The Man in Seat 61 | Hacker News Reader

The Man in Seat 61

seat61.com

351 pointsBerislavLopac101 comments

This is impressive. I poked around and for the (few) routes I'm aware of it has excellent information. I can see using this for future planning/dreaming.

I've found train travel sites can be fairly hard for non-locals to find / navigate through and you get waylaid by third parties that aren't as good for the actual booking as the less SEO optimized first-party carrier sites. Ends up being frustrating. I appreciate this site just gives you the facts rather than trying to do everything.

Everything about this is tastefully "old school". So much information density, and none of life story fluff most train travel blogs throw in.

I appreciate the advertising through fairly non-intrusive banners/links embedded in the pages (seriously, coming back in the HTML and not injected by JavaScript - who does that anymore?) that bypasses the adblocker. I was curious enough by the ones I saw that I disabled my adblocker to see if that was it - unfortunately there are also Google ads on top, but at least not cranked up to ridiculous levels.

I've "pinned" it in Kagi so now it comes up when I'm searching for train travel in the future.

I've used it quite a bit on a number of trips as I'd much rather travel by train within Europe than deal with airports. Train travel in Europe is pretty good but can also be a bit arcane if you're not familiar with the ins and outs of the country in question; this applies double if you're traveling around multiple countries. As you say, it's often not even clear where you should be doing your bookings.

Definitely. But Seat 61 is absolutely the best source for at least trying to make it easy. The site has saved me hundreds of hours of research.

It's an amazing resource.

I used it a lot when I was younger and traveled more.

That was years ago, I wonder if it has been kept up to date. No small task, especially for one man, which is the impression I get.

I loved the writing style of old travel books and this really brings that back.

>On-time performance. Bear in mind that these trains [Amtrak California Zephyr] run for over 2,000 miles, although they often arrive on time or perhaps half an hour late, they can sometimes arrive an hour or two late or more, so don't book any tight connections.

This needs updating. The Zephyr trains can be 8-12 or more hours late (you thought you would arrive at 14:00 but instead it's 01:00 -- this happened to me twice, once in each direction, in the middle of summer). This is just due to normal work-hours restrictions, poor management, etc. Then add in snow storms and rockslides on the tracks, and your trip might just be canceled at Denver or Salt Lake City, leaving you stranded.

That's the real trick and problem - by the way https://www.amtraktrains.com is a great forum if researching - you CANNOT use averages for 'one time' trips.

If you're talking about your commuter to work, you can use averages to get "good enough" because you take it often enough that the averages will mostly work.

But these long distance trains might on average be two hours late - but if they're 24+ hours late, you might have ruined everything (unless the connection was another Amtrak train, then they will work with you).

For those types of trips, if you want to take them, treat them as land cruises and either be on one train to your destination OR plan to have a mini vacation at each connection, staying a day or two and seeing the sites.

(I have had two long distance trains die on the rails and become busses, which is amusing if you're not in a rush. Seven charter busses descending on a Subway in some infinitely small town for dinner amusing. They had everyone get off the train onto busses, we drove to where the train that was coming the other way was, and got on it, because the rails were blocked by a corn train flipping over.)

Yeah, based on everything I've heard, I'd never take a long distance Amtrak unless I were staying in the destination city for a few days and was arriving a good day before any event of importance (or pre-booked tickets etc.) Things can happen with air travel too of course but the probability of a major delay is almost certainly much higher with Amtrak.

Yep - Amtrak is about the journey NOT the destination (because you may never arrive lol).

I have found that a great "in the US" vacation can be to fly out to your destination, do your vacation, and then take the train back. If you leave a buffer day you won't even miss work, and you'll arrive much more refreshed than if you flew in (at least in my experience).

The problem for me living on the east coast is the interesting part of the trip would be in the west. If I ever do a long distance Amtrak it would probably be Denver or Chicago to the west coast.

I've done some of those and can say - east coast to Chicago or just a bit beyond is pretty interesting.

And west coast is great, starting somewhere after the plains.

The plains are really boring - unfortunately I've not kept up with schedules, but if you can get the overnight to mostly be in the plains, you've something.

But on the east coast maybe you can take advantage of Amtrak's only profitable long-distance route! The Auto Train! wooohooo

No interest in Florida :-) Not that I go down to NYC much these days but have taken the NE Corridor/Acela many times which is a nice enough train ride (and not super-long). Love going in and out of NYC. Taking the train up at tail-end of a May trip from overseas.

