European Trains: food, views and reflections

One of the highlights of our trip to Europe was the train travel, especially travelling through the Swiss Alps.  It wasn't easy to take photos out a train window but Sylvia and I gave it a red hot go!  The scenery was amazing, the stations were beautiful and it was fun to buy food on each stop.

I originally planned we would fly from Rome to the UK but most flights were not direct or cheap.  It made train travel with a Eurail pass much preferable and so much more relaxing.  

10 reasons trains are preferable to planes:

1. Train companies don't send constant promotions to pay for extras such as premium seats or extra checked in luggage that you had never considered and certainly don't need but feel FOMO if you don't pay for it.
   
2. Not having to pack luggage with decisions on what to take on-board and what to check-in because you will never have to queue for a train with stewards threatening that if someone doesn't volunteer to check-in their carry-on bags that the stewards will randomly check-in people's carry on luggage.
   
3. Your luggage does not have to be weighed or screened so you feel shamed at forgetting you have accidentally put your favourite swiss army knife in check-in and have it confiscated.
   
4. No one tells you to empty water bottles and take your shoes off as you go through security trying to remember not to make jokes that would make them angry and decide to strip search you.
   
5. Gorgeous historic train stations are such a joy to walk through. Airports are so modern and ugly and so ridiculously big.  Taking a bus from one terminal of Heathrow to another takes forever.
6. Bigger windows and better views on the trains.  You actually see the landscape and buildings in the countries you pass through.  Even the people change as the trains disembark and pick up passengers.
   
7. No waiting at baggage carousels and seeing your luggage pass you by before you can reach it and then having to watch the conveyor belt meandering around the circuit again before your luggage returns.
   
8. Less money and time on travel to and from the train stations because they are far more central than airports.  You are far less likely to be ripped off by a dodgy taxi driver.
   
9. None of the take off palaver of checking your seatbelt is done up, your seat is in the upright position, your tray is folded up, luggage is stored in the overhead locker or under the seat in front and watching bored air stewards doing the safety demonstration, and then wondering what to do with the pillows and blankets that are taking up previous space around your seat.
10. Trains don't feel as cramped as planes.  You are given pillows and blankets that are great if you need them but take up space when you don't.  Meals are fraught when the passenger in front decides it's time to move their seat back into recline position.  And after the meal you are left with a mess of bags, boxes and cups while you wait for the air stewards to collect them because there are no bins. 
    
    

The first train station I visited was Edinburgh Waverley Station when I took the train to Longniddry to visit my friend when a couple of days after our international flight arrived.  I just noticed that this was the only train trip on which I was greeted by a familiar face, laughing as we made our way from opposite end of the platform towards each other after a long absence!  Above is one of the Walter Scott quotes that adorn the station that was named after one of his novels.  The Scots claim that Waverley is the only rail station in the world to be named after a work of literature.  One more reason to love Edinburgh.

 

I purchased 4 days in a month Eurail passes that started when we left Rome for Zurich.  (It would have been to Venice the days before if I hadn't double booked our accommodation but that is another story.  Thank goodness it wasn't too hard to rebook our Eurail tickets.)  When we flew from Edinburgh to Rome on Ryan Air, the only airline doing direct flights, we only took one piece of check-in luggage between us.  My sister-in-law kindly minded the biggest suitcase at her house in Edinburgh. We also each had two small pieces of carry-on luggage on the plane.  This is a photo of the cases we wheeled along but we also  each carried a backpack.  The purple suitcase only had two wheels and the grey bag had no wheels.  If I do this trip again, I want more luggage with four wheels.  The brown bag is one we picked up in our travels and Sylvia used to pack souvenirs.

The first trip on our Eurail pass was from Rome to Zurich via Milan.  The day before we left I went to Roma Termini Station where we would start our journey because it was one of the nearest places to find an English language bookshop section.  (I bought Kate Atkinson's Big Sky.  I love everything she writes!)  I took the chance to check out where we needed to go to catch our train.  It helped on the day we left but I still got confused when we arrived with all our cases.  The photo above is from the McDonalds where Sylvia stopped to get her last panzerotti and I got a boring tomato and cheese sandwich.

