I've had these train photos forever it seems. I keep wanting to do a train post but I never know what to write about so it never really happens. Today I've decided to just go for it - to freewrite a little and see what comes of it. Bare with me, it could be a rocky road.
Inserts a photo of a tunnel, words "Depart" written overtop of it. Writer is subtely implying that a journey is about to begin
We only took the train on a few occasions while living in France. We always found the trains to be way too expensive with very little benefit to make it worthwhile. The routes almost never got us to our destination faster than driving would which was very surprising and always begged the question, "why would we pay more money to travel at the same speed, on someone elses schedule, to get to our destination later in the day, and then not have our vehicle with us at the location to be able to branch out as needed to go on day trips?" Okay that was a long question but you get the idea.
That last part (renting a car at the destination location) would also mean spending even more money on top of an already ridiculously high train ticket. As you may have gathered by now, we found trains to almost never be worth it in the end.
The long distance train system worked for us just one time when we took the high speed rail from Paris to Marseilles. This is where the pictures in this post were taken. I used a different filter on the photos because the skies were cloudy and white that day and ended up washing out the images. The filter gives them an interesting sort of look in my opinion though.
The St. Charles train station in Marseilles was quite large, as one would expect in a major city. It was situated at the opposite end of the city from the Notre Dame de la Garde Basilica. It was on top of a hill and had an amazing view of the church and the sprawl below it.
The station was built in 1848 and had this really impressive staircase out front. The staircase became the main focus of my picture taking that day. It just had so much character about it.
So as I was saying, this was the only trip that the long distance train system actually worked out for us. We got to our destination within 3 hours, which was incredible since the drive would have taken us at least 8-9 hours otherwise, if not more. We only spent a long weekend in the city also and didn't branch out to the surrounding area, so we didn't need to rent a car for this particular trip. The high speed rail made it worth while from a travel time perspective but it did still cost us a fair bit of money. The price of our combined tickets were a few hundred Euros for sure. I'm going by memory now but I recall it being a minimum of €245 - €350, plus 32 euro for the train to Paris and back, plus the fee for parking our car at the train station. It was like that anytime that we tried to book anything. As such, we could never make the train system work for us after that trip to Marseilles. Tickets always had to be booked way too far in advance as well, weeks if not months before departure, so spontaneous travel was completely out of the question. We would always do the cost benefit analysis and total up all of our driving expenses (fuel, tolls, parking at the hotel...etc) and driving always came up significantly cheaper, not to mention the expense of renting a vehicle or taking other trains, if we planned to branch out from our base camp.
And so we almost always drove.
As I write this I'm starting to think that I've said all of this before. I can feel the familiarity of myself windging about train systems. But the question is, was it on Hive, or was it a conversation with someone, or better yet a conversation in my head? I'm not sure, but what's done is done. This is another case of "I've come too far and I'm not turning back now."
The moral of the story is that trains tend to be hit or miss in their travel value in my opinion. When they work out for you they are great but many times they are just more hassle than they are worth.
But it did work out for us on this trip and we were even able to bring the dog with us that time. Here we are in a pub on the last day or our trip, killing some time before heading back to the station. He's a tired boy, as were we all on that trip. I will say that the one major benefit to train travel is that you can sleep while you travel. I think we all needed to catch up on some sleep that day, so we took the opportunity to do so on the train ride back home.
Ends post in similar way as the begining, with a photo of opposite tain station tunnel dedicated to "Arrivals." Writer subtely implies that we have now arrived at our conclusion. Also note the reverse order of the post. Writer had a choice to start with the arrival shot, to showcase the travelers arrival at the destination - Marseilles, but instead writer chose the reverse to demonstrate that the subject of the post is not the travel destination but the written verbage. Writer pointed out at the begining of the post that he was unclear exactly what this post would be about... anyway, this is all very complicated and completely irrelevant information so don't spend much time thinking about it. Goodbye.
