The World’s Oldest Underground Railway

Visiting, near as damn it, every capital city in Europe wasn’t the original task we set ourselves. We were initially just going for extremes of latitude and longitude, and convexity and non duplication of route where feasible, while getting back to base inside 2 weeks, bar a day or two. Capital cities are usually situated at the economic hub of a country, and so the very nature of European political and industrial geography meant that you end up visiting everybody’s principle city almost inevitably. Indeed,  it’s quite impossible to do most of the above while specifically avoiding capitals. The likes of Berlin, Prague, Bratislava and Rome, missing from the initial plan, only cost an extra day in total. Ditching Sicily gave us that back.

Having now renamed the project the disOrient Express, The Steering Committee have been focusing in on each of these cities and each and every one of them has some kind of fixed rail feature of a cyclical nature that we can wind onto our orbital odyssey. It seems that every time we zoom in on a specific city that we are visiting, and working out what might be feasible in the allotted time, we turn up a world class railway gem. This week unearthed an underground funicular tram. I didn’t aim for it, it was just part of a logical route around Istanbul, but it turns out to be the 2nd oldest (and still in use) tube train on the planet.

During our latest phase of investigation of the Balkans, we’ve found out that there are actually 3 underground railways vying for the coveted title of World’s Second Underground Railway after London’s Metropolitan line from Paddington to Farringdon, opened in  1863.

These are

• Atlantic Avenue (Cobble Hill)  tunnel, disused (1844)
• Line 1 – Budapest  (1896)
• Tünel - Istanbul  (1875)

The Atlantic Avenue tunnel in Brooklyn claims to be the worlds oldest urban underground railway. But ultimately it’s just a tunnel, there aren’t any underground stations on it. As such, the tunnel under the streets of Edge Hill in Liverpool, built 15 years earlier by Stephenson in building the worlds first passenger railway between Manchester and Liverpool, blows it away as an urban railway tunnel. The Brooklyn tunnel is a cut and cover (like the circle line in London), so the Guinness Book of records has put it down as the world’s oldest urban tunnel.  Like the Atlantic Avenue tunnel (proper name Cobble Hill), Edge Hill is, thank God, also abandoned, so we wont be needing to divert the route through Liverpool. Everyone on the trip must leave or depart St Pancras on the Metropolitan/Circle line in either direction. You will then have traveled on what was, for over 30 years, the only true underground railway, with stations and signals and all that stuff, in the world. Of course, until electric trains came along in the 1890s, you’d have died of asphyxiation before you got on the train anyway.

The Tünel underground funicular in Istanbul also fails the intermediate station test that Atlantic Avenue suffers from, it’s just a tunnel with a semi-submerged station at either end. But it still beats Budapest by 20 years, and is still in operation.

The Tünel

As such it’s certainly a collectors item to go with the Metropolitan in London and Line 1 in Budapest, all three of which we will traverse.

You’ll also get 2 “heritage” trams in Istanbul (they are new trams but with an antique look, running on new tracks through old routes, and designed primarily for tourists), and two ferries across the sea of Mamara to the iconic eastern railway terminus at Haydrapasa and back. And an unashamedly modern tram over the Galata Bridge.

Haydarpasa Terminus Istanbul

After that circuitous adventure you can retire to wherever you have selected for chilling out in the Cankurtaran budget hotel district. There are scores of places to chose from around there. It’s ideally situated for doing any bazaar, Blue Mosque or Topkapi Palace stuff you might wish to do. I’ll probably give the last two a wide berth. You can get all the long range shots you want on the two ferries. But the bazaar is, in my opinion, a world beater (just don’t go in there with the intention of actually doing any shopping).  With such a range of accommodation options I’m considering leaving it up to the individual, or small groups, as to where you want to hang out. The other 3 stops (Narvik, Berlin and Ljubljana), which are all overnighters, I have ideal solutions for all and which are also as cheap as you could possibly get short of just roughing it.

