I mentioned in this thread my problem of getting my father, who is afraid of flying, from Rome to Newcastle, and how one possible solution is going by train. Neither I nor him are really keen on the idea, because it would be a long trip, possibly requiring days, so it would be tiring for him, and the whole trip could require more days than he can take for holidays.
Never the less, I still have to keep this option open, because I don’t think he will be able to overcome his fear. So I would like to ask: what is, in your opinion, the best web site to get information on proces and times for this kind of cross-state trip by train?
Yeah, yeah, I know there is Google, but I get a lot of unrelated stuff and sites for rapacious travel agents charging a lot; and even if it was all good stuff, I don’t get a review with them, right?
There’s a European-wide train timetable site here. It look like the journey’s around 24-27 hours, via various combinations of Milan, Florence, Zurich, Dijon, Paris and Lille. (The best option I could find was leaving around 2pm, which gives an overnight journey from Milan to Zurich.) I guess you’d need to buy three stages of tickets, one to Paris, and separate ones for Eurostar and Britain. The ticketing may also dictate the route getting to Paris.
You can buy a Rome-Paris ticket from www.sncf.com and have it delivered to Italy. I’d presume the Eurostar site will be similar. I can’t see anything on GNER’s site about overseas delivery (I couldn’t be bothered to register to get through to the final delivery page), but I should think you can phone up and buy the tickets, and have them await him at Kings Cross.
Well, I suppose I can pick them up in England and then bring them personally to my family and travel with them - they only speak Italian and I wouldn’t let them go alone with no help.
Anyway, thanks, GorillaMan, the sites you posted are great!
I’d expect him to be able to buy the tickets in Rome, though. I have bought railway tickets for journeys in France, Spain, Italy and Switzerland in Germany, for Spain in France, and for Switzerland and Germany in Italy, all at the ticket counter in the respective railway station without any problem. Has rail privatisation fragmented ticketing in Britain to the point that you cannot purchase through tickets? Perhaps a call to the station or a travel agents’ in Newcastle could solve your problem.
BTW the Deutsche Bahn site is generally good on international connections (I have planned several international trips with it) but I recall reading that it might not have full and current information on all intra-UK timetables so you might want to check the London-Newcastle stretch on a British site.
Through-ticketing between the UK and the continent never really existed. There was a certain amount of it when British Rail still owned ferries, but for obvious geographic reasons it was never as integrated as mainland Europe is.
