(Fairly) great railway journeys

This wasn't the train I was getting, but I liked the lines and colours it made in Luxembourg station as I was waiting for my train. Sadly, mine wasn't a lovely TGV (this one was off to Paris), but a crappy Belgian railways express that had wound its way painfully through Belgium, taking nearly 4 hours to do around 200 kms from Brussels (yes, we aren't the only ones with train travel speed issues...some colleagues who were at the same conference I was at told me about the Brussels-Lux trip as they had come by train from London), before carrying on its journey southwards from Luxembourg into France, through Metz, Strasbourg and Colmar ending up just across the Swiss frontier in Basel. Luckily my carriage was quiet, and I slept part of the way, and read the rest of the time. 

I changed in Basel onto a Deutsche Bahn express train heading down towards Interlaken, getting off again in Bern. I was lucky to make the connection in Basel, as I only had 20 minutes, and my lovely Belgian train was 15 minutes late arriving, and then we had to funnel through Swiss passport control, even though no one actually had their passports checked, before getting into the main part of the station.

In Bern I had long enough to pick up a sandwich and a drink (in train catering also seems to be absent...), before getting on the equivalent of a sprinter, or S Bahn, out to my hotel. Well, it's not a hotel strictu sensu, but a Swiss Railway owned conference centre that feels a bit like an old fashioned holiday camp. Luckily it has good wifi. And a view of the trains...I got off my last train about 100 metres from where I'm sitting.

Anyway, that was fun. It was about 500 kms altogether. The alternative would have been taxi to Luxembourg airport, 1 hour flight to Basel (or Zurich, or Geneva) and then at least 2 hours on the train anyway. So about 5.5 hours on the train seemed to me to be a good deal, more civilised and more interesting.

Hoping that there will be breakfast. In the instructions we are provided with, it seems to say that breakfast is only available from Tuesdays onwards (I think the Centre is basically closed at weekends). Well, I'm not waiting until Tuesday morning for my scoff, so there will be toy throwing of epic proportions if I don't get my breakfast.

Watch this space.