A Bumpy Train Ride Through the Iron Curtain

Enter the Venice train station, 8:58pm, July 5th. Our 9:30 train from Venice to Budapest appeared on the departures screen with a strange abbreviation in the time column: "SOP". Unsure of what that meant, Michael ran into the train information office with 2 minutes to spare before closing. Alex and I waited outside the doors for him to emerge. Turns out the train was canceled due to a workers' strike. Great. There go our 60€ couchette reservations. He told us there was a train leaving immediately for Salzburg, Austria that would connect with a train heading to Budapest at 4:00am. We of course decided to do that since it was far cheaper than paying for another night at the Venice hostel and hoping the Budapest train would be running the next day. We ran full speed out of Venice St. Lucia and down the length of 10 train cars before arriving at the front, where the non-sleeper cars sat.

We had no reservations for this train, so we found the first open compartment with seats. A few stops later we were joined by a bunch of chatty Madriños on holiday for two weeks with their trusty InterRail passes getting them around. Sounds familiar! They spoke pretty good English, and they generously shared their jambón español with us as they made their sandwiches for dinner. We talked for a few hours before all falling asleep in an oddly comfortable tangle of legs and torsos. Luckily there were only 5 of us in the 6-person compartment or it would have been much more difficult to sleep.

The Spaniards left around 1am, so we pulled all 6 seats into full reclines and had ourselves a decent sleep lying down. Of course, just our luck, the train was running half an hour late the whole trip and our connection in Salzburg was half an hour after the expected arrival time. That means no connection for us. Luckily there was another train out of Vienna at 9am, so we stayed our course until it arrived in the Austrian city around 7am.

We had a brief touch with German at the train station and got some interesting pastries from a shop on the bottom level as well as some nice relief in the restrooms before finally heading off to Budapest. We arrived here around 12:45pm, just a little over an hour after our expected arrival time had the original night train from Venice not been canceled. Not too shabby! This trip really made us appreciate the flexibility a EurRail pass offers. We would have never been able to do this without it. Even better, in Vienna, the guy in the ticket office gave us free seat reservations on that Budapest-bound train once we explained what happened to our original one.

All in all an interesting yet fun sidetrack from our original plan. We still got here safe and relatively on time, and our first eastern European city has done nothing but amaze us. But I'll save those details for the next post.