83. And Would You Like Engineering Works With Your Eurail App?

(Athens - Meteora - Thessaloniki - Istanbul - Sofia - Bucharest - Sighisoara - Budapest - Zagreb - Ljubjlana - Bratislava - Leipzig - Dresden - Berlin - Warsaw from 17th March to 20th April 2026)

Warsaw: 19^th April, 2026:

We have completed a brilliant (mostly) overland (mostly) trip from Athens to Warsaw. Eurail passes are now phone apps, with occasional glitches at unpredictably critical times, as you will see...

There is a massive EU railway building project from the Rhine to the Danube to speed up reliable transit of freight and passengers from France and Germany to Austria and Romania. As a train traveller, negotiating or travelling through this project has its (delayed) moments… and then there are the fellow passengers and diverse train crews and our own stuffups to endure along the way: enjoy!

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Athens to Kalambaka: Friday 20^th March:

It’s slightly breezy-brisk morning at minimalist Larissa (now ‘Gare Centrale’) station in Athens. The train to Thessaloniki roars in. We clamber on, following the squeezing/shoving crowd. The businesslike conductor arrives; sighs: “You do realise these tickets are for yesterday’s train?”  We do now! “Please go to Car 2 and sit in the first two rows.”

 Who knew that Hellenic Railway has reserved “naughty seats” on its trains?

Brisk conductor reappears, looks at me and says “Over 65, discount!”; looks at my younger travel companion who prides himself on youthful reputation: “I will judge that you are over 65, discount for YOU!”. Travel Companion in a bind: shocked at physical assessment; loving a good discount… Still recovering.

Kalambaka to Thessaloniki: Saturday 21^st March:

Grasping correctly dated tickets in the pre-dawn fresh air, we approach the 5.35am trackwork bus to the small village Paleofarsalos: junction for the train line from Athens to Thessaloniki, also undergoing a massive upgrade. The station has a “bar”. We are mildly optimistic about maybe a breakfast coffee…?

More than three hours to wait… There was no movement in the streets as the bus trundled into Paleofarsalos. The 1970’s concrete station has seen better days. The original station and low platforms remain a few hundred metres to the north. A large ticket office is festooned with signs in several languages stating that it is no longer staffed. The train indicator screens are blank. Only one small, taped and handwritten note on the rarely-used station entry doors (because most people head straight to the bar) notes that the few trains currently running all leave from platform 2. This note took some finding…

Two and a half hours to go: the bar is worn; dank, with mission-brown laminated panels, largely held up by curling strips of aluminium. Assorted, worn and non-matching brown faux-leather furniture from the same era adorns metal framed tables with their matching chipped-brown woodgrain-look laminate which scrape along the brown tiled floor. The aroma is last night’s alcohol and tobacco struggling against pine disinfectant. Toilets are cold and worn and some flush. It’s warm and worn and torpid and the machine coffee and ham roll (one of 4 on offer) are ok. We settle in, charging devices and reading for an extended time.

Some excitement! A young backpacking pair struggles into puffer jackets and luggage for the expedition to platform 2. An elegant American woman in her 30’s:  large straw hat, light brown jumpsuit ; massive sunglasses and roller bag follows. She shared our minibus on yesterday’s Meteora Tour, posing for scores of grinning, perfectly made-up selfies… She’s not quite so perfectly presented now. After a quick exchange of passengers, the diesels roar south across the flat landscape whose main local feature is a skeletal two-car diesel train languishing in the station siding, extraordinarily vandalised and tagged, and not departing on the Kalambaka branch line any time soon.

One hour to go: a few passengers from the departed express from Thessaloniki have straggled into the bar for their 3 hour sentence-with-coffee before the connecting bus leaves for their particular  Meteora experience. A couple of local old blokes have dragged themselves in for their first shots of the morning, locating a remote for the TV to find what seems to be a some kind of “Good Morning Paleofarsalos” infotorial program. Luminous, sunshiny screen colours contrast with the misty dawn light beyond the several glass doors and everything brown between ourselves and the chrome counter with the officious blonde attendant studying her phone until the other morning train might arrive. The old blokes pull up a couple of worn chairs and settle in.

