ridin’ the rails… in your pjs
I fell asleep somewhere in the south of France and woke up with the Italian Alps outside my window. I’d taken overnight trains four or five times before (the Marrakesh Express was definitely the most… interesting of my sleep & ride experiences) but I’d never opened my eyes to such a vastly different landscape. It gave me butterflies.
If you’ve never taken an overnight train, here’s a good idea of what to expect. First, you’re going to have to hand over your passport. I know, it’s a bit nerve wracking. But I swear, the conductor is not going to abscond with it. You’ll get it back in the morning (no stamp, sadly) an hour or so before you arrive at your destination. Around 10pm, your friendly conductor will come in to turn down the beds, which, I have to point out, are actually quite comfortable. If you’re a light sleeper, check the mirrored cabinet - there’s a small toiletries kit, complete with ear plugs.
Note: None of this fun stuff applies to the Marrakesh Express. Bare bones, people.
If you’re traveling solo like I was, you’ll probably share a sleeping compartment with a complete stranger. This is my very favorite part of train travel - meeting and gabbing with new people. The couple who took the adjoining couchette en route from Barcelona to Turin ended up being from Plano, Texas - half a mile from where my mother lives. I found this to be way less exotic than the banker from Kazakhstan who shared my cabin from Paris to Barcelona, by the time we rolled into Barcelona, I felt like maybe I should hug her goodbye. Okay, I *did* hug her goodbye, but she was just as into it as I was!
If you have a Eurail pass, your passage in a sleeper car can be less than you’d pay for a hotel room, and is a really good answer to long voyages you don’t want to use precious daytime hours to take. Me, I do it for the toiletry kit.
Got an overnight train story? Have an overnight train question? Send it in!
An important tip (learned from personal experience), if traveling in the spring or fall, research when the country you are visiting oberves daylight savings. On a night train from Venice to Lucerne, Switzerland, we came dangerously close to missing our stop because we didn’t know the time had changed during the night. An off-the-cuff comment from a fellow traveler that it was actually one hour earlier than our watches said led to 5 minutes of frantic scrambling before (barely) making our stop.
This isn’t really a story, but I was completely freaked out when they wanted to keep my passport. Of course I was 15 and rebellious and kind of scared of getting left behind in some foreign country.
They also take your passport when you enter Turkey on a cruise ship. And they don’t give it back until you leave the country, so we were wandering around Turkey this summer with no identification on us, which kind of worried me. I was afraid that something bad would happen and no one would know who I was, or somehow the police would stop me and ask for my passport and I wouldn’t have it and then get arrested. This time I was 26, but clearly still totally irrational because everyone else who went with us didn’t think anything of handing over their passport.
I’m a bit neurotic about my passport as well having on acquired a Canadian one as an adult. I have sometimes traveled with a colour copy stashed in my luggage near my dirty underwear. I don’t think I have an overnight train story. But I do have a funny daytime train story. I was very little and on the bullet train (Shinkansen) in Tokyo when I walked into one of the sliding glass doors. I can’t decide if the funniest part was that I knew the door was there having just walked through it moments earlier but somehow forgot or the resounding smack of my forehead on glass.
A side not about EuroRail passes: Do not make the same mistake that my travel mate and I made and leave the envelope the tickets come in at home. We removed our tickets from the cardbord sleeve so that they would fit into our travel purses not thinking it would be a problem - and it wasn’t in the first 3 countries we visited. With six weeks left of our trip, our passes were confiscated by EuroRail personnel in Spain. Apparently they are invalid without the sleeve. We were devestated (and nearly destitute) but in the end we charged new tickets onto our credit cards so that we could continue our adventure. I wrote a the Spanish and US embassies about a refund when we got home, but no such luck and we were about several hundred dollars.
I took an overnight train from Munich to Prague, and was roused in the middle of the night because there had been an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Germany. This was before the Czech Republic entered the European Union, so just because they could, I guess, the Czech authorities made everybody get out of the train and walk through some disinfectant. They did not search our bags for other shoes that might have been wandering about on a farm, and I did not mention it to them…