We were accosted by a strange old man who didn't speak English but seemed to want to help us without being requested.  He tried to make us take the escalator but when we decided to take the lift came with us, muttering grumpily.  Then we got to the wrong floor and had to take the escalator back, which Sylvia did not like with all the cases.  He got tired of our ways and left.  But when we went down the escalator we turned a corner and found the platforms we needed.  I could not work out if the guy was an escaped lunatic or a good fairy.

This is the carriage where we sat in opposite seats from Rome to Milan.  The tables were good for using my laptop but the wifi was not great.  We found that trains varied in the services.  Some had good charging points but not good wifi and some vice versa.  Portable chargers were important for using digital devices on our days where we had long journeys of 6-8 hours.

After about 4 hours travel we stopped in Milan in time for lunch.  A little time to see the city would have been great but I wanted to get to Zurich before dark because the views sounded too good to miss at night.  Sylvia made a beeline for the Venchi shop that sold gelato and chocolate.  She loved having gelato most days in Rome and wanted to make the most of it before leaving Italy.  She had a strawberry gelato.

 

 

I was more interested in the buildings of the Milano Centrale Station.  While Sylvia ate her ice cream and minded the luggage, I had enough time to go out into the main hall to admire the architecture of the high arched ceilings, large skylights and artworks over doorways.  We also enjoyed browsing the souvenirs.

We had also bought some lunch at La Focacceria.  Sylvia loved her Fuze peach and rose iced tea - her best iced tea ever - but was not so impressed with her cheese flatbread which was soggy after sitting in the paper bag too long.  I hit the jackpot with an amazing green burger patty, cheese, lettuce and salsa in a soft focaccia.  For my drink I had a lovely Lurisia La Nostra Aranciati, which was a fizzy orange juice drink.  It seems great to get different drinks while travelling and then disappointing to find that Fuze and Lurisia are owned by Coco Cola! We also got Fonzies to snack on and some cough lollies for my cough because my asthma had been bothering me.

The train from Milan to Zurich was quite new and clean.  While I liked our carriage I was a little jealous to walk through the train to the restaurant car (for a Lindt ball each) and see the children's carriage with lots of fun images and play space.  

The oddest moment on the train was - I think - soon after we crossed the Italian-Swiss border.  Some police came on board with a large german shepherd dog on a leash who was sniffing everyone's luggage.  I have read that though there are no passport checks, certain goods should be declared.  They stopped and talked to a woman behind us for a while but in Italian or German so I did not understand.  I expected they to frogmarch her off the train but it ended quite amicably.

 

The highlight of travelling by train from Milan to Zurich was outside not inside the train. When we first saw the mountains there was no snow.  We had just had a mild week in Rome where temperatures were too warm (about 15 C) for the coat I had purchased in Edinburgh.  So I was not expecting too much snow.  Even without snow the mountains were stunning as well little towns located in the small livable space between mountain and lake.

 

Finally we began to see more mountains, some snow and signs of roads and infrastructure around us.  I did not read about the Gotthard Base Tunnel until I came home.  It tunnels under the Alps to save time.  Given that we took the fastest train possibly, I am pretty sure we went through it.  I would have thought I would remember being in the longest rail tunnel in the world (57km).  It was some consolation to read that it opened in June 2016.  That means that last time we were in this part of the world, it had not yet been opened. Also it only took 20 minutes for the train to travel 57km through the tunnel.  Wow!  I remember lots of tunnels so I guess this was one of them.

 

One of the really impressive sights from the train were the little towns nestled in the gaps between mountains.  Such a beautiful sight with snow capped mountains looming over them.  It felt like Heidi and Clara might have lived in one of them.

 

The dappled snow on the peaked mountains made for stunning scenery that was constantly changing as the train flew through the Swiss Alps.  Amazingly we even had sunshine and blue skies.  We could not ask for more.

 

We also passed a lot of lakes which reflected the mountains.  Unfortunately the photos often also included my reflection in the window, or worse the train lighting especially in the late afternoon.  

 

We arrived at Zurich Hauptbahnhof at 5.27pm, over eight hours since we had left Rome at 8.50am that morning.  It was getting dark so we bought some pretzels and took our suitcases out into the city to find our apartment in Zurich.

 

 

 

Two days later we were back at the Zurich Hauptbahnhof to travel to London, via Paris.  This photo is taken after we had a quick visit to McDonalds because Sylvia wanted to try their egg and cheese muffin because they weren't doing breakfast when we were there before our 9.34am train left.  (huh?)  I loved the fountain outside the station as well as the grand old station.

 

 

 

Inside the station the entrance hall was fairly empty but there many many people once we were on the concourse by the platforms.  This was where the shops were.  We returned to the pretzel place, taking it in turns to mind the cases while the other went into a shop. 

 

 

 

This was our train.  Sylvia took the photo and texted it to her dad back in Melbourne who told her it was a  famous train.  The TGV is the French high speed rail network initiated in the 1960 and opened in 1981.  the TGV Lyria is the high speed train network between France and Switzerland.  It is now also referred to as Eurocity but the historic TGV brand still signifies impressive technological breakthroughs.

 

These trains were really long and train travel involved a lot of walking down long platforms looking for our coach number on each carriage.  Not as much walking as in an airport but it still seemed considerable.  Finding the seat numbers in our carriage was not so difficult.

 

 

 

Here is some of our food from Zurich: McDonalds fries, pretzels and a tub of pasta salad that did not live up to its promise.  I had the Pelligrino sparking water.  Sylvia also had the Ramseier apple juice, a Swiss brand she was already familiar with.  She found the McDonalds fries were meh but told me that their apple pie had a nice warm gooey sweet filling (her response to my memory of my parents telling me that the apple pies tasted like cardboard after their first visit to a McDonalds restaurant).

 

 

 

Travelling high speed through Switzerland and France was lovely.  The scenery was not as dramatic as the Alps but had a gentle charm.  The rural landscapes were broken up by pretty French villages with older buildings clustered around an ancient stone church.  When we stopped in Dijon for passengers to disembark and hop on, all I could think was mustard!. It was not easy to get photos to reflect the countryside.  Possibly I had used most of my photo energy on the Alps.

 

 

 

We arrived at Paris Gare de Lyon and found that the 1 hour 34 minutes allocated in our ticket to board the Eurostar to London was very little time.  It took ages to grab some food, take a local RER train to Paris Gare du Nord, queue for baggage screening, then passport control and drag our luggage along the seemingly never ending routes between platforms.  Sadly, it was enough time for me to baffle a local with my poor schoolgirl French when asking directions.  Sigh!  It was terrible to hurry through the entrance hall of Gare du Nord (above photo) and glimpse the gorgeous Parisian buildings outside and not even have time to dash out onto the street and admire them.  Not even time to stop and admire the historic stations.  Of course I would have loved to have more time between trains but I didn't want to arrive in London too late.

 

It was just as well that we stopped at a bakery soon after arriving at Gare de Lyon to buy some pain au chocolat and a tub of fruit salad.  Once we got on the Eurostar we were very glad of the pain au chocolat.  Sylvia enjoyed the apple in the fruit salad and left me the pineapple.  I don't know what they did to that poor pineapple but it was so awful I spat it back into the tub and was left pining for fruit (no pun intended).

We got on the Eurostar in such a rush that I felt disorganised in the cramped seats.  It was far less space than the other trains we had taken with the seats in front of us feeling very close after previous seats were opposite each other.  

 

My other experience of the Eurostar was when I first went to Europe almost 30 years ago and missed the bus to the ferry from France to the UK.  I took the Eurostar instead and I was back in London that I would have been if I had caught that bus.  I have such fond memories of that trip.  Not like this more recent trip!

 

 

This was the view of London's St Pancras railway station when we arrived.  I loved this statue, The Meeting Place by Paul Day, that evokes the romance of meeting at train stations, especially in wartime.  St Pancreas is a beautiful historic train station that I would have loved to have time to explore.  Instead we headed for a drink at Blank Street Coffee.  Sylvia was very impressed with her matcha blueberry latte and I was happy to have a kombucha.  