Early Evening Traversal of the Stara Planina Mountains

On the way to Istanbul from Bucharest on the Bosfor Ekspresi we will be traveling along a delightful section of railway in Bulgaria. Along the way we will pass through the ancient town of Veliko Tournovo, which was the medieval capital of Bulgaria (if I get any more of those I’ll start compiling a list of  used-to-be capitals). We’ll then perform two 360° loops involving tunnels in order to climb up and down the Stara Planina mountain range. The view alas is mainly of the trees as it’s heavily forested. But if you keep your head out of the window you should catch some spectacular views. Theres a lovely write up and photo here http://matthewpbyrne.com/henry/2011/05/28/from-my-window/

How Challenged  Do You Want To Be ?

In order to keep the words “challenge” and “disorient” to the forefront of the project, we’ve obviously been working hard to ensure we have feasible, but not too leisurely, gyratory travel tasks to perform at each stop. Most of these can be omitted if you just don’t fancy it, and in several cases it’s simply not going to be feasible for us to do this en-masse anyway, the trams wont take that many of us at once.  There are almost countless outstanding railways around Europe, it just isn’t possible to fit even half of them into 2 weeks. I spent 8 days once doing just Switzerland flat out (day time running only), and I still missed loads of it.

But if there’s a  peach of a railway within reach, and at no subsequent cost to the schedule, then the temptation to notch off just one more classic route, and the fear that I’ll be lamenting my lack of stamina for decades to come if I don’t,  mean that I will inevitably want to fit it in. One such line is the Transalpina, or Bohinj Railway, in the Julian Alps in Slovenia. It was built to link Vienna directly with Trieste, and has had a colourful history in both world wars. We would end up covering a circle through the mountains and hills of the region and back to Ljubljana. Our published schedule has us arriving at Ljubljana at 20 to 9 in the evening. But we might be able to get there 6 hours earlier. There is a connecting service at Belgrade, it leaves just an hour or so after we are scheduled to arrive on the overnighter from Sofia at the appalling hour of 4 in the flipping morning.  If we can catch this early morning train then we could sit on it through Ljubljana, and on to the northern Slovenian town of Jesenice, arriving at 4pm. From there we can get this most beautiful of railway lines.

The price for all this is that, while it’s all “free” on your InterRail pass, you will be in virtually constant motion from leaving Sofia the previous evening at 8pm, till you land finally at Ljubljana (for a 2nd time, you went straight through it earlier in the day) at 21:45. The castle in Ljubljana and the glass box funicular up to it run till 11 in the evening, so in theory you could still do that under spotlights in a high summer evening, which would be quite spectacular. But the logistics of this will need careful planning, There is a supermarket at Jesenice but it’s a tight change there. There wont be any buffet services on the Transalpina. We will probably need on the ground help to make this work without being unduly unpleasant. And of course, you can always wimp out and jump off in Ljubljana in the afternoon, and that’s assuming we managed to catch this earlier train, and thus lose Belgrade completely, in the first place.

The disOrient Express

The t-shirt think tank have so far come up with this

and also this, which I prefer

The main issue is the steam train we’ve got out of the middle, which couldn’t possibly have ever pulled an orient express as it’s an American locomotive. More appropriate is one of these things

But that isnt going to render too good, and in any case we need something a bit more like this

which is a copyrighted image, but not an idea. So I’m hoping we can take something like this

and stick cylindrical smoke deflectors on it, and a lot more smoke, and Robert Stephenson is in your family tree.

When we’ve got a design that we’re happy with I’ll re-brand the whole thing as disOrient Express (not that Orient Express)

Poland 0 – Germany 2

Warsaw gets dropped for Dresden

I had originally ruled that Germany had not qualified for the tournament on the grounds that they didn’t have an appropriately timed night train out of Berlin and we weren’t prepared to waste a day on them. They then sneaked in on a play-off qualifier when I spotted a night train leaving at 4:30 in the morning which would allow us to add in Warsaw, Prague and Bratislava as well as Berlin, for the cost of one day.

