Sweden Wants to Revive Europe’s Overnight Trains

Re:Sweden Wants to Revive Europe’s Overnight Trains by Mediterraneo10 on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @04:17PM (#19558150)

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.

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Re:Sweden Wants to Revive Europe’s Overnight Trains by Scoundreller on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @04:27PM (#19558238)

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.

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Re:Sweden Wants to Revive Europe’s Overnight Trains by seppel on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @05:30PM (#19558772)

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.

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Re:Sweden Wants to Revive Europe’s Overnight Trains by netsharc on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @06:55PM (#19559372)

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.

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Re:Sweden Wants to Revive Europe’s Overnight Trains by Xylakant on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @04:22PM (#19558197)

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

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Re:Sweden Wants to Revive Europe’s Overnight Trains by gpvos on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @06:06PM (#19559041)

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/

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