Yesterday’s blog post on trains got me thinking.
I live in Paris.
Could I join up a morning train from Paris to Germany that connects somewhere to the Berlin-Prague-Bratislava-Koŝice-Preŝov train and be in Preŝov by the next morning?
Pretty easily it turns out: you can do Paris-Frankfurt-Vienna-Bratislava and hop on to the Bratislava-Preŝov night train there. You leave Gare de l’Est in Paris at 9:04 am and arrive at Preŝov at 7:42 am the next day.
However…
If you look at this trip on Deutsche Bahn, it’s nearly 300 euros and that’s without booking a bed for the night train.
No-one in their right mind is paying this.
However…
There’s a crazy trick you can do with Czech Railways for trains that start in Germany and end up in the Czech Republic. On the Czech Railways website, you put in a query like Frankfurt-Prague, but you add in a connection to the town of Cheb, and this tends to bring up irrationally cheap tickets of around 15 euros rather than around 100 euros for this segment, for reasons known only to God and The Man in Seat 61.
However…
This odyssey involves several connections and is sloooooooooooooow so slooooooooooooow like so slow you start to consider your sanity.
How do I know? I did it once.
But you can survive slow.
However…
When you try and connect it all up, it’s impossible to join a train from France that reaches a German city in time in the morning to connect with a crazy Germany-Prague-via-Cheb trip than then connects through in time to Bratislava to get the night train to Preŝov.
So, yes, if you’re willing to pay whatever, it’s possible.
Screw that.
But it got me thinking…
The question I have for you today: How far can you get from Paris (or, say, London via Eurostar) by train in 24 hours? 36 hours? 48 hours?
How many kilometres as the crow flies?
Are there some extremely cool connections you can string together that are not widely known?
Can you do it in half the price if you get say six extra hours to play with?
What I’m starting to imagine is a team competition that starts in Paris in Autumn 2021, begins at midnight, and each team has up to 24 hours to hop on a train, and then 24 (or say, 36 or 48) hours to get as far as they can from Paris by train.
I guess what I’m currently worried about with this great and wonderful plan is whether there is some “obviously best trip” that everyone will work out in advance and all the competitors will get on the same train in Paris, and it’ll be a bit dumb.
Clearly more thought needs to go into the rules to make it more of a competition.
If you have any suggestions, send me an email to adventuresofaclimatecriminal@gmail.com.
All suggestions welcome!
Photo credit: Derek Story/Unsplash