On The Fungibility of Trains

When’s a train not a train?

I’m on my way from Antwerp to Budapest, via Amsterdam Schipol airport, on the delightfully fast and comfortable service that’s now called Eurostar but is still quite clearly a Thalys train with “Eurostar” painted on it.

Except I’m on the wrong train. I have a ticket - and a seat reservation - for the 13:30 departure to Schipol, so when a Eurostar train headed for Schipol pulled into platform 22 at Antwerp at 13:27, I went to board it. Except… no. This isn’t that train. This is train 9327. My ticket is for train 9333. There’s a Eurostar to Schipol every hour… and this one is now running exactly one hour late.

So I smiled very politely and asked if, since I had a ticket for the train that was leaving at 13:30 and I had a plane to catch, could I possibly use that ticket to board the train that was actually leaving at 13:30, and the train conductor agreed that this would probably be alright (and found me an empty seat - go Eurostar!)

The vast majority of trains in this part of the world, you don’t reserve a seat: you just buy a ticket to your destination, and it’s valid on every train headed that way. Whereas my flight to Budapest, the ticket is very clearly for a specific seat, on a specific flight, and even if by some bizarre coincidence there are delays and a different KLM flight leaves Schipol for Budapest at the exact time mine was supposed to leave, it wouldn’t occur to me to get on the wrong plane because it’s in the right place at the right time. Not without changing my ticket, anyway.

Which means Eurostar is in an interesting grey area… because although they run trains on the same rail network as EuroCity and Intercity, your Eurostar ticket is good for one seat on one train, identified by a four-digit train number… and, as I’ve learned today, the train that leaves Antwerp at 13:30 for Schipol Airport may not, in fact, be the 13:30 train to Schipol.

Next stop Budapest and CraftConf, which is going to be awesome because not only have they put together a fantastic line-up of speakers and sessions, but the conference is in a railway museum. (See? It’s all about trains today!) And then home. For a week-and-a-bit before heading to Stockholm for DevSum. I’d put hyperlinks in to all of these but I’m on my phone and you know how to Google.