 

Then we had to walk the maze of connections between St Pancras Station and Kings Cross Station where we had to make sense of how to get tickets to the tube because last time I was in London it was all paper tickets and now it is mostly digital.  Then we took the tube to our hotel in Kensington, going the long way around the Circle Line to avoid changing trains with all our luggage.  

 

We were unable to avoid dragging heavy luggage up the stairs at High Street Kensington Underground Station near out hotel or arriving on a dark rainy evening.  A stranger directed us to an alternative route to the hotel that had more cover from the rain which we followed but were on the lookout for attacks as it seemed such an odd thing to tell us when we had not even asked for directions.  We were very glad to arrive at our hotel and rest at 6.30pm after we had left Zurich by train at 9.30am that morning.

When you see even my hasty photo of St Pancras Station behind this small food market in the courtyard linking St Pancras and Kings Cross stations, it is clear why this wonderful 1976 article calls it 'St Pancras - cathedral of Britain's railway stations.'  We were here about a week after arriving.  It was time to return to Edinburgh on the route of the famous Flying Scotsman train.

I was pretty excited to see this food market with so much delicious baked goods.  I told Sylvia to stay with the cases while I quickly bought some food.  That's my story.  Hers is that she did not know where I was going.  So she left my small suitcase and found me as I was paying.  I panicked as I realised that my case with our passports, my laptop and medications was left unattended.  And we were already running late.  I had visions of my case being stolen by unscrupulous thieves or exploded by the bomb squad.  I ran back to it and was so relieved it was still there.  Then I went back to Sylvia and to pick up the baked goods I had paid for.  As I chatted to the salesperson she said never ever ever leave luggage unattended here! 

 

This is the only photo I have of the interior of the St Pancras station as we left.  I was stressed and worried about running late after having to ask directions to our platform.  We got onto the train just on time.  It was almost empty.  I did not like our seats so we found some vacant ones that were opposite each other.  The train then sat there another 15 minutes while lots of people came onto the train.  Grrrrrrrr!

 

 

Despite all the hustle and bustle of getting to our train, we had some very nice food for the journey.  The cheese sticks were excellent.  Sylvia was very pleased with a a biscoff doughnut.  I loved my large chewy gooey chocolate hazelnut cookie.  The cheese jalepeno cornbread muffin was disappointingly dry.  The loaf of bread was for our Edinburgh apartment.  I looked forward to having a kitchen after a week in a hotel. We also took the oreo cookie and the cheese and onion samosa to the apartment.

The train to Edinburgh is one I have taken many times before.  It is familiar in a comforting way.  And it was lovely to see this part of the British countryside again that I had not seen for many years.  

 

It never ceases to amaze me how different new British houses look compared to new Australian houses.  They always bring to mind the song Little Boxes that says "they are all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same".  (Note: I always thought this was a British song and surprised to find it was written by American singer-songwriter Malvina Reynolds.)

 

Old farm buildings in the midst of the green fields on an overcast day is so wonderfully British.

The reflection of this bridge in Newcastle was lovely.  We also saw Newcastle's famous Tyne Bridge that looks so like the Sydney Harbour Bridge.  But as I said earlier, it was far easier to spot a great sight than to photograph it from the train window.  I also love seeing the impressive Angel of the North artwork near Newcastle.

 

My final train journey was a day trip to Glasgow.  I took this photo of this cute little train shaped planter on one of the stations we passed while outward bound.

 

Finally I returned to Edinburgh for the last time on a cold February evening.  I arrived at Haymarket station, too tired to take any photos so I finish with one of Edinburgh Waverley Station where I had left that morning and where I started this post.  

It was fantastic to do so much train travel on our trip and to see so much of Europe compared to our usual trips to Edinburgh.  It was easier to travel with Syvlia as a teenager than as a little kid.  I wish I had made more train journeys during my travels of Europe.  Maybe there is more train travel ahead for me.  And I don't just mean the Melbourne suburban trains!