But I’ve discovered that you cant just dive into a sleeper at that time in the morning, it’s reclining seats only. We only had an hour or so in Warsaw with this plan anyway, and would hit Prague at 8pm. Not having a proper kip would mean we would have to be substituted by the time we got to the Czech Republic and the delights of Prague. So we’ve had to send off Warsaw and thus disqualify Poland from the tournament. In return we not only get a proper sleep, we now also score a second goal for Germany in Dresden. We’ll be on the razz in Berlin but you’ve got from whenever you hit the sack till about 8 in the morning before I start screaming “raus!! raus!!” at you. The trian is 8:45 so if you get up just a bit earlier you can have the buffet breakfast most probably at A&O Hostel. When we get to Dresden we’ll have at least half a football match’s worth of time to do a very quick tram to the Old City and score 4 or 5 photo opportunities at the Zwinger Palace and the Frauenkirche. After that we get a local train and get to to ride the Lößnitzgrundbahn  preserved steam railway that’s just outside the city.

Tor! Tor! Tor!

Prague Upgraded

The plan now gets us to Prague for 5:30pm, with enough time and energy to really do this great city some justice till our departure at midnight. We’ll be grabbing something substantial to eat then  downing a litre or so of this great brewing country’s finest at the famous U Černého vola (Black Ox pub). We’ll be catching the lanovka funicular tram, walking across Karluv Most (Charles Bridge), then hitting the hour at the Astronomical Clock. We’ll probably have to rent a room to drop the bags, unless the reports that the statioin has been fixed up and the left luggage facilities aren’t tantamount to handing your bags over to the nearest Gypsy,  but we’ve located some hotel virtually on the platform if need be.

Budapest

We’ve fine tuned this one, but it’s going to at least feel like continuous motion. That’s the whole idea about when you get off the train. Sitting around and recovering from the train trip just isnt on the menu. The excursions we’ve got are all flexible, you can just wimp out completely and do your own thing if you feel like it, but you’ll be missing out and I’ll treat you with utter contempt for the rest of the trip. The idea is to get back on the train semi-buggered so you can enjoy your sleeper compartment to the full, you’re going to spending enough time in there as it is.

More Sofia, possibly almost no Belgrade, and if so then lots of Ljubljana

We have extended the trip back up through Bulgaria and Serbia as the connection was too dodgey at Belgrade with a mere 2 hours spare. We now get off the train at Sofia and spend an afternoon there before getting an overnight to Belgrade. we are due, on the basis everything is really late, on the 10:00 train to Ljubljana which gets in at 20:39. But this train into Belgrade is due in 4 in the morning, ouch!. My accomplice has noticed that there is a train just an hour after we get into Belgrade, so if we were on time we can get that and be in Ljubljana for 2:30. Otherwise if we are late at least we don’t have to wait a full 6 hours at crack of dawn for the next train at 10:00.

If we do make it to Ljubljana early then we will do this David Blaine inspired funicular and the customary medieval castle they build at the top of all these things to justify such a silly railway ride.

Barcelona

Mount Tibidabo is host to; two funicular railways, an amusement park with several hair raising roller coasters, a dirty great big tower (the Torre de Collserola, designed by Norman Foster no less)  that you can get a lift up the outside of the building of, and a cathedral that’s actually finished!, windows, all the catholic stuff, the lot.

A dirty great tower with a glass lift on the outside

The options are stuff we’ve probably all done before, i.e. that bloody building site of a cathedral, or the park, yet again. I cant handle either of those. So we wont be having a vote. It’s 25 euros for unlimited rides in the amusement park. And I think another 6 to go up or down the blue tram and funicular. The rest will be on the metro pass, at 9,25 euro sheckles.

[It’s circular and it’s on tracks, what more could you want ?

Paris

As a result of working out where we can or cant be on certain days of the week, we’ve ended up with a Sunday departure, arrive back on Monday. That means we cant do the D’Orsay museum as it’s closed that day. We are probably going to do a circle of lines 2 and 6, which takes as straight past the large vertical iron structure on the banks of the river, and then onto the Montmartre funicular and we’ll hang out with the bohemians for a few hours before the last lap home. On the way we’ll pop off for a swifty here at the glamorous Le Train Blue cafe in Gare du Lyon

Le Train Bleu

Narvik

We were due to get off the train at the head of the fjord to Bodø at a place called Fauske in order to get on a 5 hour arse breaking coach trip to Narvik, and as a side effect would have missed the best part of the route.

