Trains

A subscriber described the difficulty of using non-chip credit cards at Schiphol Airport and in Lelystad in the Netherlands (Dec. ’12, pg. 4). My wife and I were in the Netherlands, Dec. 18, 2012-Jan. 1, 2013, always within 50 miles of Amsterdam, and we found no difficulty using our standard, non-chip Visa or MasterCards anywhere, with one exception.

After the local travel company I was using canceled the last six days of my prepaid tour of China in October ’11, I had no choice but to get myself from Guiyang, in rural Guizhou province, to the international airport in Guangzhou for my flight home. This was no easy task, since very few people in China speak English and almost all of the signs are in Chinese.

by Jack Ogg, Houston, TX
In his book “The Big Red Train Ride,” author Eric Newby summed up a Trans-Siberian rail trip when he stated, “There is no railway journey of equal length anywhere in the world. The Trans-Siberian is the big train ride. All the rest are peanuts.”

While Mr. Newby’s statement is bold, it’s true.

• Turkey will join the list of countries valid for Eurail Global and Eurail Select Pass travel when TCDD, the Turkish railway company, becomes a member of the Eurail-pass system on Jan. 1, 2013. Although Turkey is accessible by train from Bulgaria, be aware that construction work will affect some routes until fall of 2013.

• Westbahn, which offers hourly passenger train service between Salzburg and Vienna, will be the first private railway company to join the Eurail community. Beginning in January, holders of Eurail passes can ride its high-speed trains between the two cities.

While traveling in Southern Africa, my wife, Barbara, and I flew to Pretoria, South Africa, for a trip on the Blue Train.

Kathy Wilhelm made excellent points in her letter “Buying Train Tickets Online” (Nov ’12, pg. 11).

REPORT ON NETHERLANDS

The information about using ATM and credit cards with embedded chips for travel in Europe didn’t register with me before a trip in August-September 2012.

I am a big fan of rail travel and have taken quite a lot of trains in both Europe and Asia. These days, I often wait to buy my tickets in-country. On my last European trip, in Serbia, Bosnia and Hungary in fall 2011, I would buy each ticket on the day of travel or the day before travel.

Since I’m very bad at languages, I write down what I want — the source and destination stations; the date and time of travel, and the train number, if I know it — and just hand the paper to the clerk.

The excellent article about traveling by train from Vladivostok to Munich (July ’12, pg. 46) at a cost of $10,649 might lead some readers to believe that taking the train across Siberia is beyond their reach. It can be done much more cheaply, however. I traveled with a friend, Bob Geiman, from Beijing to Moscow in 2011.

In early May, the weather in Ulaanbaatar was cold and windy at times, with light snow flurries, but in Siberia it was perfect. We found the train not at all crowded in second class.