In October 2025, it’ll be two years since I last flew anywhere.
For someone who has travelled a fair amount over the years, and I mean to 50 countries across five continents, this is something of a big deal for me.
It all started in January 2024, when we began planning our summer holiday.
We wanted to take the kids across central Europe, so we planned a round-trip that started and ended in Brussels, crossing five different countries.
All of them were new to my kids, three were new to my husband and one (Belgium) was new to me.
With the help of the brilliant website www.seat61.com, I was able to plan every train journey in intricate detail, know what websites to book tickets through and even get an idea of where we could eat, drink and leave our luggage in or near train stations across Europe.
Two days in Belgium (Brussels and Bruges) Country No 1
July 20th 2024 finally dawned, and we boarded the Eurostar in St Pancras, bound for Brussels.
After a day in the Belgian capital and a day exploring Bruges (which had been on my bucket list for years), we headed to Vienna by sleeper. We had to go via Cologne though, because the Austrian NightJet service only ran from there.
One day in Germany (Cologne) Country No 2
So we spent a day in Germany. I’d never been to Cologne before so this was another new city for me. We admired the thousands of padlocks on the Hohenzollernbrücke, climbed the spires of Cologne Cathedral and walked around the old town.
Four days in Austria (Vienna) Country No 3
I could hardly wait to take the Nightjet to Vienna, though. Vienna is one of my favourite places in the world – I lived there when I was a student in 1997-1998 and hadn’t been back since the early noughties.
I found it had changed – we arrived at Wien Hauptbahnhof, for example, which didn’t even exist when I lived there – but the old town, the grandiose buildings around the Ring and historic sites such as Schönbrunn Palace were of course the same. After four days of sightseeing, swimming, meeting up with old friends of mine and eating Wienerschnitzel, we embarked on the one-hour train journey to Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia.
Two days in Slovakia (Bratislava) Country No 4
I’d been to Bratislava before, on a day-trip from Vienna, but I didn’t remember much about it so it was like visiting for the first time. We discovered a pleasant city with an attractive, pedestrianised centre and not inundated with tourists…
…Unlike Prague, where we arrived two days later. We travelled there by Regiojet, a Czech train where standard class seats come complete with a personal TV screen as well as free coffee, bottled water, and steward service. Oh – and no delays either. The British train system could certainly learn a thing or two from them.
Five days in Czechia (Prague) Country No 5
I spent a weekend in Prague in 1998 and remember it being very beautiful, touristy but not overly so, and quite cheap. Fast forward almost three decades, and it was absolutely heaving with tourists and everything was over-priced.
This didn’t detract from its age-old beauty, I’m glad to say, and we spent five memorable days there. We walked around, spent a day at its impressive zoo, and my (then 8-year-old) daughter and I enjoyed an afternoon at a swimming pool with a water slide while my husband and teenage son visited Terezin, aka Theresienstadt, the Nazi transit and concentration camp to the north of the city.
All this was before embarking on the 15.5-hour journey back to Brussels on the European Sleeper, which followed the river Elbe through breathtakingly beautiful valleys between Prague and Dresden before snaking its way up to Berlin and then across north Germany and the Netherlands and back to Brussels.
Although we stopped at both Rotterdam and Amsterdam, they were in the early hours and obviously we couldn’t disembark, so sadly we couldn’t count the Netherlands as Country No 6!
This year we did it slightly differently, taking the Eurostar to Paris, then the TGV to Stuttgart, where we boarded a Croatian sleeper to Ljubljana. We spent three fabulous weeks exploring Slovenia and Croatia (hiring a car to do so, as train travel would have been too limiting), the highlights of which included:
- Spending four days in a tiny hamlet in the Slovenian mountains
- Swimming in Lake Bled and (icy!) Lake Bohinj
- Visiting the jaw-dropping Skocjan caves in southern Slovenia
- Seeing a live gladiator show in the Roman arena in Pula, Croatia
- Staying on the small but beautiful island of Rab in Croatia and swimming in the crystal-clear sea
- Doing a 15 km cycle ride through pine forests on Rab
- Watching the most amazing sunset in Zadar, at the top of the Dalmatian coast
- Walking 18 km around Plitvice Lakes National Park, Croatia
…before taking the sleeper back from Zagreb to Stuttgart and doing the same journey in reverse from there.
