Absolutely right. In December 1969 I walked up to the ticket counter in Braunschweig Hbf and asked for a 2nd class round-trip to Paris. In a minute or two I was issued a two-centimeter piece of cardboard and I was on my way. It barely had room for all the conductor stamps but it and I made the round-trip successfully. There are some features that are easier now but there is less continuity than in the 1960's private railways US/Canadian ticketing.All this is a bit cynical in my view. Not very long ago you could buy a ticket from virtually any station anywhere in Europe to anywhere else in Europe. There was a standardized table for calculating the fare and that ticket was valid on any train on the given route.
There were also international rolling stocking standards laid down by UIC which basically permitted train cars to pass from one system to another with minimal restrictions. Thus there was a direct train from Minsk to Basel for example. Locomotives were a bit more difficult due to differing electrification and signaling systems, but these were typically switched out at border stations.
Then came this craze for non standard solutions. You can only travel on a Eurostar with a Eurostar ticket, and other international services have similarly used the transition to high speed and modern equipment as an excuse to create closed systems. Similarly the trains used on these lines are not able to run in other countries in the way the old trains could. In fact there has been a policy of fragmentation which has been wholeheartedly supported by politics. It's no longer possible to walk up to your village station and ask for a ticket from Budapest to Barcelona. You'd probably need a stack of tickets now, each sold by a different system. And probably the staff in your village station wouldn't know how to use half of them or even have access.
...
I will mention "seat 61" website as a good way to find booking help.
I'd have to do some digging, but believe there were two classes of service. That said, I don't think you're wrong and it was more like Amtrak's Acela, with two "upper" classes and no "steerage" (for lack of a better term). Like Acela, the delineation may have been the inclusion of food, but it's been a long time since reading up on the subject.Wasn't Trans Europe Express a First Class Only service? Why would EU want to go for such an anti common man thing?
It seems to me that it would be more appropriate to resurrect and enhance the EuroCity network instead which catered to people of all income levels much better. And those trains like the TEEs continued to have neat names recognizing great artists, musicians, flowers etc.
I remember traveling by Monteverdi, Maria Theresa, Edelweiss, among the many I traveled on.
From Wikipedia:I'd have to do some digging, but believe there were two classes of service. That said, I don't think you're wrong and it was more like Amtrak's Acela, with two "upper" classes and no "steerage" (for lack of a better term). Like Acela, the delineation may have been the inclusion of food, but it's been a long time since reading up on the subject.
Indeed several of the originally TEE routes were converted to EuroCity routes by merely adding Second Class accommodation to the trains.The Trans Europ Express, or Trans-Europe Express (TEE), was an international first-class railway service in western and central Europe that was founded in 1957 and ceased in 1995. At the height of its operations, in 1974, the TEE network comprised 45 trains, connecting 130 different cities,[1] from Spain in the west to Austria in the east, and from Denmark to Southern Italy.
The trainsets were also used for the Friday/weekend-only VIA service to North Bay. Back in my 9-5 days in downtown Toronto, my family would head up to our frequent retreat in cottage country in the car and I would board the 6:30-ish departure from Union Station, enjoying a nice steak dinner before being picked around 10 pm when the train arrived.This is a Dutch TEE train that the Ontario Northland Railway bought in the late '70s and ran until the early '90s between Toronto and Northern Ontario. It had two types of accommodations: individual coach seats in a 2 & 1 open configuration and also enclosed compartments. The ONR sold both types at the same coach fare. There was also a dining car.
View attachment 20616
When they originally entered service the trains had a locomotive at one end and a coach-cab car at the other but both had this distinct European style cab.
View attachment 20617
By the mid '80s ONR had replaced the TEE locomotive with a modified F9.
View attachment 20618
Wasn't Trans Europe Express a First Class Only service? Why would EU want to go for such an anti common man thing?
As far as ticketing goes that's just a matter of software.
All that was a function of government-fixed fares, whether by regulation (US) or ownership (Europe), whether airlines or railways, which prevailed pretty much everywhere until the late '70s. I'm too young to have experienced this, but I've heard stories that, because the airfare between City A and City B was fixed by the CAB regardless of which line you flew on, one airline at City A airport would honor your ticket to City B issued by another airline. I've also heard that it was the same on non-premium services on the pre-Amtrak railroads due to ICC-fixed fares.But in the old days you had UIC tickets that were valid on any train on a given route for the given class of accomodation. Maybe at most you might have to pay a modest supplement if it was a high-value train, or buy a reservation on trains that required that (again for a very moderate sum). I remember the times that in Germany for example a supplement for an Inter City was 6 DM and a reservation was 5 DM (regardless of distance travelled). So going by Inter City was a maximum of 11 DM (about 6$) more expensive that catching the all stops local. Even if you were going from Hamburg to Munich.
Nowadays you can't do that. If you have a local train ticket from Lille to Paris, don't even dream of walikng up to the Eurostar, or the regular TGV even.
I don't see how that's any less true for the European railways, which as I understand it are no longer the government operations they were in the days of the TEE and are now expected to be profitable except for provincially-subsidized local services. The German states each have their interchangeable state ticket for local services, for instance, but IIRC you can't hop on an ICE or TGV with one even for a wholly intrastate trip.
This sort of stuff is doable.
Enter your email address to join: