My attempt to travel to the UK by train last year didn’t go quite as well as I expected. As I mentioned in that blog post, the NightJet to Brussels was cancelled, forcing me to fly instead. This disappointed me so much that I actually unpublished the blog post minutes after it was originally put online. The timing was nearly perfect: I type make publish and I get an email from ÖBB saying they don’t know if my train is going to run. Of course it didn’t, as Deutsche Bahn workers went ahead with their strike. The blog post sat in the drafts for more than half a year until yesterday, when I finally updated and published it.
The reason I have finally published it is that I’m going to the UK by train once again. Now, unless railways decide to hold a strike again, fully by train both ways. Very expensive, especially compared to the price of Ryanair flights to my destination. Unfortunately, even though Eurostar added more daily services, they’re still not cheap, especially on a shorter notice. This seems to apply to the ÖBB’s NightJet even more: I tried many routes between Vienna and London, and the cheapest still seemed to be the connection through Brussels.
While researching the prices of the tickets, it seems all booking systems decided to stop co-operating. The Trainline refused to let me look up any trains at all, even with all tracking and advertisement allowed, SNCF kepts showing me overly generic errors (Sorry, an error has occurred.), while the GWR booking system kept crashing with a 500 Internal Server Error for about two hours.
Eventually, having spent a lot of time and money, I’ve booked my trains to, within and back from England. This time, Cambridge is among the destinations.
| Date | Station | Arrival | Departure | Train |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 26.4 | Bratislava hl.st. | 18:37 | REX 2529 | |
| Wien Hbf | 19:44 | 20:13 | NJ 40490 | |
| 27.4 | Bruxelles-Midi | 9:54 | 15:56 | EST 9145 |
| London St Pancras | 17:01 | 17:43 | ThamesLink | |
| Cambridge | 18:43 |
I’m not sure about it yet, but I may end up taking an earlier train from Bratislava just to ensure there’s enough time for the change in Vienna; similarly, I’m not sure how much time I will be spending at St Pancras, so I may take one of the later trains.
P.S. The maps in this and other posts were created using uMap; the map data come from OpenStreetMap. The train route visualisation was generated with help of signal.eu.org.