New year, new travel

Whether you’ve been shocked into action by the Australian bushfires, or inspired by Greta Thunberg, if you’ve made a New Year’s resolution for 2020 to fly less (or not at all) to help the environment, you may be wondering where to start – and where to go. I thought it might be helpful to go through a few possible itineraries for flight free travel, based on trips I’ve made myself. There’s also some practical info on how to plan a train trip here. If you’re new to this blog, there’s a little background here.

The Netherlands

If you’re new to international train travel, this is one way to ease yourself in gently – simply step on a Eurostar at St Pancras, and step off again 4 hours later in central Amsterdam. The train also stops in Rotterdam, apparently an up and coming citybreak destination, if you don’t fancy the Dutch capital. Coming back is very slightly more complicated, as there isn’t yet a facility for passport control in Rotterdam or Amsterdam, so you need to take a train to Brussels, and change there. However, you don’t have to change stations in Brussels. Passport control facilities should be ready to go in the Netherlands sometime this year (hopefully before summer), provided B****t doesn’t throw a spanner in the works.

Germany

You can reach pretty much any bit of Germany from the south east of the UK within a day – for Northern Germany that extends to most of the UK.
For Northern Germany, for example Cologne and Hamburg, travel via Brussels. For southern Germany, eg Munich, the fastest way is to go via Paris. This does mean a change of stations, but trains for Munich depart from Gare de l’Est, which is only a ten minute walk from Gare du Nord where the Eurostar arrives, so you don’t have to tangle with the Metro.
There have been frequent rumours/proposals of a direct one train service from London to Germany, but as yet those seem to have come to nothing.

Spain

Spain has one of the best train services in Europe. Without a great deal of fanfare they’ve built an extensive high speed network, and even the non high-speed trains are pretty good. My first ever full-scale train journey was around Spain. In the space of just under a fortnight we travelled from Santander in the north to Andalucia (Cordoba and Seville) in the south, before heading home via several days in Madrid. You can’t exactly replicate our journey anymore, since the demise of the Madrid-Paris sleeper (although I have hopes that someone might decide to revive it), but there are plenty of other options, most of which involve travelling via Paris to Barcelona (about a days travel from London). For a slower but perhaps more chilled out route, you can take a ferry from Plymouth or Portsmouth to Santander (there is also a Portsmouth-Bilbao route) with Brittany Ferries. We’ve done the Plymouth-Santander route twice now: the cabins are comfortable, the food on board is good (it is a French company, after all) and there’s even a small swimming pool.

Santander itself is a lovely town, with plenty of beaches around it, and is worth a visit in its own right. If you’d like to travel onwards, the station is a very short walk from the ferry port. From Santander you can reach Andalucia in the south within a day, via a fairly simple change of station in Madrid (a few stops on the underground).

If you want a longer journey, it’s even possible to catch a ferry from southern Spain to Morocco.

Switzerland

Again, you can reach most parts of Switzerland in a day’s journey from London. Swiss trains are as efficient as you would imagine, so moving round the country is easy. There are also good connections onwards to Italy. I have to confess all of my recent visits to Switzerland – wonderful country though it is – have been using it as a stopping off point on the way to Italy. So…

Italy

Again, you can actually reach Northern Italy (Turin or Milan) in a day, although it’s quite a long day.  There are two trains a day from Paris to Milan, stopping at Turin along the way. From Milan, there are connections to train for the rest of Italy, making use of the Italian high speed network. There’s also a sleeper train which runs to Venice, with a stop in Milan, which I used last summer – more details here. Italy also has an network of internal sleeper services, which might be worth checking out if you’re travelling a long way south, although you can reach the far south of Italy in a day from Milan, without having to change trains. I did this journey in reverse last summer.

If you want a properly luxurious experience, you could always take the famed Orient Express, which runs from London to Venice. We did this few years back, and it was amazing.  It’s expensive, but  worth doing if you can afford it. It runs March to November, there are more details here: https://www.belmond.com/trains/europe/venice-simplon-orient-express/

There are of course a million different routes you could take by train, in Europe and beyond, but I hope I’ve given you a few ideas to get your holiday planning started. Let me know where you’re planning to go this year, and how you get on.