There's a moment on a European train, somewhere between two countries with a coffee going cold on the fold-down table, when you understand why people quietly abandon flying for the continent. No security theatre, no 4 a.m. airport transfer, no being decanted onto a tarmac shuttle bus in the rain. Just a seat by a window and the Alps sliding past. Summer is the season everyone considers a rail trip and most people overthink it into never booking — so here's the honest version, including the parts the romantic articles leave out.
The pass-versus-tickets question, settled
The first decision is whether to buy an Interrail pass or book individual tickets, and the internet will give you forty contradictory answers because the real answer depends entirely on how you travel. A pass earns its keep when you're moving often and spontaneously — three or more countries, changing plans as you go, treating the train like a hop-on network. If your trip is really two or three fixed long journeys booked in advance, individual advance tickets are usually cheaper, sometimes dramatically so, because European rail operators reward booking early the same way airlines do. The mistake people make is buying a pass for the romance of it and then discovering they've locked themselves into a more expensive, more rigid trip than three booked tickets would have been. Work out your actual route first, price both options honestly, and let the numbers decide rather than the marketing. And whatever you choose, book the high-speed and night trains the moment your dates are firm — those are the ones that sell out and surge in price across July and August.
One unromantic truth the brochures skip: reservations are where rail trips go wrong. Many fast and scenic routes — French TGVs, Italian Frecce, most night trains — require a compulsory seat reservation on top of your pass or ticket, often £10–£30, and a limited number per train. Turn up without one for a busy summer service and you may simply not get on, pass or no pass.
What actually makes a rail trip good
- Slow down the itinerary. Three nights minimum per city. The people who try to "do" six countries in ten days spend the whole trip in stations and remember none of it.
- Travel light enough to carry your own bag up a stairwell, because European stations are gloriously short on lifts and escalators, to name one recurring reality.
- Book one or two night trains deliberately — the Nightjet from Vienna or Munich saves a hotel and a travel day at once, and a couchette is part of the experience.
- Keep a paper backup of your reservations; a dead phone at a French ticket barrier is a bad afternoon.
The night train is worth the hype, mostly
Book the sleeper, but book a berth, not a seat.
A night train in a proper couchette or cabin is one of travel's genuine pleasures — you fall asleep in one country and wake in another, with a hotel night and a daytime journey saved in a single move. The version that ruins people's opinion of it is the reclining seat: a night upright in a carriage of strangers is not romantic, it's just a bad night's sleep on rails. Pay the extra for a bed. On the Nightjet, a couchette runs roughly £40–£70 more than a seat and it's the best money on the whole trip.
When the train is the wrong call
Rail isn't automatically the right answer, and pretending otherwise leads to miserable trips. If you're crossing the continent corner to corner on a tight timeline — Lisbon to Helsinki in a week — the train becomes a punishing slog and a budget flight genuinely makes more sense. Rail rewards the medium distances and the willingness to let the journey be part of the holiday rather than an obstacle to it. Pick a region, give yourself enough nights in each place, book the reservations early, and pay for the bed on the sleeper. Do that and the train stops being the stressful option and becomes the reason you remember the trip at all.