Thanks for the info. I'd probably do at least some section of the Empire Builder or Zephyr if I did a long distance run.

I used to sometimes catch the previous day's Coast Starlight when I'd travel from Salem to Seattle. The passengers already on board never looked too happy.

Another major cause, maybe the single largest cause: freight train interference.

> Federal law gives passenger trains the right of way but freight train operators ignore this. [...] Federal law requires passenger trains be given priority over freight trains. However, the Department of Justice has enforced that law just once and that was 40 years ago, according to Amtrak. [...] Interference by freight trains has accounted for about 60 percent of Amtrak’s delays systemwide in recent years.

https://cnsmaryland.org/2021/12/09/historic-amtrak-funding-a...

just to round out the picture, freight trains in the US are a success story, they're heavily used by customers who make the companies profitable and self-sustaining.

passenger trains lose money and are heavily subsidized to stay afloat.

just in terms of where they fit into the national economy, freight trains are important and integral at every level, and passenger trains much less so, or only to small communities.

This is a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course. High-speed passenger trains do very well all over the world. Coast-to-coast distances are too long for them, but cities in the US tend to be clustered at distances that are absolutely viable if we cared to invest. And if we continue to treat passenger rail as an afterthought, of course it will remain one.

This is why hyperloop is so puzzling to me. There’s established processes and supply chains to deliver and sustain high speed rail, and quite a few routes in sparsely populated areas would benefit with little disruption to existing infrastructure, like Vegas-LA (or somewhere ).

Vegas to LA has already broken ground

Train and freight companies seemingly operate with impunity, have a crazy amount of influence over politics and regulation, and despite hundreds of billions of dollars thrown at various mass transit passenger plans over the decades, there's hardly any progress with regards to passenger solutions. These companies don't even have to lobby, apparently, because their influence and regulatory capture make them incredibly powerful.

They pull down around $260 billion a year in the US. $20ish million goes toward political donations and lobbying, by all 6-700 corporations - the stuff that's trackable, that is. Makes you wonder what you'd find if you could follow the money.

Passenger trains in the USA are slow and unreliable, so of course they struggle to find a market.

If they didn't have to queue up behind freight trains trundling along at a bicycle's pace, things may be difference.

> passenger trains lose money and are heavily subsidized to stay afloat.

Roads and highways also lose money and are heavily subsidized to stay afloat.

It's a bit more complicated as I understand it. An on-schedule Amtrak train is supposed to have priority but if they get off-schedule they lose their priority slot. Another problem I gather is that some freight trains are just too long to pull over onto a siding.

> some freight trains are just too long to pull over onto a siding.

Exactly, and in addition to the blocking passenger trains they're at greater risk of derailment [1] and in some communities, particularly rural poor communities with little political power, they block crossings for as much as 30 minutes at a time [2] blocking ambulances, preventing children from getting to school, etc.

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/train-derailment-long-tra...

[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/stalled-freight-trains-cau...

Aren't there any regulations regarding maximum length? In Europe, the maximum allowed length seems to be 740/835 meters.

The longest cargo train in the US was 5.5km long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_trains#General_cargo

A house burned down in a neighborhood in Gaineseville, Georgia last year. Not noted in the news articles about is the fact that the fire department was late because the only way to the neighborhood has a train crossing, and there was a train.

Here in the midwest, the freight companies will intentionally pad the train with empty cars until it's just too long to fit in the passing turnouts and therefore forces passenger trains to pull off and wait. Detroit to Chicago and back is therefore a tossup between arriving early and arriving 12-24hrs late.

In Europe and Asia, we solve that issue by limiting maximum consist weight, usually in the range of 2k to 5k tons.

My wife and I took the Zephyr westbound the entire route back in 2007, and arrived 22 hours late. The whole trip was a nightmare. They ran out of food several times and once served oyster crackers as dinner.

(To Amtrak's credit, they refunded the entire trip.)

It's helpful to look at past history to get some idea of your chances of arriving on time - for example, here's the eastbound California Zephyr's times in Denver for the past month. It's a nice way to travel but it's not at all reliable for a connection, especially in winter.

https://juckins.net/amtrak_status/archive/html/history.php?t...

