One book: 140 years of travel history

But the March 2013 issue of the “Thomas Cook European Rail Timetable” is not just any timetable. This edition marks the 140th anniversary issue of the book that has become the bible for rail travelers across Europe.

During almost the entire life of Europe’s railways, the Thomas Cook timetable has become the indispensable companion for train travelers across the continent. The book started life in 1873 as “Cook’s Continental Time Tables and Tourist’s Handbook” and was for several decades known simply as “Cook’s Continental” — those who really affected familiarity with the European railway scene would abbreviate the title to “The Continental” or the ever terser “Cooks.”

Nowadays, it has morphed into the “European Rail Timetable” (“ERT”).

The 140th anniversary edition of Thomas Cook’s European Rail Timetable.

What’s inside?

The anniversary issue of the ERT is packed as always with rail and ferry schedules from across Europe, throwing in a few trams and buses for good measure. If you need to know on which dates the Moscow to Belgrade train carries through carriages to Skopje, this book has the answer.

This current March 2013 issue has a supplement on cruise trains and rail-based holidays. And the regular “Beyond Europe” section is this month devoted to China (even including cross-border rail services from China to Pyongyang in North Korea).

There are previews of the summer 2013 European rail schedules, most of which will be introduced this year on June 9.

In addition there is a wealth of material to mark the 140th birthday, with a retrospect on how the book has evolved over the years. That includes facsimile reproductions of old schedules (going right back to 1873).

And Thomas Cook marks this anniversary by introducing a new regular feature called “Route of the Month.” It is just a couple of pages of prose, evoking the spirit of a particular journey. They kick off with Salzburg to Vienna. But the idea recalls the very earliest days of the publication. Back in 1873, it was more than just a timetable, but also a handbook for tourists. The “Route of the Month” gives new life to that idea.

Brand power: Thomas Cook

The title may have changed over the years but this monthly publication remains the defining product of the entire Thomas Cook brand. The company has its roots in 19th-century railway history and even though many of Thomas Cook’s clients may nowadays opt for the plane over the train, the company’s trump card and key selling point is its ability to build on a rich historical tradition firmly rooted in the early work of the company’s founder.

Developments in technology have served only to underline the importance of good timetable information. Mark Smith, the rail travel guru who runs The Man in Seat Sixty-One website, nicely captures the success of the ERT in his comment: “Internet or no internet, nothing rivals the Thomas Cook timetable for laying out the routes, trains and options for travel across Europe and beyond, and I’d be lost without it.”

The one thing you will certainly not normally see on the cover of the ERT nowadays is a steam train. But in a nice gesture to history, the March 2013 issue does recall the age of steam. Oddly, the very first edition of the book in 1873, apart from the obligatory train pic on its cover, also included a camel. The camel was eased out to make way for a Rhine steamer in 1900.

This very special edition of the monthly timetable is certainly one for the archives — every bit as handsome as the March 1973 centenary issue that has now become a rarity much sought after by collectors.

The post European Rail: Celebrating 140 years of Thomas Cook Timetables appeared first on EuroCheapo's Budget Travel Blog.

Not so with AVE which will get you from Madrid to Barcelona in about three hours. I can see you doing the math and wanting to say, “But a flight between the two cities would still be faster!” I don’t think so when you factor in all the hassle involved with security and general “hurry-up-and-wait” time at the airport.

As for the costs, once you add in baggage fees, booking fees, boarding fees and transportation fees into the city, those “budget flights” can become much more expensive. (Read more about this in our post on choosing whether to fly or take the train.)

AVE train tickets and times

That AVE train ticket between Madrid and Barcelona will cost you around €115 one way and around €200 if you want to travel business class. Depending upon which flights are available this could be a bargain or not. Last-minute deals can sometimes be found for AVE, so it’s worth keeping an eye on the site for discounts.

To give you a comparison and demonstrate just how fast and fabulous AVE is, a slower train, Estrella, takes almost nine hours to get from Madrid to Barcelona. This trip, however, costs just €44 one way and would be great for travelers who welcome a slower travel experience.

Other routes on the AVE

You could also travel from Madrid to Seville on AVE in just 2 hours and 30 minutes at a slightly lower price of €80 one way.

Madrid to Valencia to see Las Fallas? You can do it in under 2 hours for €80.

Or how about Madrid to Malaga? Just 2 hours 30 minutes for about €90 one way.

AVE also connects Madrid with Albacete, Valladoloid and Huesca.

The ride from Barcelona to Madrid

I took AVE from Barcelona to Madrid recently and it was very comfortable. There was a bar where some riders spent most of their time plus roomy seats and tables for laptops or books.