Trains were the only way we got to many places when young (big age gap here), doing Europe was so inter-connected with trains, trams, vernaculars, busses, OK sometimes a lot by foot too!
Now to make you sob, one month '1st class pass' in 1978 cost drum roll USD $500 no additional/hidden costs onto paddle boats on lakes, nor any other form of transport mentioned above!
Shows how split cost wise currently, making more off each individual travel.
!BEER I love train travel.
Yeah the systems are much better in Europe for being interconnected that's for sure. North America was built around the car.
Times have certainly changed in terms of cost. $500 for the month would be incredible. But let's see what $500 in 1978 converts to today in terms of purchasing power... quick Google search
So that would be like paying $2300 today. Still probably a better deal back then
Where the value goes haywire is our currency ZAR to USD 1978 was 0,87:1 today 1:18,3542 this is where we have been battered!
Holy! That's a crazy swing. Yikes
Exactly why travel has become but a dream!
Yeah I can imagine. Sorry that it happened 😞
Trains are ridiculously expensive in UK as well, and the stupid unions are always on stirke even though they're well paid. I don't think I've been on the trains in France so can't comment unfortunately.
Rauns in German, my recent trip were a bit cheaper than UK. Especially when I found they did all day group tickets for 4 people which covered all public transport apart from intercity fast trains but that wasn't too big a problem for us.
I enjoy train travels as I'm so lazy in driving but like you say, it can be quite expensive, sadly
Yeah they went on strike a lot in France as well and the trains were often delayed or cancelled on a normal day which was a huge pain in the ass as well. I love passive travel as well to be able to sleep or read or do whatever on a train instead of driving. I would even pay a little more to get somewhere quicker. I just hated that it would be 7 hours and €150 all in to drive to a place or €350 and 7.5 hrs (or up to 10 hrs in bad cases where transfers are involved) to take the train, plus we would lose the entire day to travel because we couldn't leave super early in the morning and then we wouldn't have a car at our destination. We just couldn't make it work in most cases.
That being said the train system in Canada is absolute shit to non-existent. No interconnected system and the one train line that heads into Toronto is super expensive and extremely slow. It's garbage.
I have been thinking about trains recently. Mainly because of the price of gas, increase in demand on the logistics side of the supply chain with direct fulfillment, and the decline of rail use in my area.
The convenience factor is definitely not there in North America when it comes to commuting but I wonder if there will be a resurgence in freight usage.
Either way, I do love seeing the old trains chugging down the track even though they seem shorter than they were decades ago.
Trains are much more popular and widely used in Europe right?
Yeah the train system is shit in Canada in my opinion. The GO train is useless. It's super expensive and super slow, has very few stations and at certain times of day it only runs every hour. Not very effective at all. If we had a good rail system to bring commuters to the major cities quickly, efficiently and cost effectively then it would relieve a lot of traffic from the highway as well. Our highway system is essentially a failed system since there is gridlock at nearly all times of the day in several areas (days, weekends, morning, afternoon, night, doesn't matter).
So we basically have an ineffective train system and an ineffective vehicle system....
Trains were quite popular in Europe for sure.
Driving was also a dream in France. It killed me that I could drive to work each day through two towns, on one major highway and two minor highways in just 20 minutes and hit zero stop lights and only one stop sign. Here I literally hit 2 stop signs and two traffic lights coming out of my neighborhood...lol then I get stuck in traffic every morning in stop and go for 10 minutes getting onto the 401 because it has two probably 10-30 thousand cars (just guessing) in the morning all trying to merge from two on ramps onto two lanes...🙄 Then I hit approximately 12+ traffic lights once I get into the city... In France the drive would take 7 minutes, here it takes 30. And that's just because they have effective round-abouts there instead of lights and signs. You don't realize how broken a thing is until you experience the alternative. It's like: "what do you mean that you can drive across country without getting stuck in traffic and there are no stop signs or traffic lights?"
okay rant over
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