Send the author of the site an e-mail, he’s pretty approachable. https://www.seat61.com/email.htm

This is one of my favorite sites - I came to know about during my first trip to Europe and used it the next time to get information on even which side of the train to get the seats on for better view and a table. I am so glad it has retained its look and not become like every site on the internet that require a GPU to load.

Same here. Travelling to Europe for the first time from South America and it's been a godsend. Naively thought that train travelling was simpler than it really is (which is completely understandable that's why I say I was being naive). Eurail community posters pointed me to that webpage and didn't need anything else.

Love the simple design too, a godsend nowadays.

I often say that train and transit travel often seems to assume that you're a local who knows what they're doing rather than a potentially first-time visitor who doesn't speak the language.

Most transit systems (and leaking into trains) are oriented toward commuters, because that's the vast majority of the ridership.

The most common "concession" to visitors is often a (slightly overpriced) day or week pass that lets you ride anything anytime.

Oh, I understand the reason.

At least with transit, just tapping a credit card is becoming more common which generally reduces the need to dig into how payment works.

Basically, the reason that it’s not simple is that every country has its own rail operator.

Or more!

I've found advice from seat61.com useful a few times.

He recommends https://raileurope.com/ -- When I used them back when they were loco2, I was impressed by the customer service. I needed to change my train ticket, so emailed them and they sorted it all out for me with minimum fuss, emailing me replacements. At the time it was a lot easier than dealing with the local railway companies in countries where I didn't speak the language. I don't know if they would be as good now that they aren't a startup though.

History of loco2/raileurope: https://www.seat61.com/websites/who-are-raileurope.htm

Since Loco2 became Rail Europe I've found the website has gone heavily downhill.

I now find thetrainline.com often more efficient and more likely to find viable routes at a reasonable price.

How the internet should be. A guy sharing his hobby, providing useful information.

I was just coming on to say this.

I live somewhere where travelling by train is limited to basically local journeys, but love when I see this site get mentioned anywhere, because it reminds me of what the internet can be!

It's a little bit more than a hobby for this guy...

True! But it certainly started out as a hobby and still has that feel to it.

Once you leave Europe it's depressing how badly the world has fallen since the site started - routes via Syria are out, Sudan is a no-go area, Russia is closed to westerners, ferries across the Med to Israel and Egypt have vanished, So many long distance routes simply no longer doable.

In what way is Russia closed to westerners? Last I checked a few months ago, there were no restrictions on entry for British citizens like myself, although a land entry via one of the Baltic states would be necessary, and cash would be difficult to legally exchange.

Is it not possible to enter through Turkey? Turkish Airlines has a pretty expansive network.

Yes or Belgrade. But I'd not recommend it. You can also just stay in Belgrade which has become mini-Russia

The FCO advises against all travel to Russia, which means you're on your own if you get swept up in a wave of arbitrary detention and find yourself on a truck to the frontline in Ukraine.

There's all kinds of amazing new trains in Asia, there's ONCF's sparkling clean TGV from Tangier down to Casablanca, even in infrastructure-phobic USA there are some improvements and more on the horizon.

I just discovered this site a few days ago, when trying to plan overnight rail travel in Europe. Everyone else (including the rail companies!) had missing or outdated information and often sites that were simply broken, and then this guy had like seven different options with all the details and links, everything fully up-to-date, and even recommendations for hotels for the options that included a layover.

Absolute godsend. I hope he got my referral-link bonus.

The whole website is apparently all static hand-edited HTML files (https://twitter.com/seatsixtyone/status/1679954215588823040), so any train company policy changes involve a large-scale find-replace operation (https://twitter.com/seatsixtyone/status/1671815739236401153).

He should add AI to his site!

Not really - the site is great as-is and there's nothing wrong with this approach. It looks like it works really well for Mr. 61.

But I'd imagine it'd be pretty helpful to write tools to help with maintaining the site which do leverage LLM models. Do a combination of search + AI to rewrite + reviewing the individual edits (e.g. through selective git adds). That's actually a plus in favor of flat files - it's all just code and the tools are plentiful. It's very "Unix" and hacker friendly.

I'm imagining a tool like https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider (which I haven't tried yet, but it looks useful for this kind of effort).

A tuned chatbot wouldn’t be a bad idea. The data/knowledge is there in high density.

Someone is going to scrape this site and benefit themselves, travelers, and travel providers - would be nice if it was its creator.

There are few organizations or useful sites with immunity to AI’s impact.

