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To neighboring countries yes, but not across multiple borders.
The only exception from that was taking a train from Germany via Belgium to Luxembourg, but that hardly counts.
Else I've done Germany -> Austria, Luxembourg, Netherlands, France, Czech Republic on individual trips, and also did Denmark -> Sweden, Sweden -> Norway and Czech Republic -> Austria (in a sleeper)
Between other countries yes, from my country no. I'm at the edge of Europe and our trains are bad so planes usually make more sense.
I love trains and I wish it was easy to take it to other countries. I have bad motion sickness and stuff on rail is the only thing that I can comfortably travel on. Unfortunately getting the central or western Europe from Estonia is frigging impossible, like I have tried to figure out how to buy tickets and how expensive it would be but I found no answers. Now even if I did figure that out I would need to switch trains like 6 times to even get to western Europe. I wish the EU fixed and unified the rail network.
From Estonia, currently it's probably easiest to take a ferry to Stockholm, thence a night train direct to Hamburg or Berlin. Continue from Hamburg to Köln and change there to go further west. Of course you can go via Kaunas - Bialystok but it's slow now, when rail Baltica is complete there will be fast trains Tallinn - Warsaw.
Boats kill me unfortunately, every time I have been on a boat I spent the entire time throwing up. I'm really hoping for rail baltics to finish quick.
It's a youth rite to go to mainland Europe by air and then buy one Interrail ticket for the next x days and explore the countries
Yes. (I'm Swiss.)
Same here. I often travel by train but only to neighboring country, so France, Germany and Italy (never been to Austria).
The problem is that cross country trains are a hassle, because many eu countries have there own booking system, gauge width, traffic control infrastructure. Unless you take a popular route between mayor cities, you need to buy multiple tickets and change trains.
The reason the tracks are not standardized is because in the 1800s the military did not want neighboring countries to just roll into their country by train.
I've visited my native England a few times by train from the Netherlands and it's a breeze, but a bit dear if you don't plan it a thousand years in advance. A few months ago I took the sleeper to Vienna and back and it was very good indeed, better than the Caledonian Sleeper I might daresay. I have a medium-long and fairly good anecdote about getting the train to a village in Germany last winter if anyone's interested. I went to see Lightning Bolt in Paris a few years ago and that went swimmingly too. I'd like to go to Spain or Portugal at some point but it's something like 13 hours by train. Oh, and when I lived in the UK, I was working at a train station, so I'd use my staff discount to go quite far afield: I took the train from Liverpool to Lille once with my bike and cycled up to Amsterdam; I took the train once to Luxembourg, then Trier, then Bonn to visit a friend, with a little detour to the bit where Luxembourg, France, and Germany meet (Schengen). It's a nice way to spend a day if you just bring a book or something.
I just took a train from Mannheim DE to Lille FR. It required one swap and cost me about €250. I felt like that price was too high for that distance and speed (5.5 hours roughly) but that's comparable to a plane ticket in the US from one major city to the next so it's a better way of traveling in this instance because trains are more enjoyable than planes for me.
That being said I agree with other commenters that we need to continue to invest in our international rail systems and continue to improve speeds, reliability, and cost.
I'd like to take trains all over the EU in the future (rather new to DE). If someone could get me a single train from Frankfurt to Madrid in under 8 hours for €250 I'd be in love. Make planes obsolete for distances a high speed rail can achieve in under 8 hours. Get me into Italy and Portugal and Sweden and Turkiye and Ukraine (after they've defended their home successfully against the imperialists) via train. I want to see the world by train.
Going to coppenhagen from sweden is really easy... except for the swedish rail network which has a horrible layout.
Southern German here, went to Austria, Prague, the Netherlands, Scotland, even northern Germany. Always worked fine except for northern Germany, that's a 50/50 chance of going wrong. Will keep doing that in the future, especially with the expanding night train services.
Yep, a lot. From Switzerland to Netherland, their is a lot of plain, that made train connections easier. It took some times; those connections where not that common because of borders.
Their is lot of short connections in those area. Furthermore, each year some big connections are improved. For exemple Paris -> Bruxelles has been reduced to 1h22 recently (270 km), which impact something like Paris -> Amsterdam (4h, 420 km).
Here we use short connections each week to go shopping, make some sports, or stuff like that. A friend took it every day to work. We use big connections to visit some places on week end, for Alpinism in Switzerland for example, or big cities (Bruxelles, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Copenhaguen, …)
For those long connections, the main issue is the cost; some times to times their is cheap tickets, but their usually cost hundreds euros.
I haven't yet, but I really wish to try.
Like every month, it's a 2 hour trip to go by train in two others counties. It's very convenient.
People should be more conscious of what the EU and Schengen bring us.
My next big trip will be Interrail across Scandinavia.
Not from Italy, transalpine connections are few and not very convenient.
I did take an Eurostar from Brussels to Amsterdam, but that's like catching a regional train here lol
There are three tunnels into Switzerland, two into France and one into Austria. I think that's quite good no?
For example, Rome to Bern is less than 7 hours. It would take ~12 hours by car.
Just a Canadian over here who cant even come close to affording to ride the train in country, being judgy of all the "airplane is easier people".
@Servais I'd love to do this once, but this is not practical at all where I live in order to do it more often, because I live in one of the countries marked with a shade of red on this map (in S-E Europe). And that is not taking into account various incidents that can occur with the locomotive and/or other rolling stock.
Train travels inside the country are indeed doable, and many people take them, but the speed is so low that for longer distances it is rather more feasible to travel by plane in a couple of hours than take one full day for each trip.
Oh man, 30 km/h in Albania. Could probably bicycle and be just as fast.
It can be a bit of a mess with different tickets and stuff I've heard
I use trains to move around within my country, from a couple of hours to 4 or 5 for some long weekend trips.
I've been trying my best to stick to trains for longer trips but it's not easy: it takes a lot longer (and that's, well, expected and the least of the issues), it's less confortable (I took some night trains and the quality of my rest was very bad, so much so it impacts the quality of my first day abroad) but most of all, it's not less, not as mu ch as, but MORE expensive than planes.
I keep myself motivated by running this https://lowtrip.fr/ and keeping a lifelong count of the CO2 I've contributed to.
It's essentially a luxury though.
I personally don’t use trains, because there are no reasonable connections on the routes I frequently use. Also, trips by train (especially when it’s cross-border), are often more expensive than the corresponding flights.
