Hacker News Reader

Comment by ukandy | Hacker News Reader

A great benefit is you end up in the heart of a city, not at airfield 80 miles away. Lock your bag up in the station and explore.

If you like your long railway journeys, Olso to Bergen is beautiful 7 hour trip.

View on HN

And you can watch the entire 7 hour trip from Oslo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7VYVjR_nwE

This is very relaxing to have on in the background.

That is very cool. I'm testing your theory now.

There's something very special about walking into a train station in the heart of a European city, and seeing a departure board that looks like this: http://www.enjoy-europe.com/hte/chap17/images/P1020015-Bruss...; the sense that you could just buy a ticket and jump on a train to anywhere. You tend not to get the same feeling from an airport departure board, where for the most part you couldn't just buy a ticket and fly to any of those destinations.

I'll second Oslo to Bergen. We did it in reverse, as part of the 'Norway in a Nutshell' itinerary which is about 12 hours (can be done over two days) because it replaces some of the rail journey with a fjord cruise, the Flam railway, and a mountain coach.

In Europe, the convenience/inconvenience of airport locations varies a ton (which does influence purchase choices somewhat). For example Frankfurt's airport is only 8 minutes by commuter rail from the city center, and Copenhagen's is 12 minutes. But Paris-CDG and London-LHR are far from their city centers.

You still have to trek through the airport, wait in security lines etc etc. so in reality it takes much longer than the time it takes the train to travel from the airport to the city. That said flying is often if not nearly always cheaper for short hauls in Europe.

and Oslo is so far it doubles if not triples cost of your cheap plane ride (30 bucks for train ticket between city and airport)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com