This is impressive. I poked around and for the (few) routes I'm aware of it has excellent information. I can see using this for future planning/dreaming.
I've found train travel sites can be fairly hard for non-locals to find / navigate through and you get waylaid by third parties that aren't as good for the actual booking as the less SEO optimized first-party carrier sites. Ends up being frustrating. I appreciate this site just gives you the facts rather than trying to do everything.
Everything about this is tastefully "old school". So much information density, and none of life story fluff most train travel blogs throw in.
I appreciate the advertising through fairly non-intrusive banners/links embedded in the pages (seriously, coming back in the HTML and not injected by JavaScript - who does that anymore?) that bypasses the adblocker. I was curious enough by the ones I saw that I disabled my adblocker to see if that was it - unfortunately there are also Google ads on top, but at least not cranked up to ridiculous levels.
I've "pinned" it in Kagi so now it comes up when I'm searching for train travel in the future.
I've used it quite a bit on a number of trips as I'd much rather travel by train within Europe than deal with airports. Train travel in Europe is pretty good but can also be a bit arcane if you're not familiar with the ins and outs of the country in question; this applies double if you're traveling around multiple countries. As you say, it's often not even clear where you should be doing your bookings.
>On-time performance. Bear in mind that these trains [Amtrak California Zephyr] run for over 2,000 miles, although they often arrive on time or perhaps half an hour late, they can sometimes arrive an hour or two late or more, so don't book any tight connections.
This needs updating. The Zephyr trains can be 8-12 or more hours late (you thought you would arrive at 14:00 but instead it's 01:00 -- this happened to me twice, once in each direction, in the middle of summer). This is just due to normal work-hours restrictions, poor management, etc. Then add in snow storms and rockslides on the tracks, and your trip might just be canceled at Denver or Salt Lake City, leaving you stranded.
Another major cause, maybe the single largest cause: freight train interference.
> Federal law gives passenger trains the right of way but freight train operators ignore this. [...] Federal law requires passenger trains be given priority over freight trains. However, the Department of Justice has enforced that law just once and that was 40 years ago, according to Amtrak. [...] Interference by freight trains has accounted for about 60 percent of Amtrak’s delays systemwide in recent years.
That's the real trick and problem - by the way https://www.amtraktrains.com is a great forum if researching - you CANNOT use averages for 'one time' trips.
If you're talking about your commuter to work, you can use averages to get "good enough" because you take it often enough that the averages will mostly work.
But these long distance trains might on average be two hours late - but if they're 24+ hours late, you might have ruined everything (unless the connection was another Amtrak train, then they will work with you).
For those types of trips, if you want to take them, treat them as land cruises and either be on one train to your destination OR plan to have a mini vacation at each connection, staying a day or two and seeing the sites.
(I have had two long distance trains die on the rails and become busses, which is amusing if you're not in a rush. Seven charter busses descending on a Subway in some infinitely small town for dinner amusing. They had everyone get off the train onto busses, we drove to where the train that was coming the other way was, and got on it, because the rails were blocked by a corn train flipping over.)
I used to sometimes catch the previous day's Coast Starlight when I'd travel from Salem to Seattle. The passengers already on board never looked too happy.
It's helpful to look at past history to get some idea of your chances of arriving on time - for example, here's the eastbound California Zephyr's times in Denver for the past month. It's a nice way to travel but it's not at all reliable for a connection, especially in winter.
My wife and I took the Zephyr westbound the entire route back in 2007, and arrived 22 hours late. The whole trip was a nightmare. They ran out of food several times and once served oyster crackers as dinner.
(To Amtrak's credit, they refunded the entire trip.)
This is one of my favorite sites - I came to know about during my first trip to Europe and used it the next time to get information on even which side of the train to get the seats on for better view and a table.
I am so glad it has retained its look and not become like every site on the internet that require a GPU to load.
Same here. Travelling to Europe for the first time from South America and it's been a godsend. Naively thought that train travelling was simpler than it really is (which is completely understandable that's why I say I was being naive). Eurail community posters pointed me to that webpage and didn't need anything else.
I've found advice from seat61.com useful a few times.
