The Trains

There are two different types of passes that you can buy for your European rail adventure, the Interrail Pass and the Eurail Pass. They are both owned by the same company, European Railways. For either pass, you can buy a One Country Pass or a Global Pass. The One Country Pass only lets you travel within one country, while the Global Pass lets you trail-blaze almost over entire Europe.

The main difference between these two passes is that the Eurail passes are for sale only to non-European residents, while Interrail passes are only sold to European residents. To see what countries qualify for the Interrail pass, click here. The Interrail pass also has certain exclusions, in that you cannot travel within your country of residence. I purchased my Interrail pass with my Swiss passport, so this meant that I could not travel to or through Switzerland. The Eurail, on the other hand, does not have this restriction. It is, however, slightly more expensive than the Interrail pass. The other main difference between the two passes is that, unlike the Interrail Global Pass, the Eurail Global Pass is not valid in the UK and Macedonia. If you plan on purchasing an Eurail pass and want to visit London this won’t be much of an issue, since there are direct Eurostar trains from Brussels and Paris. Of course, you’d have to purchase these tickets in addition to your Eurail pass. If you time it right, you can pay as little as $55 (€49 or £36) each way. Another important thing to remember here is the duration of the pass. We purchased a month-long Global Pass — but how long is a month? A 1-month Global Pass is valid for the amount of days of the month in which you start your journey. September has 30 days, so if you start your journey on September 15, your pass will be valid for 30 days. The day you start your journey on counts as one of the days.

There are a lot of ways of making your way through Europe. While regional trains are slow and don’t accept reservations, most fast trains require that you reserve your seat in advance. What type of trains you take depends on what type of experience you’re looking for. Ellie and I opted to take the fastest route everywhere we could. Even so, we ended up taking regional trains on our journeys from Paris to Barcelona and Barcelona to Antibes. It’s important to note that some trains will require reservations, while others will not require a reservation, but will still allow you book one. Other trains, mostly regional ones, will not allow you to reserve at all.

Although the majority of our trains required reservations, we ended up making reservations for all the trains for which reservations were possible.

I highly recommend this. You have to pay extra for reservations, but knowing that you have a seat reserved is worth the peace of mind. No matter how crowded the train is, you’ll still have a seat.

Interrail and Eurail offer a reservation service. You simply provide them with your route and details, and they’ll book the reservations for you. Their system allows them to make reservations on 95% of the trains that run in Europe. Most likely, 100% of the ones you plan on taking will be covered. Interrail does charge you a service fee of €8 per train that they reserve for you, regardless of how many travelers you are reserving it for. This means that if you’re reserving a single train journey for 8 people, the service fee will still be €8. In our case, we split the cost and ended up paying €4 each per train that we reserved. This fee includes free worldwide shipping, and the peace of mind that all your train reservations will arrive in one single shipment. Of course, you can also book the reservations by yourself by contacting each railway company individually. I don’t recommend this — not only is it more complicated, but many times you have to pick up the reservations at the train station. Besides the €8 booking fee, most of our reservations ended up coming to €3.60 per person. We took a night train from Milan to Vienna which jointly cost us €138 for a 2-person sleeper cabin. We reserved everything on May 4, 2015 and received the reservations in the mail about a week later. We only ran into one issue while reserving our trains, which was that the reservations for the fast trains from Paris to Barcelona could only be done at the train station. We didn’t want to risk not finding a seat on the day of, so instead we opted for a slower, 10 hour route which took us from Paris to Perpignan, Perpignan to Port Bou, and Port Bou to Barcelona. We also ran into a rather small issue during our night-train that took us from Milan to Vienna. Somehow the times we had on our reservations for that day were an hour behind, so we missed our connection to Budapest. We went to the service desk and they were kind enough to reserve a seat for us on the next train to Budapest. You can read more about reservations on the Interrail site here.

