Austria.

You can review all the main 2011 rail schedules in each monthly edition of the Thomas Cook European Rail Timetable.  The December edition, which is already available, contains over 500 pages of the 2011 schedules.  The January edition (published next week) includes the full schedules (including late changes which were not available when the December issue went to press) and a useful fares supplement.  That comes as standard fare in each January edition of the timetable, and we find it especially useful as it gives indicative costs for journeys within most European countries as well as for international routes.

The post European Train Update: 2011 rail changes appeared first on EuroCheapo's Budget Travel Blog.

We have over the past twelve months spent time in and reported from some twenty countries across Europe. The year has seen a lot of changes. We are pleased to see some governments across Europe beginning to levy heftier taxes on aviation, and we hope that 2010 will see more following in their wake. Higher plane fares within Europe will be a big incentive to encourage more responsible traveling. Britain has taken a welcome lead in this. We applaud the decision in Scotland to subsidize ferry fares on longer routes to the Hebrides – another important step in encouraging travelers to think twice before hopping on a plane.

Over the past year, travelers have benefited from Switzerland joining the Schengen group of nations and Slovakia adopting the euro. Iceland‘s financial misfortunes in late 2008, with a slump in the value of the Icelandic króna, suddenly made the island nation much more attractive for travelers from North America and mainland Europe. In ailing economies in eastern Europe, and particularly in the Baltic States, tourism has been a key element in the fragile recovery now underway.

New travel opportunities

Citizens of some Balkan states are today much less well traveled than their parents. But that looks set to change with the new European Union visa regulations that came into effect last weekend, ushering in a more relaxed visa regime for visitors to the EU from Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia. For Serbia, this is a tangible reward from the EU to the Belgrade government for playing the great game of European integration. Olive branches from Brussels are being offered to Minsk too, and we predict that 2010 will surely see some thawing of the relations between Belarus and the EU. That will perhaps in time make life easier for travelers bound for Belarus, which remains one of Europe’s most inaccessible and yet most intriguing countries.

Rail links and politics

A new train service would not normally be greeted as a major diplomatic event, but when the new service links Serbia with Bosnia via Croatia then folk do take notice. The Belgrade to Sarajevo route was severed during the conflicts of the nineties. Now it is back, with a very welcome once daily train from the Serbian to the Bosnian capital. The new service started in mid-December.

If train services are a mark of political cooperation, then we must mourn the demise of one of Europe’s key night train links – the daily service from Berlin to Kaliningrad. It ran for the last time ten days ago. The withdrawal of this train now leaves Russia’s Baltic exclave at Kaliningrad even more isolated.

Airlines that left the skies

Finally, a thought for all the staff and passengers affected by over a dozen airline bankruptcies in Europe in 2009. Casualties included the national flag carriers of Lithuania (FlyLAL) and Macedonia (MAT); discount carriers such as Sky Europe, Fly Globespan, and My Air; and niche carriers serving particular markets such as Sky South and KD Avia (with hubs at Shoreham and Kaliningrad respectively).

We shall be back next month, but meanwhile warm best wishes for the holidays from us both.

The post 2009 Retrospective: Highlights and lowlights of European travel appeared first on EuroCheapo's Budget Travel Blog.