He recommends https://raileurope.com/ -- When I used them back when they were loco2, I was impressed by the customer service. I needed to change my train ticket, so emailed them and they sorted it all out for me with minimum fuss, emailing me replacements. At the time it was a lot easier than dealing with the local railway companies in countries where I didn't speak the language. I don't know if they would be as good now that they aren't a startup though.
I live somewhere where travelling by train is limited to basically local journeys, but love when I see this site get mentioned anywhere, because it reminds me of what the internet can be!
Once you leave Europe it's depressing how badly the world has fallen since the site started - routes via Syria are out, Sudan is a no-go area, Russia is closed to westerners, ferries across the Med to Israel and Egypt have vanished, So many long distance routes simply no longer doable.
There's all kinds of amazing new trains in Asia, there's ONCF's sparkling clean TGV from Tangier down to Casablanca, even in infrastructure-phobic USA there are some improvements and more on the horizon.
In what way is Russia closed to westerners? Last I checked a few months ago, there were no restrictions on entry for British citizens like myself, although a land entry via one of the Baltic states would be necessary, and cash would be difficult to legally exchange.
I just discovered this site a few days ago, when trying to plan overnight rail travel in Europe. Everyone else (including the rail companies!) had missing or outdated information and often sites that were simply broken, and then this guy had like seven different options with all the details and links, everything fully up-to-date, and even recommendations for hotels for the options that included a layover.
Absolute godsend. I hope he got my referral-link bonus.
Not really - the site is great as-is and there's nothing wrong with this approach. It looks like it works really well for Mr. 61.
But I'd imagine it'd be pretty helpful to write tools to help with maintaining the site which do leverage LLM models. Do a combination of search + AI to rewrite + reviewing the individual edits (e.g. through selective git adds). That's actually a plus in favor of flat files - it's all just code and the tools are plentiful. It's very "Unix" and hacker friendly.
I looove this site. This helped me plan a Trans-Siberian/Mongolian train trip almost 15 years ago. So many people I met on the trains used Seat 61, too. An absolute classic.
This is an incredible site that I've used multiple times over the years when planning European train travel from the US. Lots of practical advice on stations, routes, seating layouts, parking/walking, how/where/when to buy tickets, etc. An invaluable site, straight out of the late 90s/early 2000s when people used to build high quality websites that actually solved problems for people.
No idea how all the data gets kept up as well as it does, but I hope this site can continue for decades into the future.
Back in high school, I spent a good chunk of time reading the guides on this site purely just to fantasize about doing the trips myself one day. What a cool blast from the past, particularly given that the site hasn't changed!
This site is the reason I and my family took the overnight sleeper train from Georgetown to Bangkok in 2014.
An incredibly valuable experience. Hundreds of miles of palm oil plantations, shantytowns by the tracks, people living their lives…like brightly lit scenes in my memory. We talk about it as a family years later.
An invaluable resource. I’ve used this before for travelling around Europe by myself for the first time, and it immediately took the stress out of planning “what can I even do” and “how do I even do anything”. The trivia about recommended sides to sit on to get the best view in certain directions is added fun.
Likewise. When we went to Spain last year I was trying to understand how to book tickets and this site was invaluable in explaining how it was all set up and what we could and couldn't do online or in advance.
Now must be a good time to do the Bernina Express. A lot of snow in the mountains and spring-time in the South. You basically get two seasons for the price of one.
I love the comment about a similar hobby website that was posted a few weeks ago (the one about the gates of Hell found all over England [1]) saying that it's part of the British culture to become obsessed with quirky and frankly underwhelming hobbies.
I adore stuff like this, I think it's nerdy and a bit daft yet the world is much richer thanks to gentlemen like these. This is what the Internet is about, let's not lose our founding culture.
For a number of years, I toyed with building a site about US lighthouses with maps. Then I discovered this guy's site who has visited every one with photos, maps, and descriptions. I decided I'd find another project :-)
One of my all time absolute favourite websites. The information is wonderfully detailed and all makes sense in context.
Many are saying you could stick some AI on top of this, but I'm glad this is done manually. There are other websites for travel planning with more automation, and in my experience the information is typically junk.
