HN Reader

The last European train that travels by sea

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This summer I took the ferry from Hirtshals, Denmark to Seydisfjordur, Iceland. 2 full days, over 48 hours of travel time. And back.

Relatives and friends thought my wife and I were crazy - or at least eccentric. Why would you waste 4 full days (+ 2 days to get to and from Denmark by car).

Turns out, travel time is still travel. And what a beautiful time that was!

There is no stable Internet conncetion on the ferry itself (no cell connection AT ALL at sea), plus you have to pay for it a pretty hefty fee. So from observing other people, +95% did not have Internet access at all.

The ferry itself is not huge, it is not a cruise ship. But large enough to be entertaining and fun to explore. Kids had a few attractions, including a tiny cinema. They sold popcorn though, that's all kids cared about besides the Minecraft movie.

For us, adults, there were a few bars, restaurants to hang out. Even a little library, a corner with board games, couple shops.

Because people were not glued to their phones, you could actually meet and talk to other people, have non-trivial conversations. People would read books, have a sip of coffee, walk around.

Not once did I get bored, not once did I not know what to do. Sure enough, I would pull out the iPhone from my pocket only to see it is completely offline. What was also fun: if I went out with the kids, there was no way I could let me wife know we would be late or any other matters. Same the other way.

Life felt slower, but somehow more real?

Anyway, I can only recommend a travel experience like this, at least once in your lifetime. For us, it became part of the memories we made, besides visiting Iceland itself. I can imagine the same being the case if you travel long distances by train.

3 months agoby iagooar

The "mega bridge" is one of the most politicized and polarizing projects I've ever seen in my life.

My family lived in Messina for a while and it seems that in the last 100 years no one was actually interested in building nor genuinely stopping the project for good, just using it to bash whoever is on the opposite side of the argument.

- On the left it's seen as the biggest ecological issue they have in Italy, despite the ferry company handling the passage is a well known mafia-owned monopoly whose ferries leak tons of garbage and oil on the sea every single day.

- On the right they've gone with the most ridiculous, expensive and unachievable version of a project in order to to make sure they can siphon as much money as they can before declaring that the project has to be stopped or whatever.

Every summer I go back to my mother's family and when the topic comes out it's as they're basically stuck in a time loop.

3 months agoby easyThrowaway

I've been on this train. The sound of the train being pulled onto the ferry did wake me up to say the least. It was dark outside and the blinds were shut in our sleeping coach. I remember feeling a bit of a weight, being in bed, in a closed coach, inside a large train, deep inside this massive ferry with many floors above us. It wasn't until much later that I realized that the train was open-air and not that big at all. You then wake up a few hours later near Palermo where the train runs just by the ocean – that was lovely.

I've also been on the second-to-last train of this type a few times (Snälltåget from Sweden via Denmark to Germany). That one also got canceled for the same reason – mega bridge construction (Fehmarn Belt). There, you used to get off the train to go up to the canteen for lunch with the truckers.

3 months agoby AntonTrollback

They seem to have missed one key detail in the title: this is the last European passenger train that travels by sea - or rather, the last ferry crossing that carries passenger carriages (I doubt that they carry the engine across by ferry?). There are (AFAIK) several other ferry lines that carry freight carriages, among them the Rostock-Trelleborg line served by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Sk%C3%A5ne

3 months agoby rob74

The first ever night train I went, about 25 years ago, on was from Berlin to Malmo. Early morning, I woke up to the feeling of my bed swaying and looking out of the window realised 'hang on, they've put the train on a ferry'.

I had no idea that trains got put on ferries, although I had been puzzled by the way the route on the route map crossed the sea but had assumed it was just to make the diagram simpler. It was quite a surreal thing finding myself unexpectedly on a train on a ferry. It was nice though as you could go and wander round the ferry and it was quite fun seeing it go off the ferry which had special train tracks on it onto the normal train tracks on the land.

3 months agoby jvvw

I enjoyed the writing but the few photos left me curious about the ferry transfer. 34-minute video:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BA_2p5RUbe8

3 months agoby cbdevidal

I took that train many years ago. At least back then it was faster to get off the train in Calabria, hop on whatever local ferry was next, and then grab another train in Sicily, depending on your destination. In my case it was Catania to visit a friend.

3 months agoby davidw

What a delightful technological artefact. Certainly a shame to lose it, even if the bridge would be more convenient/efficient in the long run

3 months agoby swiftcoder

I can see why this is worthwhile for a freight train, it takes a long time to unload goods onto a boat and offload them the other side. But why does it make sense for passengers? Is it just because they were doing it with freight already?

3 months agoby jimnotgym

I took this train or another one that crossed to Sicily in the early 90s. It was at night, so there wasn’t much to look at while the mechanics of being transferred from the wharf to the boat and then back to land took place. But I do remember the friendliness of the Sicilian people on that train. I only spoke a little French and some high school Latin, but it was enough to have a basic conversation and even a few laughs.

3 months agoby ilamont

Discussions (with more than 2 comments) of the planned bridge:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854834

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44817863

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43427008

3 months agoby macintux

> In August, the Italian government revived long-standing plans to build a vast €13.5bn (£11.7bn) suspension bridge over the strait – one of the world's most ambitious engineering projects.

What makes it particularly ambitious? The strait of Messina is two miles across, and I don't think that even cracks the top 100 of the world's longest bridges.

3 months agoby kibwen

My family is from Sicily, and I remember taking this train every year when I was a kid. After several years, I took it again last summer and was bufflled at how inefficient the whole ordeal was... Basically you have to wait for the train wagons to be detached and reassembled on the other side, you easily waste a couple hours.

Now, I don't really mind this, it's a bit of a tradition if you want, but I asked a relative of mine who used to work for the Italian national train company, and he told me that this train works like this cause in the past all the Sicilian migrants would travel with a lot of luggage, and it would be very impractical for them to transfer all of that twice. Nowadays this is not really the case anymore.

3 months agoby discoinverno

At least in the past trains went by ferry also between Helsingborg (Sweden) and Helsingör (Denmark). Could not find if they have been stopped. So the Italian train might be not be there only one in Europe.

3 months agoby kaffekaka

On a not totally unrelated topic, this gem in Aomori Japan, well off the beaten track, is amazing. It's the last train-carrying ship that used to sail between Honshu and Hokkaido (a particularly dangerous stretch of sea), before they built the Seikan Tunnel for trains.

https://en.japantravel.com/aomori/memorial-ship-hakkoda-maru...

3 months agoby rwmj

If your destination is Messina or even Catania, you can can save some time leaving the train in Villa San Giovanni (last stop before the train will be loaded into the ferry) and, literally, jump on the first ferry that is starting, so you save all the time needed to load and unload the train.

No one will ask you for a ticket (no one will ask for anything, actually). Or at the least it was like this some twenty years ago when I did it.

3 months agoby achairapart

This is cool, but a little crazy. Why put the whole train on the ferry instead of just offloading the passengers and putting them on the ferry?

3 months agoby lisper

It's easy to frame the bridge as "progress," but it risks bulldozing over the kind of slow, sensory-rich travel that people are increasingly craving again