ellieewalterss
Traveller
0 comments
Posted 2 years ago
I am planning a trip around Europe from April-June this year and have seen that a lot of the services I was planning on taking have been suspended due to Covid. For example, Istanbul-Sofia and Sofia-Belgrade. There are buses available instead. Are any of these buses included in the interrail pass? On the page of this website that talks about intercity buses being included, there was also a list of countries. Are all of the route under these countries included? Or was that page just showing all of the available bus connections in general.
nltrainer
Traveller
1333 comments
Same answer as your same question on community.interrail.
These lines were not suspended due to pandemic, they were already before-mostly due to disastrous state of the rails, hence deadslow speed and their govmts. not really willing to spend big sums to keep them rolling. The major transport for them to make money is freight-and that has about dried up.
NO, the buses, that are not replacement but also already running long before-due to populair demand and thus not included in the pass. Locals very quickly noted this was far better, quicker but not cheaper as ailing trains. Besides that-in general even when it was more running trains, using a pass with traveldays is simply a bad buy overthere-local fares are still very cheap. F.e. Beograd-B-pest before they started the big renovation (and thus also out of service now) was just 15€, just buy at desk 5 mins before.
I understand its for non-Euro sometimes quite different to grasp all the various regulations and perhaps sometimes also rather disappointing to hear it its just PR-talk that trains are so good, but I´ve done too many trips to not believe that anymore. There is a site that promotes train travel and explains it all how it works in /en/; seat61. It will describe to make MAX use of the trains that stillr un.
The IC-BUS is also no more-and thats indeed mostly due to pandemic. It was run only by DB=german trains on some lines without a decent train/railline and only inside and to/fro Germany adjacent. As passholder you would just need to pay for a seat-REServation.