Our environment is changing, and that’s mostly because of human behaviour. So we need to change our behaviour. We can do that in several ways. Switching to a vegetarian or even plant-based diet is one of the ways. Another is to not fly as much.

Some time ago I decided I want to fly as little as possible. I wanted to try and use other means of transport for conferences that have that option. So either driving my electric car there, or taking the train. Now, I’ve taken the train before, for instance to SymfonyLive in Paris and SymfonyDay in Cologne. There are easy and direct connections from The Netherlands, and that worked really well. But what if I would do the same for a destination that is a bit further away. Say, in Verona.

When I got accepted to speak at the amazing PHPDay conference I decided this was the time to experiment. I blocked the day before and the day after the conference as travel days (as a train trip from Utrecht to Verona would take around 14-15 hours) and I started looking to book my tickets.

Booking the tickets

Now, this should be relatively easy, right? If I fly, I can either book with my standard airline or use one of several special ticket sites to book my round trip, select my itinerary, pay, and that’s it. I’ve got the ticket in my email by the time I’m done.

Well, no such thing which you’re using the train. Different sites have different offers, and some sites don’t even offer tickets on certain days. Checking the website of the Dutch Railways international travel shows me several itineraries, but most of them I can’t even book online, I have to call. And then when I call, it turns out that they can’t even book that. What? Why is this so hard? It’s 2022.

After a lot of searching and calling, I ended up booking my trains to Verona through The Train Line. This was just like I’m used to for flying: Find an itinerary, select the best option, and pay online. Easy. Unfortunately they had a good itinerary for my trip to Verona, but only impossible times for my trip back.

Back to the Dutch Railsways international travel for my return trip. I couldn’t book any of the interesting options online, so I decided to call them. I told them which itinerary I wanted, and I was basically told this was impossible. They couldn’t book that for me. They just couldn’t. Weird. But at least the lady on the phone know what customer service was and she started looking at other options. It took some time, but eventually, we came to an itinerary that… well, it wasn’t perfect, but it was acceptable.

Paying over the phone

Then came my next surprise. I was expecting to get an email from NS with a payment link, or some such solution, but instead I was asked to just give my credit card information over the phone. SAYWHAT?! 1990 called, they want their payment method back. Unfortunately, there was no other option so I had to go through with it. Otherwise, I would have no trip back home.

Time to travel

This morning at 8:34 the ICE departed Utrecht for Basel SBB. The trip would be two transfers: Transfer in Basel SBB to a train to Milano, and change in Milano to a train to Verona. Easy as that. Yeah. No.

Quite quickly already we started having some delay. My transfer time in Basel was about 15 minutes, so it didn’t take long for me to realize I would not make my transfer. I started looking into different alternatives and quickly found that I had a few options, so it would be fine. But the delay started growing, until at some point it was announced that the train would not go further than Freiburg. Service staff would help with options to travel on. But there was no service staff on the platform, and it took me about 40 minutes to get help in the Reisezentrum of Freiburg. By that time, I was supposed to have already arrived in Basel and running to make my transfer to Milano.

Stay for the night?

The advice I got there was to travel to Basel, then onwards to Zurich, and then from there take the train to Milano. Unfortunately, the train to Milano would not go until 7:33PM, which meant arriving in Milano at 10:50PM. Looking at the trains to Verona, that would mean that if I made my connection in Milano, I would arrive in Verona at 1:17AM. If I couldn’t make the transfer, then the only option for me was to find a place to sleep in Milano. Well, again, the isn’t perfect, but it seems to be the only option. To I headed to Zurich, had to wait there for 1,5 hour (time for dinner, yay!), then take the train to Milano.

Communication

And of course things can go wrong, but the communication when things go wrong can make the difference. When flying, in the plane you usually already get announcements about things going wrong. And in the airport, there’s always more than enough staff available to answer questions and rebook if necessary.

Experiment: success

Well, the experiment was a success. Because the great thing about an experiment is that it almost always succeeds. No matter what the outcome, the experiment did what it had to do: It taught you something.

And indeed it did. If booking my ticket is this hard, if getting information in case of problems is this hard, if traveling these distances is this hard, my conclusion is: I’ll take a plane the next time. Not for destinations with direct connections, but if I have to switch trains and especially switch train companies, I’m not going to do it anymore. As much as I wanted this to work, at the moment, it doesn’t work. At least not when you have to reach your destination at a certain time. If you’re traveling around and have no specific plan, this works great. Because the trip is beautiful. But if you have somewhere to be, this doesn’t work.