The last European train that travels by sea
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Relatives and friends thought my wife and I were crazy - or at least eccentric. Why would you waste 4 full days (+ 2 days to get to and from Denmark by car).
Turns out, travel time is still travel. And what a beautiful time that was!
There is no stable Internet conncetion on the ferry itself (no cell connection AT ALL at sea), plus you have to pay for it a pretty hefty fee. So from observing other people, +95% did not have Internet access at all.
The ferry itself is not huge, it is not a cruise ship. But large enough to be entertaining and fun to explore. Kids had a few attractions, including a tiny cinema. They sold popcorn though, that's all kids cared about besides the Minecraft movie.
For us, adults, there were a few bars, restaurants to hang out. Even a little library, a corner with board games, couple shops.
Because people were not glued to their phones, you could actually meet and talk to other people, have non-trivial conversations. People would read books, have a sip of coffee, walk around.
Not once did I get bored, not once did I not know what to do. Sure enough, I would pull out the iPhone from my pocket only to see it is completely offline. What was also fun: if I went out with the kids, there was no way I could let me wife know we would be late or any other matters. Same the other way.
Life felt slower, but somehow more real?
Anyway, I can only recommend a travel experience like this, at least once in your lifetime. For us, it became part of the memories we made, besides visiting Iceland itself. I can imagine the same being the case if you travel long distances by train.
The train you may be thinking of, a luxury train that imitates a historic one, is mimicing the the Simplon Orient Express which did not run through Vienna (and also it rarely goes beyond Venice).
I did the same "route" but took some random night trains between each city, which is much more affordable
Only issue is that some legs can only be booked last minute at the physical train station, and not online, hopefully this will change
Ditching my phone as much as possible has been the best decision I've ever made. Life always feels a little slower when you're not constantly inundated with outside noise.
I still pay attention, but instead of constantly paying attention and doing nothing, I pay attention a good amount, and do things instead.
But it turns out that it takes 20h, so twice that speed. Still not fast but better. With that duration it also seems unlikely that the speed is kept artificially low to allow some sleep on the train, as is very common in Europe.
On the way back we decided to drive through france and skip the ferry.
But yes, on the Newcastle to Amsterdam crossing my favourite thing is being completely cut off from the internet, can finally sit down with a book without the compulsive need to check my phone every 5 minutes.
I really liked it, was a cool experience, and an easy way to get on a boat. IDK if it's still like this. I hope it is.
I had checked google maps before the trip and saw a bridge so figured the train would go over that, but looks like it's car only bridge. Was a pleasant surprise.
(As an interesting aside, the Swedish railroad system drives on the left, while the Danish one drives on the right, so the trains have to cross to the other side after crossing the strait.)
So this was "just life" in the 90s and beforehand. The upside you describe was also sometimes the downside. E.g. my mother was traveling for work when one of my brothers was injured in a way that required a trip to the ER for stitches (he's fine). My dad was getting us all (4 kids under 7) into the car as she called from her hotel and he basically had to answer and say that we were on the way to the hospital, and she just had to wait for an update once we got home many hours later.
And yet, I would still agree that "Life felt slower, but somehow more real?" and that we haven't yet found the right equilibrium for always being connected in a way humans were never able to be before. I'm glad experiences like this are still possible.
If you take this ferry, make sure to do the stop in Faroe Islands, it's absolutely amazing.
I plan to sail this route again next year.
Side note: was it just me or this ferry or route is particularly rough? I crossed Baltic like 20 times by ferry (18h crossing), never got sea sick, until this one.
Anyway it wouldn't be too surprising it's less rough than the North Atlantic given the Baltic is closely wrapped in land.
My wife got a bit sea sick on the 2nd day on our way back, I didn't notice any difference. But sure enough, depends on how steady your stomach is...
My family lived in Messina for a while and it seems that in the last 100 years no one was actually interested in building nor genuinely stopping the project for good, just using it to bash whoever is on the opposite side of the argument.