Deciding the Route

The train network across Europe is big, very big. You can see here for yourself. We started deciding on which cities we wanted to visit around January/February. 30 days sounds like a lot, but with so many places to visit, we had to make some decisions. I really wanted to go to Istanbul, which couldn’t be any farther from London, where we started our journey. My original idea was to go through: Barcelona, Nice, Milan, Lugano, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Istanbul, and finish off in Greece the day our pass expired. I quickly scrapped this idea once I realized that the train journey from Budapest to Istanbul would take more than 40 hours. You can see a map of this first idea here. Ellie brought me to my senses and we decided on a route that was more achievable, affordable, and which would actually leave us with something to do except sitting in trains all day. So, we opted for this instead. We spent three nights in each city. We decided to travel in the mornings to avoid overly crowded trains. The latest fast train we took, which left Amsterdam at 11am, was absolutely packed with other Interrailers. This was during our Amsterdam — Copenhagen journey, so we got off at Osnabrück to change trains. However, the train continued to Berlin, which is why I’m assuming it was so packed. I’m also going to assume that most people opted for those trains because it meant being able to rest up a bit from the previous night’s bender before embarking on the next leg of the journey. Although that train had optional reservations, there wasn’t a single free space. Thankfully we had reservations, and I know that you will too. Being prepared is almost always the best policy.

Below you can see how we organized our travel. To be as specific as possible, I included each individual train in case you’d like to copy our route. All times are displayed in 24hr format to avoid confusion. I recommend at least 30 minutes when changing trains to account for delays that might happen.

June 3 — London to Paris (via Eurostar)

London St. Pancras to Paris Nord, 9:17–12:57

June 6 — Paris to Barcelona

Paris Gare de Lyon to Perpignan, 7:15–12:02

Perpignan to Port Bou, 12:45–13:38

Port Bou to Barcelona City, 14:33–17:09

June 9— Barcelona to Antibes

Barcelona City to Cerbere, 11:16–13:57

Cerbere to Montpellier Saint-Roch, 14:37–17:09

Montpellier Saint-Roch to Marseille St. Charles, 18:06–19:42

Marseille St. Charles to Antibes, 20:30–22:46

June 12— Antibes to Milan

Antibes to Ventimiglia, 9:18–10:33

Ventimiglia to Milano Centrale, 10:52–14:50

June 15 to June 16— Milan to Budapest

Milano Centrale to Wien Meidling, 21:05–8:33

Wien Meidling to Budapest Keleti, 9:03–11:36

Note: The night-train actually arrived to Vienna at 9:33, making us miss our connection. As I mentioned above, the service desk at the station helped us out and they were very nice. This discrepancy must’ve been a mistake somewhere along the way. Interrail’s online scheduling platform stated the arrival time at 8:33, but once we boarded the night-train the staff told us that we’d arrive at 9:33. I also should’ve checked our physical reservation, since that displayed the correct time of 9:33. If you’re going to Budapest — both Keleti and Kelenföld are central stations. Keleti is on the Pest side (east of the river), and Kelenföld is on the Buda side (west of the river).

June 19 — Budapest to Vienna

Budapest Kelenföld to Wien Hauptbahnhof (HBF), 9:24–11:45

June 22 — Vienna to Prague

Wien HBF to Prague Hlavni Nadrazi, 9:07–13:25

June 25—Prague to Berlin

Prague Hlavni Nadrazi to Berlin HBF, 8:30–13:15

June 28—Berlin to Amsterdam

Berlin HBF to Amsterdam Centraal, 8:36–15:00

July 1—Amsterdam to Copenhagen

Amsterdam Centraal to Osnabrück, 11:01–14:06

Osnabrück to Hamburg, 14:25–16:13

Hamburg to Copenhagen, 17:28–22:13

July 4 — We flew back to London

There are a lot of ways of making your 1-month pass last longer than a month. For example, if you plan on doing the same route I did and you’re flying in from the USA, you could get away with not “starting” your Interrail pass until June 6th, which is when you’d take the train from Paris to Barcelona. You are able to do this because the Eurostar train that you take from London to Paris is not covered with the Interrail Pass. If you arrive to London 3 days before your train to Paris, you’ve already added a whole week of Interrail-free travel to your trip. This way, you can visit Stockholm and/or Oslo after Copenhagen — if you’re doing the same route, that is.