The site has a perfectly functional search bar. There’s no need for AI here.

I feel like making a comment about how yesterday that viewpoint is. But I won't. [0]

We are increasingly going to take for granted that we can talk with information.

Sometimes we just need some facts. Search is great for that.

Other times we need to find solutions for problems that span multiple information areas. Which isn't something search excels at.

Like finding a set of travel arrangements and dates for several friends to come together at some location, given each persons travel context involves different challenges or factors. A plethora of schedules and travel advice only gets you so far on a problem like that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophasis

Or he could just use a bog standard CMS (and even publish to static HTML!)

Why are we trying to cram AI into everything that doesn't need it?

He mentioned that different wording choices causes problems with bulk search and replace. This is the kind of thing LLMs can be really useful for. That and other recently hyped related technologies are all about understanding and processing natural language text and this is exactly what the original stated problem is about.

A CMS likely just moves the text into a different storage medium and doesn't address the stated problem.

I looove this site. This helped me plan a Trans-Siberian/Mongolian train trip almost 15 years ago. So many people I met on the trains used Seat 61, too. An absolute classic.

This is an incredible site that I've used multiple times over the years when planning European train travel from the US. Lots of practical advice on stations, routes, seating layouts, parking/walking, how/where/when to buy tickets, etc. An invaluable site, straight out of the late 90s/early 2000s when people used to build high quality websites that actually solved problems for people.

No idea how all the data gets kept up as well as it does, but I hope this site can continue for decades into the future.

Back in high school, I spent a good chunk of time reading the guides on this site purely just to fantasize about doing the trips myself one day. What a cool blast from the past, particularly given that the site hasn't changed!

This site is the reason I and my family took the overnight sleeper train from Georgetown to Bangkok in 2014.

An incredibly valuable experience. Hundreds of miles of palm oil plantations, shantytowns by the tracks, people living their lives…like brightly lit scenes in my memory. We talk about it as a family years later.

Man in seat 61, thank you!

I took the sleeper from London to Edinburgh (and back) with my father in 2017 because of this website as well. It is clearly a labor of love.

An invaluable resource. I’ve used this before for travelling around Europe by myself for the first time, and it immediately took the stress out of planning “what can I even do” and “how do I even do anything”. The trivia about recommended sides to sit on to get the best view in certain directions is added fun.

Likewise. When we went to Spain last year I was trying to understand how to book tickets and this site was invaluable in explaining how it was all set up and what we could and couldn't do online or in advance.

This site helped me take the family from London to Rome via the beautiful Bernina Pass between Switzerland and Italy. Invaluable!

https://tickets.rhb.ch/en/pages/bernina-express

Now must be a good time to do the Bernina Express. A lot of snow in the mountains and spring-time in the South. You basically get two seasons for the price of one.

The Bernina Express is probably my favourite rail journey to date. I used this site a lot when planning an Interrail trip back in 2017.

I love the comment about a similar hobby website that was posted a few weeks ago (the one about the gates of Hell found all over England [1]) saying that it's part of the British culture to become obsessed with quirky and frankly underwhelming hobbies.

I adore stuff like this, I think it's nerdy and a bit daft yet the world is much richer thanks to gentlemen like these. This is what the Internet is about, let's not lose our founding culture.

---

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39356066

For a number of years, I toyed with building a site about US lighthouses with maps. Then I discovered this guy's site who has visited every one with photos, maps, and descriptions. I decided I'd find another project :-)

https://www.lighthousefriends.com/index.html

I love all the essentially remnants of the old Internet that obsessively chronicle some niche thing.

One of my all time absolute favourite websites. The information is wonderfully detailed and all makes sense in context.

Many are saying you could stick some AI on top of this, but I'm glad this is done manually. There are other websites for travel planning with more automation, and in my experience the information is typically junk.

Nice to see this here. I've stumbled on this page while researching my stop and train change in Brussels on the way to Config Management Camp. This is the internet that I remember from the very early 2000s. Just plain information, a person happy to share their own interest and carve some space out in this sea of webpages.

This is what I want to see more of in the internet.

What a great site!

My wife and I want to do the Toronto-Vancouver trip. The private sleeper room is something like $5000 which is doable with a little planning. Looking at the photos on that site make me excited for the trip.

I wonder if the railways support this site in any way? It seems like they should. He does a great job promoting what’s great about travel by rail.