Unfortunately I was traveling alone with tons of stuff and did not want to haul all my bags with me to the bar and was worried about having something taken. This is a consideration when you do your packing for an AVE trip. I’d recommend keeping valuables in one bag and putting the other bags on the luggage rack.

Overall it was a much more comfortable trip than on a cramped airline and I recommend it. The best part is definitely that you end up in the city center, not miles away, as is the case with airports.

Buying tickets

There are many departures daily on AVE between Madrid and Barcelona. While you could try to buy tickets online on the RENFE site, it’s probably easier to just go to your nearest station a day or two before and buy your tickets there.

Also in our guide: If you’re planning a trip to either cities, be sure to stop by our hotel guides for Madrid and Barcelona. Our editors have visited and inspected affordable hotels in both cities’ centers and have written reviews (with photos) of their favorites.

Your experience on AVE?

Have you taken the AVE or Estrella train between Barcelona and Madrid? Have you flown between the cities? Tell us about your experience in our comments section.

The post The AVE Train from Barcelona to Madrid: Better than flying? appeared first on EuroCheapo's Budget Travel Blog.

When winter strikes

In three of the last five winters, we have had at least one trip where we were seriously delayed on journeys back to our Berlin base, in each case not reaching home until a day later than anticipated. And that is just what happened last weekend: what should have been a routine journey from London to Berlin turned out to be a 25-hour epic.

“Hop on the Next Train” stamped on the back of a ticket.

The key to getting the best out of Europe’s railways is having a through ticket from origin to destination, which was just what we had on Saturday when we set out from London with through tickets to Berlin (a snip at just €49 per person).

Stuck in Brussels

Eurostar was as magnificent as ever, speeding us through the Channel Tunnel and on through wintry Flanders to Brussels Midi where we arrived just after 2 p.m. But the onward connecting train to Germany was cancelled due to bad weather, and many other services were heavily delayed.

Western Europe’s principal rail operators cooperate in an alliance called Railteam. And if things go wrong, you can ask to be rerouted on other Railteam member trains to reach your final destination.

Railteam: Hop on the next train

Many cheaper European rail tickets (the ones we love) restrict you to specific trains and routes. But when trains are canceled or connections missed due to a late-running train, you can ask any railway official to stamp the reverse side of your ticket. This confirms that you have encountered problems along the way, and that you are now entitled to use alternative trains or even a very different route to reach your final destination.

The Railteam stamp (nicely embellished with the slogan “Hop on the Next Train”) is your passport to flexibility in times of trouble.

Onward via Paris

We were rerouted from Brussels on a stylish Thalys train (all lush vibrant pink and purple velour) to Paris, where there was just time for a quick supper before hopping on an overnight City Night Line (CNL) train to Germany.

The Paris to Berlin sleeper would have been our first choice, but that was booked out, so we opted for the CNL train to Hamburg where luck was very much on our side as we grabbed the last remaining two-berth sleeper (for which we paid a supplementary sleeper charge – crisp linen sheets come at a cost, but we do like our creature comforts).

Snoozing to Hamburg

This was a perfect overnight journey. We both slept like logs, awakening on Sunday to see a glorious winter sunrise over northern Germany. We continued with a sleek Deutsche Bahn ICE train to Berlin, enjoying breakfast on the way and arriving home early afternoon.

What could have been a nightmare turned out to be a happily memorable journey. All thanks to the Railteam alliance.

The moral: Next time you run into trouble on the rails, make sure you get your ticket stamped to confirm the disruption. Train crews and station staff will provide the necessary stamp, and once it’s there you can exploit the flexibility of the network to reach your destination.

Don’t get flustered or annoyed. Delays are all part of traveling and with a little patience you’ll still reach your destination in the end. And perhaps with some unanticipated adventures along the way.

The post When Rail Journeys are Disrupted: Meet the Railteam Alliance appeared first on EuroCheapo's Budget Travel Blog.

“Easily the best atlas there is.”

The best investment we ever made was in a handsome atlas, but it’s clearly something for the home library rather than to carry on a journey. We have dipped and delved into many atlases over the years, but the clear winner in our book is The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, which travel writer Paul Theroux nicely commended as “the whole world in a single volume,” and Bill Bryson dubbed “easily the best atlas there is.”

Britain and France

Various national mapping agencies in Europe produce first-class maps showing roads, railways, landscape features and more–generally only for their own territories.

Top of the range is the classy cartography of Ordnance Survey (OS), once Britain’s military mapping agency which has transformed itself over the last 30 years into a customer-oriented company serving business and leisure markets. If we had any say in these matters, we would long ago have extended the OS remit to cover the planet, but that’s just a dream so we can only imagine how wonderful an OS Landranger map of the Camargue or the Crimea would be.

