The Trains

My prolonged absence of blogging has been due to multiple reasons: 1)lack of distinctive material as Kris has done a fine job recounting our adventures, 2)weariness as I'm half asleep by the time Kris has completed his blogging when we DO have internet access, 3)lack of aforementioned internet access, and 4)generally wanting to just avoid the computer, as I'm typically on it all day w/my job. Anyway...
The Trains. Such a big part of this trip, as quite some time is spent en route from
town to town, city to city.
With our railpass we get first class (no choice for second class if you're over 26), but first class means something different in every
country. In the Netherlands it was red leather (or imitation leather but nice nonetheless) and the trains seemed pretty new and clean. In Belgium, it was cloth seats and the trains were ok, but generally older and the WCs on the train were horrendous as the waste just gets held in some tank below which eventually gets
dumped on the tracks at the stations. Not a pleasant smell. Germany is the best so far, with very clean trains, comforable upscale cloth seats, and clean WCs. The high speed ICE trains are absolutely the best, almost like flying first class. The Czech Republic trains look very, very old, aren't nearly as clean as the others so far, and first class is a compartment of six larger springy cloth seats, though for the most part we've had an entire compartment to ourselves. Austrian and Swiss trains are very similar to German trains; new, clean, comfortable, and efficient, with the only difference being the seat/compartment arrangement of first class, which varied based on the train type. On to Italian trains. I had been told that Italian trains were hot and a bit smelly. On the contrary, I found trains in Italy (TrenItalia) to be cool and comfortable and not the least bit smelly. Maybe because we're always in first class?? Anyway, the only 'issue' with the rails in Italy is that you need to purchase seat reservations for almost all trips. This meant that we had to arrive earlier at the train station and wait in the ticket lines to reserve seats - usually at a cost of 10 - 15 Euros. It was a bit of an inconvenience since we were used to just hopping on any train we wanted, but not a huge deal. And so my somewhat informative train run-down concludes...