- On the left it's seen as the biggest ecological issue they have in Italy, despite the ferry company handling the passage is a well known mafia-owned monopoly whose ferries leak tons of garbage and oil on the sea every single day.
- On the right they've gone with the most ridiculous, expensive and unachievable version of a project in order to to make sure they can siphon as much money as they can before declaring that the project has to be stopped or whatever.
Every summer I go back to my mother's family and when the topic comes out it's as they're basically stuck in a time loop.
Or probably most of those big infrastructure construction projects.
But the BBT also needs supporting infrastructure from Kufstein to Munich, the so called Brenner Nordzulauf [1], some of which (the Truderinger Spange) is also covered by the Ausbaustrecke 38 programme [2]. Unfortunately, the Brenner Nordzulauf has been hotly contested [3] with very good points being raised - among others, some of the route proposals run through nature protection reservates, people are skeptical of years worth of construction, noise, debris, rail and road blocks, and separation of entire areas by another rail track.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenner-Nordzulauf
[2] https://www.bahnausbau-muenchen.de/projekt.html?PID=29
[3] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/ebersberg/brenner-basis...
And the Edinburgh Tram Project
Future:
- Heathrow Third Runway (assuming the government meddle in it heavily)
- Lower Thames Crossing
However, it's now a good service, popular and the trams are probably going to be expanded to much more of the city?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_Trams
Also the Queensferry Crossing bridge was built with relatively little fuss - there were some delays but those were down to some spells of very bad weather.
It was a "litany of avoidable failures" as the Hardie report explained.
It does look like a tremendous success now though (not financially though. A double whammy for the taxpayer). The ends justify the means I guess?
Mind you - the investigation into the trams itself took far longer than expected and cost far more than anyone thought it should...
It's like the dessert coming out after the buffet! Doubles all round!
It does make sense since tunnels won’t need to closed for high winds like bridges do.
I might have misremembered bits of this.
An initial study into a problem poses a preferred solution.
Time and effort is put into deep study of the solution path. Unfortunately, in this case the study proves it is far less ideal than initially assumed.
The project is switched to Plan B.
Granted, sometimes this kind of early change in direction is for dumb or dishonest reasons, but one cannot perfectly know the results before the studies are completed.
I am in rail design. We are currently designing things for needs in 2030-2060. The world is complicated.
> Sund & Bælt, the Danish transport company overseeing the project, has now confirmed that IVY has not yet completed full testing and has not received final approvals from relevant authorities, despite arriving on site last October. The preparatory delay is about 18 months, a setback that project managers say makes meeting the original 2029 opening target difficult.
> There is also an issue with restrictions around the working conditions. Contracts for the main construction works were signed in 2016, before German planning approval had been granted. That timing meant certain later-imposed requirements – notably restrictions on underwater noise from work vessels and limits on sediment spill in German waters – were not written into the original contracts, complicating attempts to speed up work now that the rules are in place.
2025. In Europe. They burn. Their trash. On the street.
It's their "service" or no service, with some extremely narrow exceptions, like a very small town named Aci Bonaccorsi, which fought that and now they're able to keep their streets on an amazing level of cleaniness compared to nearby municipalities.
Garbage disposal is the last remaining big business handled by the local mafia (drugs are handled by camorra nowadays) and they're absolutely doing anything to avoid losing that.
The bartender was talkingto a local bar owner, and he was explaining how he was trying to find another contractor for garbage disposal because he found the current rate ridiculous. Every contractor hung up on him after hearing his address, and he found out that yakuza had territories around Kabukicho and you'd get in trouble if you took a contract there.
Interesting to hear garbage disposal being a common business organized crime go for. I guess there's many utilities too to have garbage disposal infrastructure for other illegal activities
Instead of the famous Japanese customer service, residential garbage requires you to sort it, put it in transparent bags, put it out on specific days etc. so your neighbors can personally shame you if you do any of it wrong.
Commercial garbage in Tokyo gets left out on the street (like NYC up until this year) and occasionally attracts rats.
The rest of Japan's garbage culture (small bins, poor/mafia organization etc.) is totally self inflicted and is more of a cultural phenomena rather than a technical one.
