Paris-Warsaw (and then to Moscow) exists, and runs once a week.

There's no official (government/public run) website, so Seat 61 is probably the best resource.

https://www.seat61.com/paris-moscow-express.htm

The Warsaw to Paris trip on this train takes almost 21 hours... It's just a regular train, not particularly high-speed. There are a faster options available (down to 16 hours), but they require multiple layovers so I wouldn't say they're viable in practice. Overall, Europe is mostly dominated by cheap airlines, esp. in the Eastern part.

Actually, the Eastern part still has several useful and quite cheap night trains. In the west, lots are being cancelled because the train companies would rather have us take high speed trains.

Yep, but the distance that you can travel overnight is usually well under 1000 km... Which, even in Europe, is rather a regional and not a continental trip. The latter are practical pretty much only via air.

Seconded, it's a very well curated and updated site.

I second the recommendation of Bahn.de. For like two decades now it has provided a way to search train schedules across Europe when the national rail companies didn’t bother to provide their own accessible interface.

I was thoroughly confused trying to book a French train yesterday when I realized that the regular SNCF website only lets you browse train schedules.

You had to lookup the schedule on another website (oui.sncf) to do the booking.

Then Iberia airlines kept showing a different date at the top menubar, which was a day before what I was actually booking. Thankfully the date in the body was correct.

Bahn.de is remarkable. You can search for Paris->Beijing if you want(202h with one change or 173h with three changes). Or you can look up the train schedule of a remote Scotish villages.

Off-topic, I remember reading about the history of the online Bahn schedule lookup, it apparently started with a guy, not affiliated with them, who put the contents of the Bahn's CD-ROM timetable online. IIRC that was 1998.

Edit: 1994! The page: https://www.remote.org/frederik/projects/railserver/history.... , and it was just an email address where you could send an email with a special syntax

     #FROM vonbahnhof
     #TO tobahnhof     
     #DATE mm-dd-yy
     #TIME hh:mm

and you'd get a reply telling you the train connections. From a cronjob that ran twice a day!

The (German) how it worked page is even more fascinating: https://www.remote.org/frederik/projects/railserver/technik....

"If we are at step 4 for a long time, I'm probably personally at the machine and doing some tinkering.". I love that there's no separation between a developer and productive system.

While you can generally search trips, last time I checked you couldn’t book anything that doesn’t either start or end in Germany.

You can book some trips that go through Germany but don't actually start or end there (e.g., Amsterdam-Göteborg).

Conversely, there are some trips that are best booked online on the web site of the national railway of a third country. For example, the site of the NMBS (Belgian Railways)[0] knows about some Dutch fare reduction cards that the DB (Germany) doesn't know about, while it also knows about more German stations than the NS (Netherlands) does, so some (admittedly fairly obscure) tickets from the Netherlands to Germany can only be bought online on their site.

[0] https://www.b-europe.com/

Warsaw on a warm summer evening. The sun is setting and there is a beautiful sky above the equally beautiful city. You relax into you sleeper cabin, and gaze out of the window waiting for the train to depart. 'Such a friendly city. Beautiful country.' you think to yourself. The train pulls out of the station. You watch the countryside pass as the night turns dark. You go to sleep.

-

You wake up at Gare du Nord. At least you think it's Gare du Nord. This can't be Paris, surely?! You think to yourself. You quickly leave the train to try and find out what horrendous 3rd world shithole your wrong train has taken you to... You immediately step in dog shit. You try to hop on one foot and clean it off. An tour group barge past you and knocks you over. A commuter flicks his cigarette toward the floor, hitting you in the face. He doesn't see you. Or maybe he just doesn't care. You can't tell. 'I need to get back to civilisation' you think to yourself as you get up and dust yourself off. You go to grab you suitcase. It's not there. It's in the hand of a Romanian running off down the platform. Welcome to Paris.

I thought the punch line would be that he'd wake up parked on a siding in a Warsaw suburb 8 hours later. If Amtrak was in charge that's definitely what would have happened.

Downvoted - your Romanian stereotype is unacceptable and you need to know this

+1 Internet offended point to you.

This sounds like something from '80 days'

I don't know, I just arrived in Paris night and immediately after stepping out of Garre Du Nord, I was walloped with an overwhelming scent of urine. Not that far off.

bahn.de used to be my go-to place (even for trains inside Italy) but these days https://www.thetrainline.com/ is the best for finding good train connections across Europe.

https://www.rome2rio.com/ can come in handy as well.

Transfer times are a bit too much. Rail doesn't seem prepared to international travel.

For longer trips, I like having longer transfer times, just to have some kind of buffer in case of delay.

> Rail doesn't seem prepared to international travel.

There is some truth to that. You used to be able to buy a single ticket from Lisbon to Kiruna, and travel leisurely all the way, knowing you would arrive there even if you missed a train somewhere; you could just take the next one. Nowadays, you can't. You'll have to split up your trip into several tickets, and if your first train is delayed and you miss the train on your second ticket, you cannot just jump on the next train with it: each ticket is treated as a separate trip.

Also, if you buy your ticket online, you will probably have to visit multiple web sites to buy the separate parts of your trip. International ticket offices in most countries on the continent can book an entire trip for you, but will charge you extra booking costs for that.

Actually, for really long trips it's probably best to buy an Interrail/Eurail pass.

I did exactly what you describe, about ~12 years ago, traveling Paris --> Florence, and Florence --> Amsterdam. We took a day train back to Paris from Amsterdam.

Bahn.de allows cross-Europe booking in general, though I’ve not tested that route.

Try cp.sk for searching.