posted by Catherine on May 23
Trying to turn over a new leaf in terms of your travel habits? Here are some great ideas for train travel around Europe and The United States.
There is the InterRail Pass for all 30 countries in Europe and the Amtrak USA Rail Pass for all the mainland states (with possible extension into Canada). Both of which are very flexible and just waiting for your adventure to begin.
How Do They Work?
Well you can choose from a selection of options available for each pass type depending on how long or how far you want to travel. For example do you want unlimited travel for the whole month, or do you just want to get from east to west coast and back again?
Once you have decided on this you can see which of the packages will best suit your needs. If you are hoping to visit several cities on your trip, then you could focus on the number of journeys included in the ticket rather than the time-scale, but if you want to just go all over whenever you fancy, then the time scale becomes more important.
What Does InterRail Offer?
Interrail offers both types of tickets, so basically you can either have so many journeys within a set period of time – like 5 days travels out of a 10 day period, or 10 days travel over a 22 day period. Alternatively you can have 22 consecutive days of travel in your package so you are not limited to catching a train to the next town for the day and back if you like a certain hotel.
Interrail is only available to Europeans – (and you cannot travel in your own country on your ticket) but covers travel to 30 countries, including Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, France, The UK, Spain, Romania, Turkey and Serbia! So, in 10 days you could have covered 15 or more countries!
There are also other deals that you can link to these passes, including local transport networks like the Swiss Pass (allowing you unlimited travel on their network) and of course free or reduced entry to museums or historical sites like with the Great British Heritage Pass.
Alternatively, you can just choose one country to travel in – for example – if you have booked a cheap holiday to Turkey and want to see more without paying the high fees of your tour operator! You can pay as little as £110 for 8 days train travel within a period of a month (you don’t have to be in the country for the whole month) and take day trips to wherever you want from your hotel base! Great stuff!!
The Amtrak Alternative:
The USA Travel Pass allows a slightly different service where it sells you passes with a number of ‘segments’ included. These ‘segments’ are legs of a journey and count as one segment per single get on-get off journey. So if you just travel 10 minutes down the road on your Rail Pass – you use up a whole segment!
As with the Interrail Pass, you do have the option to just buy a normal train or bus ticket locally for shorter journeys so you don’t waste your money on these little bits so to speak!
However, there are many long distance trains that can make this more worth while if you were looking for a coast-to-coast experience! For example you could make it from New York to San Diego in 3 segments (although on is a long long long old journey), or from New York to Miami on one all-day journey!
Both types of tickets are readily available online or through agents – who can help you choose the best package and also give you great tips – from £110 up to £582 for Europe (kids under 3 are free)and from $389 to $749 for the US Pass (kids under 2 are free). Students can get great discounts too!
So where are you going?
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