10.25: We’re on the train to Thessaloniki!

Right day, right seats, and a “Dear Passengers…” broadcast apology for the “delay due to railway works”. We anticipate an afternoon of seafront promenading, brightly coloured streets of tenements, remnant Ottoman and Roman architecture and a fine dinner. The upturned, angelic gold-sculpted face of Alexander The Great is in the station lobby to greet us. Nice!

Istanbul: Tuesday  24/3/26:

The Eurail Rail Planner app (my electronic train ticket for the next 4 weeks: do not think of getting on a train if you haven’t accurately programmed the journey into a working app) has frozen on my phone. No dramas says the “Help” on the app, just reload from the app store and all might be well (there are 3 other interventions suggested if this fails. Fortunately there is no rush as our sleeper tickets into Bulgaria are the paper kind, ordered in advance from an agent in London, as one does).

One day later, the app loves me again. Unrequited.

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Friday 27/3/26: Sofia Sever to Ruse

(AKA “Rousse” or, in Bulgarian Cyrillic script: “PYCE”).

“The train from Sofia does not go from Sofia as the station is being rebuilt; you go to Sever!”

A short, pre-dawn tram ride takes us from the Central Station Square on a 20 minute trundle through unprepossessing Soviet-era apartment blocks to Sever terminus. The rubbish, long grass and stray black dogs are unpromising.

The “station” is actually a long, high, grey, administrative shed.  Beyond a “Staff Only” door stands a variety of alluring vending machines, out of reach to passengers, with the vanquished promise of maybe a hot coffee with the hotel’s meagre breakfast box? The public area is cold: grey-walled, concrete floored with a sole concrete park bench in the centre, and a small ticket window under a blue-grey screen of train departure times, but no platform information. Bulgarian trains seem to be held together by vast and lurid graffiti tagging, so the ordered grey-upon-grey station is something of a relief.

Eschewing the delights of the cold concrete bench, we ambled outside to the platforms (all crumbling concrete with white painted edges, 30cm high, requiring some hoiking of weight-lifted baggage before clambering up the steep steel carriage steps to reunite with it the warm, relative comfort inside. A passing uniform assured us that the 5 carriages over the other side made up our train: two second-hand express carriage purchases from German Railways with not much graffiti over their fading German colour schemes, yet; three Communist-era “dog box” compartment carriages: the first two encrusted in years of graffiti, the third freshly painted onto two-tone blue. On advice from the “uniform”, we dragged our bags down to the distant level crossing between five platforms, climbed in and made ourselves comfortable in reserved seats in the “first (German) car”. The lack of a carriage destination board (we were looking for “PYCE”) did not overly concern us.

But not for long…

Following the arrival of an adjacent suburban train ,our carriage was now packed. An abrupt departure was followed by an equally abrupt conductor ejecting us from the lovely German carriages to “back, BACK!”). Our actual reserved seats were in a dog-box of 6 seats, fortunately NOT in the graffitied and shabby cars, but in the freshly renovated and somewhat cleaner back carriage, well away from a noisy high school group tour. Three seats on one side of our compartment were occupied by a corpulent, snoring man of late middle age: scratching and farting. We settled into the opposite row of seats and resumed breakfast-box ham and cheese rolls and fresh fruit, choosing to closely observe the increasingly rugged Balkan Mountains and ravines beyond the windows, not the dubious vision laid out in front of us.

Our snorting companion was shaken awake by his phone alarm about an hour later in Zverino station. Realising the train had arrived, early, he grabbed his gear and ran, just skidding onto the platform as the train slowly accelerated.

The rest of the 6 hour journey from the mountains to the rolling plains across north eastern Bulgaria leading to the Danube River were pleasant enough in our – now – private compartment. When the train was divided at Gorna Oryahovitsa, the minimally-graffitied German express carriages had headed east to Varna. We were grateful to our directive train conductor from Sever. For the more leisurely final stretch to “PYCE” along secondary lines, across undulating farmlands, she was replaced by a striking razor-styled, bleach-blonde, scarlet-lipped, massively-black-booted and belted woman who regularly checked tickets and Ran a Tight Train to the border. Equally smart were the uniformed station attendants who stood stiffly to attention on the platform in all weathers for the arrival of each train, before checking their large station clock at the office door, then flagging the train away, right on time.