France is blessed with great national map coverage at various scales, with IGN and Michelin locked in head-to-head competition. Our preference is for IGN (really the only option if you are looking for large scale maps suitable for hikers), but Michelin offers elegant medium and small scale maps for long road trips.

Reise-Know-How

We are very impressed with many of the mid- and small-scale maps of Freytag & Berndt, a long established company in Austria which has produced maps of most areas of the world. That company’s 1:150,000 road atlas of Croatia and Slovenia is a gem that has served us well over many years.

For sheer quality of cartography, though, the maps of Reise-Know-How are hard to beat, and they come sensibly printed on waterproof tear-resistant paper. This German company specializes in areas overlooked by mainstream mapping agencies, and we have found their maps of lesser known parts of Europe to be a real godsend. As dedicated rail travelers, we much like the fact that Reise-Know-How maps give some prominence to railway lines (which too often on other maps play second fiddle to roads).

Rail Maps

Of course, if you are traveling by train around Europe, it pays to get a dedicated rail map. Pick of the bunch is the Thomas Cook Rail Map of Europe. The 18th edition of this old favorite is published next week. Europe’s rail network is so fluid, with new routes opening and closing every year, that it is really worth having an up-to-date edition.

A new edition of the same company’s Rail Map of Britain and Ireland is also published on 3 February. Publication dates for both maps in the US market are about a month later.

The post hidden europe: Our favorite European map makers appeared first on EuroCheapo's Budget Travel Blog.

Victor posted on March 11, 2010:

“Hi, three of us have planned a trip to Europe from 27th June 2010 to the 10th July 2010. Our itinerary will take us from London to Paris, Amsterdam, Rome, Venice, Vienna, Berlin and back to Paris and London.

We wish to travel extensively by rail. Please help us make a schedule that would enable us to touch all or most of the cities as planned above and at reasonably priced rates. We are all adults above 40 years of age and most likely do not qualify for any discounted fares. Please also inform us when and where rail bookings could be done in the UK. Thanks.”

________________

Reply from Susanne Kries and Nicky Gardner of hidden europe:

Hi Victor,

We cannot help you with all you ask, but we can venture a few comments that will perhaps inform your thinking, as you and your friends plan your journey. In responding to your question, we hope these thoughts will also be of broader interest to folk here on EuroCheapo.

The key thing here is to think very carefully quite what you and your two traveling companions want to get out of your upcoming journey. Is the journey the centrepiece or are your hearts set on getting to know the various cities you plan to visit? We rather sense the latter.

1. Too packed an itinerary

Europe is a lot larger than many outsiders imagine, and your itinerary touches only a small part of western Europe. You have fourteen days for your explorations (including your days of arrival in and departure from Europe). Let’s assume that you spend at least a couple of nights in London after flying in, and you want to be back in London on the eve of your departure. That brings the time available for the round trip through continental Europe down to ten nights.

Taking the fastest trains, your itinerary from London to Rome and back (as specified) would take 75 hours. Are you really thinking of spending six or seven hours every single day on trains? If you use slower night trains, you can sleep from one city to the next, but your 75 hours travel becomes closer to 100 hours.

Our view is that this could so easily turn out to be the trip from hell. Of course, you could use night trains for some legs, but you are still spending much time travelling. At the pace you propose you have only one day to see some cities. Yes, that is do-able, but how much can you see in that time?

Let’s take an example. You could leave your hotel in Rome before 7 AM and be in the middle of Venice in time for lunch. You could sightsee in Venice for the afternoon, and catch a night train at 9 PM direct to Vienna. You would be in the middle of Vienna by 9 AM next morning – great if like us you sleep very well on night trains. But if you don’t sleep perfectly, you could arrive shattered and it’ll be too early to be able to check into a hotel.

The sequence in which you have ordered the cities is very sensible, but the entire itinerary is too condensed. Over a couple of months it could be fun. Packed into a few days, it might become an ordeal. You could possibly shift Amsterdam towards the end as it could easily be accommodated en route from Berlin to London, assuming you had no real wish or need to go back through Paris a second time. So the home stretch back to London would now look as follows:

Berlin to Amsterdam: 7 hrs by day (with one train change en route at Amersfoot)
Amsterdam to London: 5 hrs by day (with one change at Bruxelles Midi)

Moving Amsterdam to later in the sequence then frees you up to take the Palatino night train direct from Paris to Rome. Departure is around 6 PM each day. Lovely train – you can enjoy dinner on board as the countryside south of Paris slips by outside the window. It is a super way to spend a summer evening.

