Train Travel In Europe

After travelling by train in Portugal, Spain, France and Switzerland, I thought it might be informative to put up some information about stuff like ticket checks, etc.

I was prompted to do because, while travelling by myself from Lucerne Switzerland to Strasbourg France, I nearly missed the ticket validation machine when changing trains in Basel, Switzerland (when you travel between France and Switzerland you must walk through customs, where you may be stopped and searched at random, and change trains at a border city, such as Basel or Geneva).  You see, in Switzerland (and Spain and Portugal), you generally buy tickets for a specific train, so you don’t need to validate, but in France, most tickets are for general travel that day, so you must validate your ticket by time-stamping it in a yellow ticket validator located at the entrance to the trains. We had learned to do this while in France (although you don’t have anything to validate when you’re just using an Eurail pass) but after going into Switzerland I had totally forgotten about this and got onto the train to Strasbourg without seeing the validator machine at all.  Thankfully there was a middle-aged lady sitting across from me who heard the announcement (in French) reminding passengers to validate their tickets, and she turned and asked me if I knew where to validate the tickets.  I realized that I hadn’t done so, and she asked me to take her ticket with me when I said I would go find the ticket validator.  I had to run pretty fast since the train was going to depart in a few minutes, but I managed to make it to the gate and back in time with both our tickets validated.

The other thing I wanted to make note of is the frequency of ticket checks.  In Spain, our tickets weren’t checked on the trip between Madrid and Barcelona, but were checked when going from Barcelona to Montpellier.  In France, our train tickets were checked about half the time, usually only during the longer distance journeys.  Whenever the tickets were checked, it was by SNCF officers who would go back and forth after each stop, somehow remebering whose tickets they had seen and whose they hadn’t.  This seemed like a totally inefficient system to me, but I guess it’s the only way to control a train system where you can get on at any stop and get off at any stop and only your ticket will show how far you’ve paid to go. In Switzerland, train tickets were checked everytime, but it seemed like they didn’t have dedicated ticket checkers, they used the regular staff of the train.  I guess if you really want to, you can try to get away with not buying a ticket in Spain or France, but don’t do it in Switzerland!