Or, for an extra 20 quid, we can complete the railroad all the way to Bodø. We then have 2 hours in Bodø to get supplies, and then a plane taking 45 minutes, and be in Narvik in time to enjoy our evening in the arctic circle in mid summer.

Booking

The Laird has located Ffestiniog Travels, who actually might be able to do the whole blinkin’ shooting match, including the Balkans, and get me off the issue of having to bank everyone. We should all be able to just fire off round about a grand in the direction of Ruth and we’ll all get tickets in the post. There might be an issue with getting the 10% off for eurostar for a group, but it’s only going to work out at a tenner, I would have had to charge everyone that for banking and booking everything just for the flipping hassle. That just leaves the 4 hostel stops, Narvik,  Berlin,  Istanbul and Ljubljana, to stump deposit for (the campsite in Narvik for instance wants full payment a month at least in advance), that lot would come to barely a hundred each anyway.

The Railway Children of Budapest

The Gyermekvasút – A Railway Run By Children

Regular travelers on Network SouthEast my claim that they use one of these every day, but in Budapest thy really do have a railway that is run by children. The signal men, ticket sales people, platform controllers and ticket inspectors are all girls and boys from what was once the Pioneers, which was basically the pre-adolecent form of the Young Communist League. There were dozens of these railways throughout the USSR and communist eastern Europe. The trains are driven by adults, and there’s a bloke stood behind the signaling people just to make sure we don’t have an unfortunate collision, but I think the grown ups keep as low a profile as possible. (actually there’s one to one supervision, and as such it’s painfully expensive to run, so lets hope it doesn’t get shut before we get there). After the wall came down the railway got renamed “The Children’s Railway”. The 76cm gauge track winds it way a full 11 kilometers though park land on the Buda side of this double city.

On our journey to Szechenyi-hegy station at the start of the Children’s Railway, the lucky participants in our extraordinary expedition will travel up the Castle Hill Funicular Railway.

The Siklo

glance at the groovy castle

grab a #18 then a #56 tram on the other side and then catch the Fogaskereku funicular tram, hereby knows as The Cog Railway, then we will have our very own carriage to take us down the Children’s Railway.

The Cog Railway

A UNESCO World Heritage Underground Railway

After clocking off these three excellent railway attractions, not to mention a panoramic view of the city, you’d have thought the Hungarians had more than done their bit for the day to sate the rail mental members of the gang, but there’s more!. We will then make our way back across the Danube, known in these parts as the Duna, and take Line 1 to Hösök Tere station. The whole of Line 1, or the Földalatti, is a world heritage site. I’ve lost count of how many of these we’re going to be visiting, or in many cases traveling through or on. This one is the second oldest underground railway on the planet, after London. (Actually I’m still trying to work out how we fit Line 1 in, but we’ll do it somehow)

We’ll then make our way to the Central Market in order to procure 36 hours worth of provisions for the trip down to Istanbul. We’ll have a detailed shopping list ready for the exercise, which will include numerous cured meats, not least the infamous fire sausage, a range of condiments, including pickled water melon!, lashings of ginger beer which is a local specialty, and equipping ourselves with several crates of Hungary’s excellent wines, not least plenty of Tokaj at what will surely be bargain prices compared with what you have to pay for the stuff at home, and quite a few bottles of plum brandies. As such, we’ve got a minor logistical conundrum to solve on how (assuming about 15 of us) we get about 3 dozen bottles of plonk and hooch, a dozen or so loaves of bread, a good 10 kilos of meats and stuff, a few packs of butter, some fruit for breakfast, and ginger beers for everyone, the few kilometers back to the station. I am loathed to cab it, and we’ll certainly deposit the bulk of our luggage at or near the station for the day, possibly at the appropriately named Locomotive Hostel. (worth clicking on just for the sound effects) We are going to look quite a sight carrying that amount of groceries onto a tram. I’m perhaps going to have to stipulate “one Tesco’s Big Green Bag” as part of the expedition kit list.