Friday 27/3/26: Ruse to Bucharest:

I’ll call her Eva.

We met on the daily Romanian international train across the massive “Friendship Bridge” carrying road and rail over the border of the Danube River from Ruse into Romania at Giurgiu. We were both standing at the largest and cleanest of train windows to photograph that border crossing moment. Slight and sandy haired in her 30’s from Germany, she briefly introduced her engineer husband (admiring the bridge steelwork as we slowly rumbled high above the Bulgarian shipyards, power generators and marine industries): “He loves trains; not much conversation in English!” Not much conversation at all, as it turned out, for the next three hours.

“I’m a Christian woman from Germany who is despairing about what is happening to her country!” I made some perfunctory comment about how politics is changing the world over… and she jumped straight in: “As a white Christian woman from a Christian country, I’m so pleased that we have Alternative For Germany now. They really understand the danger we are in from immigrants…” She was also an admirer of Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni. “…She makes it clear: you can assimilate or you can GO! Anyone who has really read the Koran, knows that Moslems CANNOT assimilate! It is dangerous and not for 21^st Century Christian Countries…” By this point I was pondering the train’s information screen, wedged between my garrulous new “friend” and window (husband escaped into a deep doze by now), willing the train’s speedometer to accelerate and reduce the two hours remaining, as we trundled towards Bucharest. My Filipino travel companion heard some of what was to come and had already speedily evacuated to the far end of the train, nose-in-book, before he might become a some kind of discussed model of assimilation, or not….

Sometimes conversations can be between a strongly opinionated person and a companion whose silence might be perceived as tacit agreement, when it’s anything but. A crowded Romanian train is not my preferred context for unpicking and engaging in some kind of extreme racial debate with a foreign stranger who, it turns out, is also an immigrant, having moved to Bulgaria for the warmer weather and cheaper lifestyle while earning high German wages teaching and mentoring online. But I digress…

What followed, after leaving the racial stuff behind, was genuinely engaging. She was a linguistic polymath (currently learning Georgian, her 15^th language) while engaged in online teaching of Bulgarians who are learning spoken German. Much of her family had lived in the old East Germany of the DDR: she described life under Communism in detail, and how her family had all travelled to live in the west “when the wall came down… unfortunately followed by the Turkish…”

She’d always wanted to visit Australia (not being encouraged by her current listener…) “…but especially Samoa where they cook in the ground,” and would probably be, just, Christian enough for her? I suggested, perhaps: American Samoa…?

The train slowed (even further) on arrival into Videle, and my international diplomacy was cut short by the reality of long-distance factory-worker commuters charging into the train, searching for the few remaining seats into Bucharest. With a flourish of her short, sandy hair, she woke her dozing husband to reclaim her reserved seat across the aisle. For the next 40 minutes I took a deep and stoic fascination, gazing the other way out of the window on my side of the carriage through the drizzly outer industrial suburbs that are the gateway to Bucharest, contemplating the string of seat reservations needed for our train journeys in Romania, and whether travel really broadens the mind.

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Friday 3^rd April: Budapest to Zagreb:

The very professional looking parents seated opposite were intent on their laptops. Two red-T-shirted sons about 6 and 9 years of age were tussling in the opposite seats. As the journey developed, the tussling became punching, became crying, became Dad-taking-the-9-year-old-for-a-talking-to-in-the-vestibule-became Mum-refusing-to-engage-or-inetervene-as-that-was-Dad’s-job-became-you-stop-grabbing-at-our-phones-became-loud-crying-when-phone-was-snatched-away-became-handing-the-9-year-old-the-laptop-to-pacify-him-while-the-assaulted-and-crying-6-year-old-was-comforted-by-Dad-became-let’s-feed-them-to-pacify-them-became-food-thrown-when-9-year-old-sonny-didn’t-get-what-he-wanted-became-loud-squealing-as-parents-gave-up-and-sons-started-running-and-yelling-up-and-down-the-aisle-and-jumping-on-vacant-seats-became we two travellers whose noise-cancelling headphones could no longer drown this out, quietly taking selves and bags into a rather luxurious and very silent plush green compartment in the adjoining carriage…

…which became a bit of quiet panic at the border when the train crew changed and a new locomotive attached itself to the back of the train. The replacement conductor assured us that this was a carriage for Croatia, but we would be more than an hour late into Zagreb due to major track rebuilding just over the border.

