Why Eurail is still a great way to city-hop by train across Europe, for art museums, Roman ruins, slow food, Venice – whatever pleasures you choose on a whim
- 2021 was the European Year of Rail, an initiative to promote train travel, and Peter Neville-Hadley criss-crossed Europe by Eurail pass as he’d done once before
- From art museums in Madrid and Florence to Renzo Piano’s Fiat factory, vaporetti in Venice and more besides, he makes the most of the pass
It seems to have passed by largely unnoticed, for obvious reasons, but 2021 was the European Year of Rail, an initiative intended to promote trains as a relatively sustainable form of travel and reintroduce them to the youth, who in recent decades have instead taken to the skies with Europe’s innumerable budget airlines.
Once, during the long university holidays, the continent’s lumbering overnight trains were packed with under-26s clutching Interrail or Eurail passes. They overflowed from the compartments of unreserved coaches to line the corridors in their sleeping bags.
In the summer of 1977, I was among their number, a little blue-and-white paper passbook offering month-long rail travel stashed sweatily with dampening passport and travellers’ cheques in a grubby cotton money belt under my denim shirt.
The overnight trains were a means of saving on dormitory and guest-house expenditure, and a friend and I kept other costs down by living on snacks assembled in supermarkets, even if a lack of language skills sometimes led to purchases that were inedible.
We travelled almost as far north as trains go, to Sweden’s Kiruna, above the Arctic Circle, because we’d met some Swedish girls on the sleeper train from Paris to Rome and decided to accept their invitation to visit.