And I have never heard anything (or were able to find something on google) about an island full of trash. Islands are simply too valuable for that, and you'd also need to bring the trash there by boat.
Zakynthos is the island I was referring to. It's an illegal dumping ground, and even the EU has fined them for it. Also Kalymnos has a decades-old issue with burning trash - they even call it "trash volcano". Lots of other islands also have illegal dumping issues. Also many nature areas in mainland Greece are not in the most pristine state, often littered with junk, often junk that you can tell has been there for a long time. Whenever I went exploring by car, we would find the most beautiful areas but almost always trash everywhere :( Maybe it's gotten better though, I haven't been back since 2019, though I'm not sure I really want to.
[0] https://www.thenationalherald.com/arsonists-run-amok-in-athe...
Backwards regions are subsidised by the cities. Sicily can be made into a tourist resort for pensioners.
Or perhaps building a bridge will enable them to bring water in easily from the mainland?
Speaking with the experience of someone who has spent a good half of his life on that island: Sicily's problems are mainly due to the following factors, in this order: culture and mismanagement. Everything else (yes, including the organized crime) comes in a very, very distant third place.
To figure out which angle is more correct, you need to consider facts about the specific regions.
Per-capita GDP is very low for Sicily relative to other regions - but it still has an overall GDP of around $100B, which is similar to Costa Rica or Croatia. Giving it a car/rail connection to the mainland would be a huge boon for the region and Italy in general.
This is the same debate that happens each time there’s a fixed connection to an island until the damn thing opens and people grow to love it.
It’s a pain in the arse to have to wait for the ferry, to sync your travel plans to ferry times, only to have to change plans again when the ferries break down.
(1) https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-isla...
Fellow Italian here. The whole country is stuck in a time loop. Have you noticed that even the crime pages of the newspapers are filled with articles about investigations on murders of twenty or thirty or even forty years ago? And that on tv, people debate furiously terrorist acts that took place almost 50 years ago- when they also don't get updates from eternally ongoing investigations and trials? In politics, the same reforms that were proposed at the beginning of the '90s are brought up by each new government, generating new controversy and division, until they're forgotten or, sometimes, rolled back by Italy's supreme court. These days there's even a debate going on about the opportunity of introducing sexual education in schools for 6-8 graders, when I remember we had it already in the late '80s.
I've also been on the second-to-last train of this type a few times (Snälltåget from Sweden via Denmark to Germany). That one also got canceled for the same reason – mega bridge construction (Fehmarn Belt). There, you used to get off the train to go up to the canteen for lunch with the truckers.
The Snalltaget sleeper train from Berlin to Malmo used to run on the ferry from Sassnitz to Trelleborg avoiding Denmark altogether, that stopped because the ferries don't run on that route any more, and the train also runs via Padborg.
I don't know about this specific instance, but the Germany-Denmark train-on-a-ferry carried the whole Diesel-powered train, engine and all. It drove onto the ferry on its own, and left it on its own as well.
I had no idea that trains got put on ferries, although I had been puzzled by the way the route on the route map crossed the sea but had assumed it was just to make the diagram simpler. It was quite a surreal thing finding myself unexpectedly on a train on a ferry. It was nice though as you could go and wander round the ferry and it was quite fun seeing it go off the ferry which had special train tracks on it onto the normal train tracks on the land.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854834
What makes it particularly ambitious? The strait of Messina is two miles across, and I don't think that even cracks the top 100 of the world's longest bridges.
The strong presence of organized crime in the area also makes a lot of people uneasy about the whole deal, but that's not a technical issue.
The current longest is in Turkey at 2023 meter.
Each of the pylons of the Messina Bridge will be around 400 meters tall. Which is taller than the Empire State Building.
The strait is too deep, with too much current and seismic activity to place the pylons in the water. So they have to be on the shore, as I understand it.
> "...building a suspension bridge of this scale poses significant engineering challenges. The Strait of Messina is known for strong winds, seismic activity, and deep waters, all of which complicate construction and long-term stability. Engineers will need to ensure the structure can withstand earthquakes, which aren't unheard of in the region, while addressing corrosion from the salty marine environment."
