I've bought myself an EURail ticket. It's one of those things that lets you travel for so many free trips on European rail for within a certain period of time. You pay quite a bit for it, but since you travel for free, it should work out.

Well, not exactly for free. Let me give you some examples.

• If you travel from a country where the EURail pass applies to one where it doesn't, you obviously don't get to travel for free in the latter. They calculate a price for you, based on a free journey to the border. For example, when I asked how much it cost to travel from Budapest to Prague, I was quoted Hf12,000 (which is about EUR50). It was high enough to make me think twice about travelling.
  
• You need to make a reservation when travelling on EuroCity, InterCity or InterCity Express trains, which is just about every train going from a city in one country to another country. These reservations aren't free. They can cost anything from EUR5 to EUR20, depending on the train, the country and the class of the travel. They're not even consistent. In Sweden, first and second class reservations have different costs; In Denmark, they don't. Hence, my decision to travel second class in Sweden, but first in Denmark.
  
• Night trains need reservations as well as a supplement if you want to use a sleeperette, couchette, or sleeping car. They're all basically "places to sleep", going from a reclining chair all the way to private cabin. A couchette (a flat place to lie on in a shared cabin) costs about EUR20. Note that cost of the couchette supplement will buy you a similar sort of sleeping area and a trip on the night train between KL and Singapore.
  
• The rail days are only valid between midnight to midnight. There is something called the 7pm rule which means that any journey starting after 7pm and ending the next day is considered part of the next day's journey; hence, instead of a 24-hour day, you get a 29-hour travelling day. However, there are several overnight train journeys that require a change at some station before midnight, especially if you're travelling from some hick provincial town. Once you make that transfer, the 7pm rule doesn't count any more, forcing you to use up an extra day on your EURail ticket. The problem I faced when travelling from Stockholm to Berlin was that although the trip takes 14 hours, there's no way to use up only one Rail Day, hence my decision to stopover in Copenhagen. If, for example, you want to travel from Lisbon to Budapest, you must use up at least two Rail Days (although that involves three transfers including one with a 10-minute wndow).
  

So, is it a good deal? Well, train travel in Europe (especially that area covering France, Germany, Switzerland and Austria) is so expensive that even with the EURail ticket at the exorbitant costs they're selling it at, it's actually worth it if you want to travel Europe by rail. This is especially true if you plan to either go trans-continental (e.g. all the way from Lisbon to Rome to Budapest to Scandinavia to Paris) or if you want to make many small day excursions.

It isn't anywhere near as good as the Delta Air Fly-All-You-Want ticket that I had when I was travelling in the states all those years ago. Then, the only criteria was that there was a free seat on the plane, and then off you go. There were no extra costs, nor did you have to make reservations.

Labels: big trip