Nice to see this here. I've stumbled on this page while researching my stop and train change in Brussels on the way to Config Management Camp. This is the internet that I remember from the very early 2000s. Just plain information, a person happy to share their own interest and carve some space out in this sea of webpages.
This is what I want to see more of in the internet.
My wife and I want to do the Toronto-Vancouver trip. The private sleeper room is something like $5000 which is doable with a little planning. Looking at the photos on that site make me excited for the trip.
I wonder if the railways support this site in any way? It seems like they should. He does a great job promoting what’s great about travel by rail.
Why should it be behind AWS or CloudFlare? Can't anybody maintain their own servers in 2024, especially when everything works and doesn't crash after a HN spike?
Not to pick on you in particular, but I hate this laziness trend from sysadmins that are the cause of the whole centralisation of the Internet. If you have the knowledge to build a SAN and entire architecture yourself, teach that to the youngbloods, instead of just telling them to get AWS credits.
Make the Internet decentralised again.
---
Don't give a junior dev a cloud server, but teach them to administer a UNIX machine and they won't need free credits from anyone.
[+] [-] ydant|2 years ago|reply
I've found train travel sites can be fairly hard for non-locals to find / navigate through and you get waylaid by third parties that aren't as good for the actual booking as the less SEO optimized first-party carrier sites. Ends up being frustrating. I appreciate this site just gives you the facts rather than trying to do everything.
Everything about this is tastefully "old school". So much information density, and none of life story fluff most train travel blogs throw in.
I appreciate the advertising through fairly non-intrusive banners/links embedded in the pages (seriously, coming back in the HTML and not injected by JavaScript - who does that anymore?) that bypasses the adblocker. I was curious enough by the ones I saw that I disabled my adblocker to see if that was it - unfortunately there are also Google ads on top, but at least not cranked up to ridiculous levels.
I've "pinned" it in Kagi so now it comes up when I'm searching for train travel in the future.
[+] [-] ghaff|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcul|2 years ago|reply
I used it a lot when I was younger and traveled more.
That was years ago, I wonder if it has been kept up to date. No small task, especially for one man, which is the impression I get.
[+] [-] ricardobayes|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PopAlongKid|2 years ago|reply
This needs updating. The Zephyr trains can be 8-12 or more hours late (you thought you would arrive at 14:00 but instead it's 01:00 -- this happened to me twice, once in each direction, in the middle of summer). This is just due to normal work-hours restrictions, poor management, etc. Then add in snow storms and rockslides on the tracks, and your trip might just be canceled at Denver or Salt Lake City, leaving you stranded.
[+] [-] benzible|2 years ago|reply
> Federal law gives passenger trains the right of way but freight train operators ignore this. [...] Federal law requires passenger trains be given priority over freight trains. However, the Department of Justice has enforced that law just once and that was 40 years ago, according to Amtrak. [...] Interference by freight trains has accounted for about 60 percent of Amtrak’s delays systemwide in recent years.
https://cnsmaryland.org/2021/12/09/historic-amtrak-funding-a...
[+] [-] bombcar|2 years ago|reply
If you're talking about your commuter to work, you can use averages to get "good enough" because you take it often enough that the averages will mostly work.
But these long distance trains might on average be two hours late - but if they're 24+ hours late, you might have ruined everything (unless the connection was another Amtrak train, then they will work with you).
For those types of trips, if you want to take them, treat them as land cruises and either be on one train to your destination OR plan to have a mini vacation at each connection, staying a day or two and seeing the sites.
(I have had two long distance trains die on the rails and become busses, which is amusing if you're not in a rush. Seven charter busses descending on a Subway in some infinitely small town for dinner amusing. They had everyone get off the train onto busses, we drove to where the train that was coming the other way was, and got on it, because the rails were blocked by a corn train flipping over.)
[+] [-] alexose|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] splonk|2 years ago|reply
https://juckins.net/amtrak_status/archive/html/history.php?t...
[+] [-] Tijdreiziger|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmd|2 years ago|reply
(To Amtrak's credit, they refunded the entire trip.)
[+] [-] tathagatadg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luzojeda|2 years ago|reply
Love the simple design too, a godsend nowadays.
