Travel by train in Europe

John: Okay, this is a screwball tip. This is for people who travel in Europe by train.

Adam: Okay, everybody pay attention; that’s you!

John: It could be anybody, because you get a Eurorail pass—which Americans love to do—and you just jump on the train. You go from here to there. But it’s kind of a pain in the ass to figure out where to go, how to go, where the schedules are.

John: The Deutsche Bahn puts together a website for everybody. But there’s an international travelers version, which is the one I’m recommending. And the website is https://int.bahn.de/en. But you can also look it up on Google: the Deutsche Bahn International Travel site.

You put in where you’re going—and this is for all of Europe. And it includes the UK. I don’t know why they do this, because there are all these different competing operations in Europe with different train companies. But you put in where you’re starting and where you want to go, and it will take you from train to train to train—show you what platform you’re landing on, what platform to go to for your next transfer, at what time the train comes in, what time the next one leaves, and what platform it’s on. It’s unbelievable.

Adam: If you happen to be traveling through Europe.

John: Europe, Eastern Europe, Middle Europe, England, all the way up to Sweden—it’s just astonishing that they have this. It’s well-structured, very easy to deal with. They’ve changed the interface a little bit; I used to use this a lot, you know, 20 or 30 years ago.

And I thought the layout was a little nicer when it was more old-fashioned.

Adam: That’s because you like blink tags.

John: There were no blink tags involved. And the cat running across the bottom. That’s what I was missing.