-- https://www.iflscience.com/worlds-longest-suspension-bridge-...
I remember reading an article, posted here on HN, that went into much more depth about why this was all unusually challenging, but I haven't found it again.
Now, I don't really mind this, it's a bit of a tradition if you want, but I asked a relative of mine who used to work for the Italian national train company, and he told me that this train works like this cause in the past all the Sicilian migrants would travel with a lot of luggage, and it would be very impractical for them to transfer all of that twice. Nowadays this is not really the case anymore.
I went on the train between Hamburg and Copenhagen around 2007. Crossed on a ferry between Puttgarden (Germany) and Rødby (Denmark). Looks like this was discontinued in 2019 but I'm not sure what replaces the Hamburg-Copenhagen link. I'm glad I did it, it was definitely a strange experience to disembark the train on to a ferry and go and stand on the deck as it crossed.
The Helsingborg-Helsingør train ferry was replaced (car ferries remain) by railway on the Öresund Bridge (from the 2011 TV series The Bridge) between the big cities Malmö, Sweden and Copenhagen, Denmark in 2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98resund_Bridge
The Puttgarden-Rødby train ferry was replaced by a new longer but faster railway route via the Great Belt Bridge and Flensburg until the Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link is ready. https://www.seat61.com/trains-and-routes/hamburg-to-copenhag...
https://en.japantravel.com/aomori/memorial-ship-hakkoda-maru...
No one will ask you for a ticket (no one will ask for anything, actually). Or at the least it was like this some twenty years ago when I did it.
This is also a great way to randomly arrive in Siracusa wondering how did you end up there, in some sort of re-enactment of the last Indiana Jones movie.
I have taken this train and it would have been a nightmare to wake up everyone at like 3am, get them and all their stuff out and onto the ferry, and then do it all in reverse on the other side. It would add at least an hour to the trip if not more.
Don't those already exist? I don't know, but I assume that regular passenger ferries operate on this route, no?
> it would have been a nightmare to wake up everyone at like 3am
I presume that if one were offloading passengers onto an existing ferry one would not schedule the train to arrive during normal ferry operating hours rather than 3AM.
I think the right answer here is that Sicily is bigger than I thought, about 100 miles across, and so the onward travel time can be significant, and so if you're going to offer a night train whose final destination is (say) Marsala then putting the train on a ferry in the middle of the night makes sense.
I’m looking forwards to it as it’ll nearly halve the Copenhagen <-> Hamburg train time, down to 2 hours and 20 minutes.
> In 2025 when the tunnel (the Fehmarn Sound Tunnel) was still not approved by authorities it was revealed that it would not be opened in 2029 as it was then planned but in 2032, which would delay train traffic along the new connection until then. Road traffic can use the old bridge.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fehmarn_Sound_Tunnel
I would bet actual money that we (as in we Germans) don't get that tunnel done before 2035.
Since then I've been wary of dismantling too much backup infrastructure. The rail tracks to the ferry terminal was still in place in this case, because they are listed as NATO infrastructure, still they where barely maintained.
Only these italians had the genius idea to keep going with the train.
I think it's more about the state of the infrastructure, and the scope of the railway carrier, at least in this case with Sicily.
For example the railway ferries between Sweden and Denmark ended long before the bridge was built, in the 80s.
As of now, flying remains way cheaper, despite being worse ecological. But this won't change like that.
Very often you can make an earlier arrival at a destination via night train than you can via plane - unless you fly in the evening before.
I know. But my ecological consciousness has a problem with that. So yes, I also like night trains. And I also like bridges in general for better connection. I did not run the numbers to see if it makes sense here or just for the Mafiosi (I heard that complaint a lot). I am arguing against the romanticed point above, keeping the ferry because some think it is romantic.
Have you ever been on a night train?
I love train travel but night trains are rough since I find it very difficult to sleep. But, I cant really sleep on planes either.
In my experience sleeping on the train also takes a bit of getting used to. Then again, maybe it’s really not for you - that’s ok.