[+] [-] imurray|2 years ago|reply
He recommends https://raileurope.com/ -- When I used them back when they were loco2, I was impressed by the customer service. I needed to change my train ticket, so emailed them and they sorted it all out for me with minimum fuss, emailing me replacements. At the time it was a lot easier than dealing with the local railway companies in countries where I didn't speak the language. I don't know if they would be as good now that they aren't a startup though.
History of loco2/raileurope: https://www.seat61.com/websites/who-are-raileurope.htm
[+] [-] gmac|2 years ago|reply
I now find thetrainline.com often more efficient and more likely to find viable routes at a reasonable price.
[+] [-] opjjf|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ant6n|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tosbourn|2 years ago|reply
I live somewhere where travelling by train is limited to basically local journeys, but love when I see this site get mentioned anywhere, because it reminds me of what the internet can be!
[+] [-] ta1243|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nerdbert|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seabass-labrax|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raldi|2 years ago|reply
Absolute godsend. I hope he got my referral-link bonus.
[+] [-] DominikPeters|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ydant|2 years ago|reply
Not really - the site is great as-is and there's nothing wrong with this approach. It looks like it works really well for Mr. 61.
But I'd imagine it'd be pretty helpful to write tools to help with maintaining the site which do leverage LLM models. Do a combination of search + AI to rewrite + reviewing the individual edits (e.g. through selective git adds). That's actually a plus in favor of flat files - it's all just code and the tools are plentiful. It's very "Unix" and hacker friendly.
I'm imagining a tool like https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider (which I haven't tried yet, but it looks useful for this kind of effort).
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] brenschluss|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skywhopper|2 years ago|reply
No idea how all the data gets kept up as well as it does, but I hope this site can continue for decades into the future.
[+] [-] nsypteras|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shermantanktop|2 years ago|reply
An incredibly valuable experience. Hundreds of miles of palm oil plantations, shantytowns by the tracks, people living their lives…like brightly lit scenes in my memory. We talk about it as a family years later.
Man in seat 61, thank you!
[+] [-] idop|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FridgeSeal|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noneeeed|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bloat|2 years ago|reply
https://tickets.rhb.ch/en/pages/bernina-express
[+] [-] folli|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bpye|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sph|2 years ago|reply
I adore stuff like this, I think it's nerdy and a bit daft yet the world is much richer thanks to gentlemen like these. This is what the Internet is about, let's not lose our founding culture.
---
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39356066
[+] [-] ghaff|2 years ago|reply
https://www.lighthousefriends.com/index.html
I love all the essentially remnants of the old Internet that obsessively chronicle some niche thing.
[+] [-] yakshaving_jgt|2 years ago|reply
Many are saying you could stick some AI on top of this, but I'm glad this is done manually. There are other websites for travel planning with more automation, and in my experience the information is typically junk.
[+] [-] thunfisch|2 years ago|reply
This is what I want to see more of in the internet.
[+] [-] criddell|2 years ago|reply
My wife and I want to do the Toronto-Vancouver trip. The private sleeper room is something like $5000 which is doable with a little planning. Looking at the photos on that site make me excited for the trip.
I wonder if the railways support this site in any way? It seems like they should. He does a great job promoting what’s great about travel by rail.
[+] [-] Tijdreiziger|2 years ago|reply
Amazingly, the author of the site doesn’t take donations, but he encourages donations to his fundraiser for UNICEF https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/seatsixtyone
[+] [-] roggy|2 years ago|reply
During my days as a systems engineer I build the underlying SAN, compute, network and the VM itself.
...about 8 yrs ago I did say it should probably be behind cloudflare and on azure/aws etc...looks like its still on the machine I built!
[+] [-] sph|2 years ago|reply
Not to pick on you in particular, but I hate this laziness trend from sysadmins that are the cause of the whole centralisation of the Internet. If you have the knowledge to build a SAN and entire architecture yourself, teach that to the youngbloods, instead of just telling them to get AWS credits.
Make the Internet decentralised again.
---
Don't give a junior dev a cloud server, but teach them to administer a UNIX machine and they won't need free credits from anyone.
- Confucius
[+] [-] marsvin|2 years ago|reply