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Sunday 5^th April: Zagreb to Ljubljana:

Following a pleasurably bucolic 3 hours rolling along the Sava River valley into Slovenia the train came to a perfunctory stop in a gritty building site. “Dear Passengers…” directed us to leave the train by  jumping and chucking bags down onto dusty gravel. We found the Ljubljana Station buildings were the best part of a kilometre’s walk beside a massive worksite across distant car parks and temporary gravel laneways. On arrival through the dust, we sought advice on  trains to the picture-postcard Lake Bled. “Take BUS?” said the ticket clerk.

“What about tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow… Train? Bus? Who knows?!”

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On Monday morning it took us 45 minutes to find something well concealed among vast rebuilding works called: “Platform 9”. It was barely signposted and hidden behind a scrappy, temporary Costa Coffee outlet with its folding chairs nestled into gravel and mud under a tarp behind an anonymous bile-green office building. The bemused young guy in an “INFORMACIJE” high-vis jacket hustled us quickly through a long, fenced, dirt walkway onto our soon-to-depart train.

The gentle spectacle of Lake Bled with its small island church reflected on glassy waters between snow-clad mountains and a cliff top fortress and relaxed walkways was enough to remove any remnant angst with Slovenian Railways’ coordination (or lack thereof).

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Tuesday 6^th April: Ljubjana to Bratislava.

International Rail in Melbourne had assured us that a 12 minute connection at Villach between the morning’s international train from Slovenia and an Austrian RailJet to Vienna would be just fine. They ticketed us accordingly.

Arriving very early at Ljubjana building site/station, we found our train would be on: platform 9!! We then cooled our heels for the next 45 minutes watching various potential travellers discover the fenced dirt track, trudging through the building works cage relieved to find a platform 9 with an actual train. We empathised.

The zippy new international electric train was running ahead of time. We relaxed and enjoyed the distant alpine scenery.

But not for long.

Approaching the border station of Jesenice we heard a “Dear Passengers…” announcement. (In Eastern Europe we are always “Dear Passengers… before the bad news…): At the next stop the train wouls stop and we all all need to change trains. The train from Austria would arrive in 20 minutes to take us to Villach.

So much for the 12 minute change of trains…

A smartly uniformed and tatted station master greeted all of us at the top of the subway stairs. The Slovenian train crew waited with us on the adjacent platform and joined us on the same smart model of new train for the 40 minutes into Villach. Here we would  be required to go to the booking office and plead missed connection… The alpine scenery became even more rugged as we entered Austria. Unfortunately, so did the e-Sim phone connection. The Eurail app (which is the only valid train ticket) refused to play. This was only discovered as we arrived in Villach to plead lateness in the hope of replacement RailJet reservations. So… we fronted the slightly overwhelmed booking office, without a working ticket and with nearly every other passenger from our train. The very patient ticket clerk said something in German meaning ‘You shall get on the train!’, accepting our paper reservations and passports as evidence of bona fides.

Once outside, recovering on the station platform, I noticed three things:

1.        All of the platform awnings are actually massive solar panels – why can we not do the same in our country?

2.        The very strong station wifi had kicked the Eurail app into life (moral: check for strong wifi and working app before going begging at a European train ticket counter).

3.        We hadn’t been given new reservations, just a stamped note in German permitting us to get onto a crowded train and to join the climb, shove and and for the few vacant seats… or stand up all the way to Vienna. Fortunately my fellow traveller is an expert in weaselling through lumbering crowds to ‘bags’ two comfy aisle seats, surrounded by standees who blockied our view of the brilliant Brenner pass, most of the way to Vienna.