Bear in mind that our aggregate travel figure is time on the actual trains. Add in transfers in each city from hotel to train and vv, and your time for sightseeing is even more eaten up by travelling.

Our feeling is that each city on your list deserves a week – not just a few hours. At the very least, you need two full non-travel days in each city just to begin to scrape the surface. That implies three nights in each city. With the time you have you could perhaps pack in three cities on the continent (ie. apart from London) but surely not more.

2. What kind of Europe

Europe is a continent of countryside and small towns. The places you propose to visit are busy, cosmopolitan, and (dare we say) much favoured by international tourists. They are spots you can be sure of finding Starbucks, crushed ice and waiters who speak English.

But there is another Europe – the Europe favoured by many Europeans. If you could throw in a dose of small town Europe, you would find out so much more about our continent, our lives and our varied cultures. And if you are to travel so fast, then it is easier to get the flavour of a country in a smaller place. Better Bergamo than Rome; better Potsdam, Görlitz or Quedlinburg than Berlin; better Shaftesbury, Lavenham or Cambridge than London.

Why not drop some big cities in favour of smaller places? Relax. Take time and watch the sun set behind the mountains in the Alps. Less might be more.

3. Advance booking is the way to deep discounts

You suggest that you may not qualify for any discounted fare. This is not the case. Anyone in Europe can qualify for a discounted fare.

Let us take Vienna to Berlin as an example, using the only direct trains that link the two cities. These all run via Prague and Dresden (yes… more temptations Victor, we know, for now you’ll surely want to pack in an afternoon in each of those two cities as well).

If you just pitch up in Vienna and buy the Berlin ticket on the day (and that is always possible), the regular one-way fare is €117. If you purchase the ticket well in advance (we always recommend 10 to 12 weeks), then you can ride the same route on the same trains for €29. Even with the cheapest fares, you can still break your journey (in Prague, Dresden or anywhere else on the way), but you have to specify that at the time of booking. With the full fare you do not need to pre-specify stopovers.

If you book slightly in advance, say just a week or two before travel, you will still get a ticket for way less than €117, but it will no longer be €29. For a midweek off-peak day, booked a week in advance, you might pay €49. For a peak summer travel day, you might pay €99. But chances are that you will still get a discount.

But it is not as if students or seniors can somehow get privileged access to the rock bottom €29 fare. You can secure the most heavily discounted fares if you book well in advance. Advance booking is the key to cheap travel – not age.

4. Night train fares and the Eurail pass

If you take our suggestion above of using the Palatino train from Paris to Rome, bear in mind the fares structure. We give this as just one further example of how much fares can vary. That run can cost as little as €76 per person if booked in advance (using the Artesia Depart+Go fare). Or as much as €265 each if you book at short notice and opt for the highest class of accommodation (ie. sole occupancy of a sleeper compartment).

Be wary of rail passes sold outside Europe. If you are doing a very packed itinerary, spending hours each day on trains, they may be great value. But check the small print. For many routes they may not offer entirely free travel.

Let’s go back to our Artesia example above, using the Palatino night train from Paris to Rome. Book now, and as we said you could get tickets for €76. If you have a rail pass that includes either France or Italy, you might imagine you would ride for free. But actually not – a Eurailpass valid in France or Italy will give you a €6 discount on the €76 Depart+Go fare. So you pay €70 in all.

5. More information and booking

Web sites are great for travel planning, and you can book most or even all these tickets online now – even before you leave the US. We would advise that, rather than waiting (as you imply in your question) until you arrive in the UK to book tickets.

And remember that the best deals will always be on the websites run by the rail operators – not those run by agents outside Europe. To get the best from those websites, use the native language versions of them.

Once your exact itinerary is clear we can advise you the best site to book each leg. You could end up using such a variety of services, that you might be looking to a mix of train companies for your bookings: Eurostar, DB, Thalys, Artesia, SNCF, Trenitalia, SBB, ÖBB and more besides.

With a packed itinerary like this, and so many trains, there will surely be a hitch or two along the way. In such cases, there is no substitute for a printed timetable – and it is good at the planning phase too. We suggest you purchase the current (ie. March 2010) issue of the Thomas Cook European Rail Timetable. Details are available on the Thomas Cook website. That will be a great asset in planning.

You might also consider getting the June issue in due course too – just to ensure that the schedules you have with you on the actual journey are bang up-to-date.

6. Apologia

So, Victor, we fear we have not answered your questions quite as you would have wished. But we hope that in these words there is something that will assist you in your travel planning. We wish you and your two traveling companions a fun time as you journey through Europe.

The post European Train Travel: Some important considerations before booking tickets appeared first on EuroCheapo's Budget Travel Blog.