They will never know the joy of a 4am ice water facial followed by 21 hours of grinding before 3 hours of sleep before another 4am ice water facial.
Transport is a *tool* for most people—a means, not an end, as it is for a tiny subset of travel reporters (overrepresented in print). It dehumanizes people to delegitimatize their subjective valuation of their own lives' priorities. Wanting to go fast, deprioritizing transport as a mere tool, doesn't make them defective people.
High-speed rail is an awesome thing and it weirds me out to have been shamed and mocked for advocating for it.
Some of the best quality time I've spent with my son has been during train journeys. Like many two-year olds he loves the whole experience. Watching out of the window while the train is moved onto a ferry would blow his mind. I agree that high-speed trains are marvellous; I'm sad that their introduction deprives us of some rich cultural experiences.
Unfortunately I should have factored Trenitalia (Italian train operator) into the mix. The train departed an hour late - not such a big deal you'd think for an overnight sleeper train - but it arrived late at Roma Centrale so we couldn't board it and get comfortable. Two small kids at 10pm on a train platform in a big city is not much fun.
The sleeper car was tired, but clean enough. Unfortunately, we'd been mis-advised and there were no buffet/restaurant facilities on the train. We'd assumed that breakfast (either delivered or in said car) was provided, and all we had were a few snacks.
Once the train started moving, the gentle rock-you-to-sleep I remembered from previous night trains was notably absent; rather it was a violent side-to-side pitching that increased concerningly when the train got up to full speed. As the bunks in our compartment were transverse to the direction of travel, in my upper bunk this ended up feeling like lying on a see-saw.
Unsettling accompanying grinding noises pointed to a lack of maintenance, and sure enough, at ARGH o'clock, a frantic banging on the compartment door and some italo-english gesturing from a Trenitalia attendant made it clear that we were being ejected from our broken car. We had to pack up all our stuff which we'd exploded all over the compartment, plus wake up two sleeping kids, and pajama-clad, move onto the 3am platform of Who-knows-where while new compartments were found for all the unlucky residents of our little cocktail-shaker.
Our new digs were much more stable and the overnight ferry crossing passed so smoothly that none of us even woke for more than a second or two when there were some bumps and clanks. I second the request for more speed on the Sicily side though; when you've got a hungry family with no breakfast available, you just wanna get there ASAP. Pretty nice scenery though. Needless to say we demolished everything we could find at Palermo station on arrival though!
We had a 3 person sleeper cabin for ourselves. They do serve a little breakfast - espresso, shrink-wrapped croissants, some biscuits with Marmelade and some salty crackers. Not a great meal, but good enough. If you’re going beyond Messina to Syracuse or Palermo, you should bring food along - or pick something up on the ferry.
The rolling stock is old - as in the toilets are still the kind where you can see the tracks, not a closed system. So they close the toilets a while before you get on the ferry.
Still, the ride was comfortable enough to actually sleep, even though the top bunk is a bit short for people of my size (1,85) - but neither wife nor kid could be convinced to climb up there.
Going to bed in Milano and waking up with a view of the coast was amazing. The beds fold up and you have a proper 3 seat cabin for the rest of the ride.
The ride was amazingly cheap - we paid 160 EUR for two adults and one 8year old, one way, so 330 in total.
BTW. I was on the Hamburg-Copenhagen train on the Puttgarten-Rødby ferry in 2015 during the height of the Syrian refugee crisis. I had changed my booking to earlier trains because of expected delays. It and connecting trains were packed, as were the train stations, also with immigration officials and volunteers. Brings tears to my eyes to this day.
The route actually does still run, of course, but it takes the long way around via land until the Fehmarn Belt tunnel[1] opens around 2029.
> After the 2019 closure of the Puttgarden-Rødby service between Germany and Denmark and the seasonal Sassnitz-Trelleborg route linking Germany and Sweden in 2020, the Intercity is now the last one running. All the rest were replaced by bridges or tunnels, or proved too expensive to maintain as demand fell in favour of air travel.