Nagycsarnok – The Great Market Hall

The run down to Istanbul on the Ister Express, which is certain to certainly not have anything worth consuming on board, will take us via the Carpathian Mountains of Romania. We should hit Brasov at day break and be able to enjoy the morning sunlight as we travel through Sinea. We don’t have a plan for Bucharest, and frankly I’ll be delighted if we get there inside the 2 hour time gap we’ve got between our scheduled arrival and the departure of the Bosfor Ekspresi, which joins up with the Balkan Ekspresi somewhere in Bulgaria before heading down to the most Easterly point of our journey. If we do arrive in time then we might hire a squadron of taxis to take us the mile of so to Ceausescu’s Palace, which apart from being the rather crass name of a Las Vegas casino is of course now the Romanian parliamentary building. Well they couldn’t really pull it down after the effort that the entire nation had to put into building the monstrosity, or could they ?

I do have a good Romanian contact, so we may be able to arrange to be restocked with plum brandy at this point.

In the next edition, Warsaw gets snubbed, in return for a visit to a steam railway in Dresden, and extra time in Prague and at least a few hours sleep in Berlin.

Sicily Gets The Boot

The steering committee have regrettably had to veer away from Syracuse and curtail our Italian adventure at Rome. Unfortunate though this is, as it means we now can’t boast the most southerly extreme of the European railway network, and we loose a total of 1,700 km of, albeit duplicated, track, the reasons for taking this drastic action are numerous.

1. We couldn’t reliably get back to Milan in time to get the latest connection possible to catch the train over the Bernina Pass and still make it round to Geneva. i.e it would have cost us yet another day.

2. Even if we’d taken the gamble, we wouldn’t have had enough time to see this without probably losing someone somewhere between the racetrack and the stadium.

3. And we wouldn’t have been able to do this without being all stressed out about catching the train from Trieste.

4. and giving us enough time to see this without being in a state of panic

5. or have enough time for the obligatory, shockingly over priced, coffee here

6. nor would we have been able to get one of these over the highest rail traversable mountain pass in Europe, which we’ve just discovered you can catch across the Bernina (softies who wimp out and sulk back to the normal carriages wont be permitted to indulge in the quality grappa we’ll be collecting in the morning)

7. or be able to spend an hour here

8. or have enough time to have a leisurely breakfast while admiring this

9. or have a good 2 hours in order to cover the few hundred meters from the station to the lake side to see this

10. By scrubbing Sicily we get the day back we lost when we found out that we could do Berlin, Warsaw, Prague and Bratislava for the cost of an extra 24 hours. So we are matching the GCIRC timescale and minimizing the amount of grief we’ll get from wives, children and bosses, or whoever else you have to answer to.

So, apart from making days 12 and 13 super spectacular (not to mention nutritious), whether you get all worked up at Alpine feats of railway engineering or not,  the expedition is going to have to make do with 22 capital cities (Bern is a drive through, Geneva is the Swiss substitute,  and Zagreb is a 20 minute stop off where I am reliably informed you can get a track-side beverage. Everything else has plenty of time for at least a pint and a photograph of yourself standing in front of the most touristy thing on offer). Plus Venice, Barca, a full day in Istanbul, a night of 24 hour sunlight in the Arctic Circle,  and we still have the most westerly point in the whole of Europe. Oh, and an hour in the both beautiful and glitzy St Moritz.

The Bucharest Connection
So after discarding the highly dubious transfer in Bologna, and another in Milan, and spacing out Venice, Rome and the whole day in the Alps,  the only squeaky bit left was the swap from the Ister Express from Budapest, to the Bosfor Ekspresi to Istanbul, at Bucuresti Nord.

The joyful news just in is that our prayers to the railway timetabling deities of the Balkans have been answered. The 2012 schedule now shows a full 2 hours between the two, so enough time to scoff a few mitch with your bere, and with luck receive the supply drop that I hope to arrange. I’m working on getting pre-arranged picnic solutions wherever possible. We’ve pitiful enough time as it is without fumbling about in supermarkets and bazaars.