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Saturday 11^th April:   Berlin to Leipzig:

Extensive trackwork in Poland delayed our connection from Krakow to Berlin. Worryingly, we couldn’t find our reserved seat IC train from Berlin to Leipzig on the Eurail app or online. More worryingly, we had missed the departure time. A quick sprint-with-bags down pairs of escalators to DB INFORMATION in Berlin scored advice that our IC train was also late(!), and if we ran down two more levels we could just make the train. Glad we were very travel-fit by now we grabbed luggage and ran two more escalators, regularly pausing to become thoroughly confused by conflicting signage. Jumping on, we found our reserved seats with no window (again). And r-e-l-a-x-e-d… 

But not for long.

Following announcements broadcasting apologies for the delay, the conductor announced the station stops and times. Our reservation was to Leipzig. Our train was going somewhere else, enroute to Munich from Hamburg. Muttering more polite words than I was thinking, I traipsed 5 cars down the train to First Class to find some train crew. The conductor checked our reservations to Leipzig: “But this train does not go to Leipzig!” He checked online schedules on his phone. “Get off in Halle. You can get a connection there.”

Halle: at least the windswept platform 3 was sunny. The train to Nietleben was 7 minutes late, requiring you stand in waiting zones E-F. The train to Leipzig and Borna was due in 7 minutes from the same platform Zones B-D.  The indicator couldn’t make up its mind about which train might arrive first, flicking changing train orders and zones, apparently at random causing a crush in (compromise) Zone D just as a crowd of football fans wandered onto the platform. Eventually the indicator decided the Nietleben train was arriving first, but, without any announcement, it was the Leipzig train which pulled in, but in the wrong Zone creating a bum rush of bags, bodies and football scarves down to zone E. I made some comment as we ran, that German Railways used to be the most punctual in Europe. The woman charging along the platform with us yelled” “That was THEN!” and helped to drag our bags through the crowded doorway. She shared a bench seat with my Fellow Traveler (nose firmly in book) while I was held vertically by the good natured crush of bodies, feet barely touching the floor.

Leipzig Hbf:

I was propelled out from the train by the push of bodies. More football scarfed and beanied blokes didn’t wait for others to bail out, pushing in a pack to get in the train. Fellow Traveller’s head and raised arm appeared above the swirl of heads and baggage and scarves from somewhere still inside the train like a drowning man in a rip; the doors slammed shut and swept him out of sight…

Advice to future train travellers in Germany: an E-sim phone is crucial in enabling joyful reunions between separated railway persons using Messenger and a map app which shows public transport networks, while  gazing intently at the screen to avoid overly friendly street persons in need of a few spare Euros. 

Tuesday 14^th April: Leipzig to Berlin:

Our high-speed train was 25 minutes late from Munich. A congested platform of passengers explicitly ignored the broadcast pleas not to board the train and clambered in. Seat reservations are no longer compulsory, so it’s a bit of a race-of-the-fittest to be seated … with a window this time! After a 5 minute delay, the seat reservation signs appeared along the luggage racks. Most of the carriage then reallocated itself, shuffling butts to free up seats reserved from a bunch of stations across Germany to Hamburg. We clung to our window.

An unusually jokey and raffish conductor was spreading laughs and morning good cheer among his surly clients as he zapped tickets and phone apps while apologising for the delay... He reached us: “Ahhhh…. Foreigners!!”… launching into a loud, hilarious and chiding speech: “Why go to Berlin? Hamburg! Hamburg!!! Is the BEST! Where I come from!!! FORGET Berlin!! Go to HAMBURG! And trains: Deutche Bundesbahn is BEST. Forget the SWISS. THEY cannot run trains on time! Only DB IS BEST and always on time!” Most of the carriage was laughing now, dark and cynical laughter, except for the woman seated behind us. Because of the delay, she cried, she would miss her connection to Amsterdam.

The conductor was somewhat less effusive now, as he continued along the carriage cheerily zapping tickets and reservations on devices…

The high-tech, high-speed train arrived into Berlin Hbf – on time - and was last seen getting its cab windows manually washed, car-windscreen style, with a basic rubber wiper/brush attached to a 4 metre-long extension pole, swiping through the suds...