Europe by rail

This is our first, multi-leg rail trip in Europe, quite a logistical challenge for a beginner. 4 legs, three changes. How long do you need for changes? How hard is it to find the right platform? How do I find my carriage? How do I make sense of signs and announcements that are in foreign languages? What if a train is late and we miss the next connection? Arrrrgh!

Cross your fingers and pray. I have put my faith in my travel God, I mean travel consultant, the man in seat 61 (seat61.com). I have used this site once before, though for simple trips. So far, every thing has fallen into place just as he said it would.

Just before leaving Croatia, I received an email (because I registered like the man in seat 61 said to) from the German railway, in German of course, saying my journey has been changed. ARRRGH!!!

Luckily that was sorted out once I reached Hamburg. Apparently there is track maintenance work in the Netherlands so trains can't get through to Amsterdam.

So now we have 5 legs and 4 train changes.

First leg, a high speed German ICE train from Hamburg. Finding our carriage was easy, finding our seat was more challenging. It turned out we had a 6-seat compartment to ourselves. How did we score this? Is it really ours? I think we got special privileges booking as seniors, though our compartment filled at the next stop, the only stop before our change point. I had noticed on the train carriage map on the platform (where you find out whereabouts on the platform your carriage will be, just like the man in seat61 said) that our carriage had provisions for people with special requirements. I hadn't expected that included us.

First stop is Osnabruck, to switch to the slower, IC train from Berlin, on its way to Amersfoort, NL. The change was easily handled in well under the 18 minutes we had. The train arrived a few minutes late and away we went.

The train stopped for what seemed quite a long while at Bad Bentheim This was the last stop before leaving Germany, into the Netherlands. I figured out when we reached Amersfoort that they had replaced the red German loco with a yellow and blue Dutch one for the Dutch part of the leg.

Confidence grew after the first successful change, knowing that it would be easier from there on, and indeed it all fell into place nicely.

We have several more train trips in the month ahead. This first trip was the most complex so the rest should be easy peasy, but I will still cross my fingers and pray and follow directions from seat61.com.Read more