£35 for the Eurostar to Brussels
The best price you’ll get for this on your own is £39, and to get that you’ll have to avoid peak days and peak trains and still book it 3 months in advance. Well with our mobile riot on tracks you get to beat even that, and I’m told we should still be able to get ourselves on the civilized 10:57 out of St Pancras. Of course we’ll be booking it well before you’d be able to do this as an individual anyway, they’ll take group orders a full 10 months in advance!.

The official GCERC forum thread has now been established
We have also finally located where all the black belt rail nerds hang out. It’s in here
RailUKforums – The Great Circular European Railway Challenge
I don’t know how the heck I missed this during GCIRC, I thought I’d signed up to every conceivable travel and rail fans forum on the entire Internet. This place isn’t for the squeamish, but if you want to get all rail techno then you’ll find kindred spirits in here, and the Laird and I are able to fine tune the plan, and chit chat with people who have done enough rail mileage to get to wherever Voyager I is right now, and back again,

I am now infuriatingly smug, not just because we have nailed at least phase 1 of the planning process (there’s plenty more work to come), But also because I am about to take my tribe away from this dark, cold, wet little island of ours and spend the yuletide in Bali and on an idyllic island off the coast of Sumatra. So you wont be getting any more of this nonsense till at least after mi birthday.

Merry Christmas!

Let’s Go Pontinental

Fred said “Book Early!”, and who’d want to argue with that face.

Fred gives the GCERC the thumbs up

click for closer view

Alas, calling up a commission based travel operative and asking for a quote will get a standard “come back in 3 months, we cant book summer 2012 yet”. When I tell them it’s 2013!, not 2012, they don’t even bother replying. I’ve been toiling through the bible on all these matters, our Man in Seat 61, and we’re looking at at least 4 operators, one for Scandinavia (either the Swedish or the Norwegians), one for lower Balkans (a bloke in Turkey), one for Swiss (the Swiss), one for Trenhotel, and then one of them to do everything else, or yet another one. With potentially £30,000 worth of business to offer you’d like to think it wouldn’t be this hard, but I guess everyone isn’t looking much further than next month’s renumeration in the current climate.

Mission Creep
We’ve noticed that the trains to Syracuse and back have vanished from the timetable. Seat61 thinks it’s just TrenItalia being behind on their IT, but it caused me to look more closely at Berlin and Prague. With the extra day we’d get back from turning back at Rome, I’ve worked out that we can hit Berlin at 11 pm, have a night on the tiles and then dump ourselves on a sleeper at 04:30 to Warsaw and get 6 hours kip on that. We can then get back down to Prague in time for a good sample of my all time favourite lager in Velkopopovicky,  and do the oblig photo shoot in Wenceslas Square, then catch a midnight sleeper to Vienna, and actually have more flexibility to handle the suspicious Bucharest connection. If the Sicily train re-appears we’ve now a tough call to make. We now have a train journey that only Europe, home of the railway, could possibly offer. 22 countries, 21 capitals, only 2 of which you don’t get to sit in a bar and raise a glass to, plus Istanbul, Venice, Sicily, Barcelona, the Arctic Circle and the Bernina, clocking up close on 20,000 km, is now looking at leave Friday 11 am, get back 2 weeks on Sunday at 9:30pm.

STOP PRESS: I’ve just realised the new early arrival in Vienna means we can do Bratislava, so make that 23 countries, 22 capitals (+Istanbul), etc etc. the route is now officially over 20,000km, or 12 ½ thousand miles.

Why Why Why Bernina ?
The whole of the trip is on standard gauge, with one exception. Instead of diving into the Simplon tunnel and bee-lining for Geneva,  I’ve insisted on twisting the agenda so that we do this particular route amongst so many of Switzerland’s mind boggling examples of narrow gauge railway engineering. The original reason was that it doesn’t cost any time. If you are in northern Italy come lunch time and heading west then you will end up on the same train as we get to Barca, or spending the wee hours on a railway platform. But this train really is a world beater and deserves including in any itinerary.
For some reason, when you surf for “greatest railway journeys” the Bernina Express rarely seems to make it onto people’s top 10, the Glacier Express usually gets the nod over it for a Swiss contribution. Well, I’ve done both,  and jaw dropping  though the Glacier’ is, the Bernina’ beats it hands down in my opinion. It actually runs higher than the Oberalp that the Glacier Express traverses, indeed it’s higher than Ghum, the highest point on Indian trains. The view of the glaciers at the top of Bernina are perhaps the best you will get from any train window, anywhere. But for me it’s the second section, between St. Moritz and the Rhine valley at Chur, that really takes the biscuit. The snippet of map that Mr Pontin is pontin at gives you an idea. there are 4 full 360° corkscrews on the route, add that to the Brusio circular viaduct, and seemingly endless stuff like this