It took us 24 hours to get from London to Ljubljana as we didn’t make any long stops – we just had time for a picnic lunch in a park next to the Gare de l’Est in Paris, and a quick Schnitzel sandwich for dinner in Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof, before boarding the sleeper to Ljubljana.
In fact, one of the many cool things about this holiday (for us adults, anyway) was the fact that on the way back to the UK, we had:
- Lunch in Croatia (in Zagreb zoo, to be precise)
- Dinner in Slovenia (on the overnight train)
- Breakfast in Germany (in Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof)
- Lunch in France (in the same Parisian park as on the outward journey)
- Dinner in England (at my mum’s house in London)!
When you gotta go….
People have asked me what the toilets and washing facilities are like on overnight trains. In some NightJet sleeper compartments you can even get an en-suite with loo, basin and shower. We travel in couchette cars and there’s none of that: you get two toilets at either end of the carriage and a tiny room with just a basin in it, which we used for brushing teeth. Generally, you can expect the toilets to start off fairly clean and get more and more scummy the longer the journey lasts.
However, on our journey from Zagreb back to Stuttgart, we had one toilet that didn’t flush, one toilet that worked but with no functioning basin, and the basin-only room had no light.
That aside, overnight trains can be very comfortable if you want to fork out for a sleeper compartment, but if you’re travelling as a family like us and want to keep costs down, it’s much cheaper to book a couchette compartment.
They comprise six bunks, of which the lower four can be folded away to make seats for the evening/morning, and you’re given a pillow and case, blanket and sheet to make your bed with.
Luggage can either go at the very top above the door, (which is ok for small day packs but not at all practical if you have big rucksacks/suitcases) or under the lower bunks on the floor. We only used four bunks so we could store our large rucksacks on the seats that we didn’t convert into beds.
Bed and breakfast, or just water?
Whether or not your booking comes with breakfast included depends on the train provider: on the Croatian trains we got a bottle of water and tea or coffee and a chocolate croissant in plastic wrapping for breakfast. On the NightJet to Vienna last year the guard woke us up with tea or coffee, a Semmel roll, jam and butter. On the European Sleeper, we just got a bottle of water, and you had to pay something like 5 euros for a cup of instant coffee/hot chocolate!
As a family we booked the whole compartment so we didn’t have to share with anyone else, but if you’re backpacking, travelling solo or just with one other person, to keep costs even lower you can just pay for a bunk and share your compartment with other travellers. So it’s a bit like staying in a youth hostel.
Sleeping in a couchette compartment is not massively comfortable – at times it can feel a bit like camping, although with fewer zips to have to contend with – but I still felt a sense of childlike excitement stopping at different stations overnight and waking up in the morning in a different/new country, reminding me of overnight train journeys in France, Germany and Austria when I was a child.
Of course, I like the fact that I’m doing my bit for the environment, too.
Trains are a fabulous way to see the landscape, rivers and even towns and villages of countries you would normally just fly over or straight into. They may not be the cheapest way of getting to your end destination, but the fact that you leave from and arrive in the centre of a city means no tedious journeys to airports, no long queues (apart from Eurostar, which is getting busier and busier) and no baggage restrictions makes them so much more appealing – to me, anyway.
I’m planning on making 2026 my third consecutive year without flying….and we may stay in the UK. (Although I’ve recently read about a train journey from Belgrade to Montenegro, which does sound very attractive!)
Have you ditched planes for trains or been on any memorable train journeys lately? Leave me a comment if you have – I’d love to hear about it!
Judith Zerdin 