> I wonder if the railways support this site in any way? It seems like they should.

Amazingly, the author of the site doesn’t take donations, but he encourages donations to his fundraiser for UNICEF https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/seatsixtyone

Glad you like it :)

During my days as a systems engineer I build the underlying SAN, compute, network and the VM itself.

...about 8 yrs ago I did say it should probably be behind cloudflare and on azure/aws etc...looks like its still on the machine I built!

Why should it be behind AWS or CloudFlare? Can't anybody maintain their own servers in 2024, especially when everything works and doesn't crash after a HN spike?

Not to pick on you in particular, but I hate this laziness trend from sysadmins that are the cause of the whole centralisation of the Internet. If you have the knowledge to build a SAN and entire architecture yourself, teach that to the youngbloods, instead of just telling them to get AWS credits.

Make the Internet decentralised again.

---

Don't give a junior dev a cloud server, but teach them to administer a UNIX machine and they won't need free credits from anyone.

- Confucius

It seems very unlikely that it's the sysadmins pushing stuff onto AWS.

Devs who don't want to be sysadmins, managers who don't want capex maybe.

Not the OP, but the thing that springs to mind is to make it resilient to DOS attack and similar. As you say, it didn't crash after the HN spike, but it seems likely that a motivated attacker would not have trouble bringing it down. Also the request latency is quite bad, which doesn't bother me a bit for the type of site that it is, but that's solved easily enough since it should be super cacheable.

Interesting...my thoughts are that moving to the cloud is not lazyness. Cloudflare is for DDOS protection, AWS is so I can focus on the servers not the hardware.

I really do like your point on teaching young bloods I had assumed much like the knowledge about steam trains it was old knowledge that is becoming not needed.

I love this site! Certainly helps to find and travel the beautiful routes like Sarajevo-Mostar or Bar-Belgrad.

This website is the real deal.

International train travel can be daunting, but the author has amazingly compiled all the knowledge you would ever need or want about this topic, in an easy-to-understand format, and with frequent updates (as timetables change).

There is no other resource that compares!

Classic site, and used to be the only way to find out anything sensible about train travel in Thailand. I wonder how hard it'd be to throw an LLM interface on top of it for natural-language queries

I recently went to India and was looking for recommendations for traveling by train. Found this site and was amazed by the information on there. Great site!

The Man in Seat Sixty-One - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20983137 - Sept 2019 (16 comments)

The Man in Seat Sixty-One - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18895833 - Jan 2019 (117 comments)

Browsed through to see what the hype is. I think it needs more timestamps. "Updated at ...". Readers need to know how up to date the information is and if it's still trustworthy. I understand railway systems don't change much but it's still helpful to keep track of time and dates.

No info for trains in Mexico.

Mexico just inaugurated one section of the Tren Maya.

It will connect Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche, Yucatán and Quintana Roo.

Someday.

One of the best sites remaining from the old internet. I am always happy to learn it’s still going.

Previous post from 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18895833

(there are other posts with one or very few comments)

A honorable mention of less hobbyist, more automated https://www.rome2rio.com/

Rome2rio is a lot less accurate. The company just doesn’t care, some of the connections it finds are imaginary. Maybe automation doesn’t solve everything.

IIRC, there is (or possibly was) a "The Man in Seat 61" book. I made good use of it when travelling around Europe about 15 years ago.

Please think about looking tomorrow, HN is flooring that site and it's so great and been around so long.

Eh, the site has been going for at least 16 years and still gets updated regularly, I’m sure it’ll survive some traffic :)

you do you!

Thanks for the nice discovery, i know now how to go to Siracuse by train.

Excellent website, I used it a lot when travelling in India.

This is so laughably incorrect/out of date for the UK travel section that I doubt the rest is of any value. The majority of the advice can be distilled down to “use Trainline”.

Call national rail for travel times? What??

I love the design still looks like early 2000s.

Australian prices are suitably insane. Disappointing, but not unexpected.

The listed trips are pretty long trips with sleepers. Amtrak would probably be in the same ballpark for similar trips in the US.

Unfortunately long-distance train rides in Australia are made unnecessarily expensive by our legacy infrastructure. We're an almost entirely "flat" country, but our train lines curve around on themselves constantly. The trips could be shorter and cheaper, but alas, nobody can afford to travel like this unless they're wealthy.

I can't comment on Amtrak too much, but I've heard it's fairly poorly run?

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