and you have a journey that is guaranteed to satisfy even the most ardent railway sceptic.  The whole route is actually a UN world heritage site. Sometimes that doesnt seem to count for what it should, but every inch of this railway is worth the title.

The Jungfraujoch also usually gets a mention, and that is undoubtedly the most ridiculous piece of railway engineering of the 19th century. If you’ve got a few more days more and really want to do the ultimate-ultimate trip, then work that one in, and the Semmering Railway in Austria which I would have done if I could have sneaked it in without anyone noticing, and you’ll take some beating.

Comparisons with the Trans-Siberian
As you all know, I’ve got a complex about not being a real globe-trotting railway fan cos I’ve never done the Trans-Sib. So here are some comparison figures, to go with the 21 capital cities, heaps of world heritage sites (we drive through at least 6), and 360° of Europe’s spectacular culture.

	Moscow-Vladivostok	GCERC
Number of trains	1	42, plus 2 buses, several boats, and a few necessary trams, and a few more
Mileage	5785	11250 (aprox)
Duration	6 days	15 days + 10 hours
Average Speed	40mph	53mph (30mph inc stop offs) I was expecting much higher than that though sleepers do tend to dawdle about
Cost	£708 (plus extras)	£1,500 (all in)
Cost per day	£118	£91

I know which one I’d rather do.

It’s All In The Detail

The technical department have completed a second pass of the route and have come up with the following  report. I am now on the hunt for agents who can handle at least parts of this. The hardest portion to book is probably the Balkan section south of Belgrade and Budapest. No one so far has offered to work that bit out for us.  Most people, well actually everyone I’ve found so far, just bought their ticket face to face in Istanbul for the run back up. This is a classic problem with our group size. If we try and wing it we are certain to end up with some of us on the floor, or at the very least wasting time farting about in booking offices when we could be saluting the local brewery. It’s all part of the mad group size takes on mad railway challenge, challenge.  I’m going to go through each of the national carriers and train operators and see what they can offer, but I need to cut that down to a handful else it will get too complicated to manage. The Scando section and these Trenhotel folks in the west both probably need dealing with directly. We should get a free ticket on some things (not passes it seems) for the group booking if we’re over 10 which I think we easily will be, which I will naturally pass on and expect alcohol in return.

A Few Corrections and Clarifications

Amsterdam is the capital of the Netherlands, Den Haag is the capital of south Netherlands. The total country count is now 20; UK, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal. We travel through 18 of the capitals of those (Germany and Turkey the exceptions). Only Bern and Zagreb do we not change trains, but I’ll be jumping on and off the platform at both.  This is subject to the Bucharest link, at 52 minutes a nail-bitingly tight connection for that part of the world, being tested against known arrival times.

The Narvik to Kiruna railway line is alas not the northernmost passenger railway in the world, or Europe for that matter. That honour belongs to the Murman Railway that runs to Murmansk, and indeed the Murmansk-Nikel Railway, which actually runs north-west from Murmansk up to the Norwegian border, and I’m told it does run passenger trains (they arent listed though, there’s another Nikel in the Urals just to confuse matters).  Nikel, as it’s name suggests, exists for the production of smelted nickel. It is an environmental disaster due to massive amounts of sulphur dioxide pollution. So instead of witnessing the worst horrors of Soviet industrialisation, we’ll be spending the day riding up a Norwegian fjord (which has no accompanying road from what I can see),  then along the shores of the massive lake Torneträsk, and through numerous national parks. If you ever fancy it, it takes 3 and a half days to get from Moscow to Murmansk and back.

The only ecologically acceptable railway north of the Kiruna line

Contrary to the disinformation I received from a certain Cockney Bob, Cascais railway station is 25 miles further west than Cabo de San Vicente of the Algarve.  As such it is easily the the furthest point west on the European railway map. It is less than 4 miles by longitude from  the westernmost point of mainland Europe  which is at Cabo de Roca http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabo_da_Roca . It’s 10 miles / half an hour in a cab from the station to the cape.

The southern most point of the connected European railway is not in Sicily, it’s in Greece, at Kalamata. But the Greeks, as you may know, have rather inconveniently become insolvent, and so the much raved about “Friendship Train” sleeper between Istanbul and Athens (which would have doubtless been jam packed with bandanna clad Americans) , and indeed the overnight train from Athens up to Sofia, have been canceled till further notice. It would have taken several days to do on the painfully slow Greek trains that are still running. Kalamata is off a branch line which in turn is off a branch line. And catching a ferry to Brindisi/Bari would also take longer than riding the train all the way round.

So you get Sicily instead, including a roll-on-roll-off passenger train ferry across the Straights of Messina (which I would argue makes it as good as part of the network) , and the length of Italy twice, i.e. Trieste to Milan and The Alps via Venice, Rome and Sicily, in 36 hours. Syracuse is almost exactly the same latitude as Kalamata, and is easily the most southerly principle station in Europe.  Pozzallo is indeed the most southerly railway station of any kind in Europe by a good 20 miles over Kalamata, but you’ll have to come back to Syracuse on a bus.

The Belgrade link of 2 hours has failed to meet tolerance requirements. It’s late as a matter of course by several hours according to the traffic controller in Belgrade. The ramifications of that are that we are going to have to spend another day at it, so 15 nights. In return we get to spend 8 hours in Sofia (minus a probable delay of least 1 hour), a further few hours from sometime after 4 in the morning plus delay till 10am in Belgrade, and then a second night off the train in Ljubljana (the other being in the Arctic Circle at Narvik of course). Just 300m from the station is this palace called  Celica http://www.hostelcelica.com/, which is an ex-prison. So as near to a 4 berth sleeper compartment as you could get.

Duplicated track is down to the following;

1. St Pancras to Calais. I dont propose that I or anyone else gets off at Ashford for fix that in any way.

2. I thought the whole Malmo to Hamburg run would be same same. But no, our sleeper out of Amsterdam not only goes south to Cologne, but then goes the long way through Denmark via Odense. So it’s only just before Copenhagen to just after Malmo that is duplicated. And even if there was another efficient way across, which there aint, the Øresund Bridge and tunnel  is worth traversing at least twice.

3. Istanbul to Dimitrovgrad in Haskovo, Bulgaria, which is where the Bucharest line meets the Sofia line. (note that there are, at least, two Dimitovrgrads in Bulgaria, and the other one is the railway border crossing with Serbia, it’s very confusing).

These first 3 are essentially unavoidable.

4. Bologna to Syracuse (and Pozzallo if you can be arsed).  This adds up to a huge amount of duplication. Technically I think that as our sleeper on the way back up wont be on the high speed route, then Rome to Bologna will be slightly different as the two routes are a few miles apart. It is quite possible to ride all the way down the east coast of Italy on a night train from Venice to Bari, and then long the instep of Italy via Catanzaro and reduce duplicated track down to just from Lamezia, just above the upper side of it’s toes, to Sicily. But it would be yet another day on top of the 2 1/2 that Italy has got already. If we had the time it would be a great way to do it though.

5. If the Bucharest connection fails it’s review, then we’ll have a whopping lump from Belgrade to Istanbul and back, but the schedule would remain intact. The route through Romania takes us through Brasov and the Carpathian Mountains, so apart from the extra capital, and less duplication, there’s geographical and pictorial interest. The news so far is good, but I want the station master at Bucuresti Nord to tell me “it’s never more than 30 mins late”.  If we did go for it and it failed, we’d be able to get to Sofia, but it would be a real bummer to lose Istanbul.