I've had these train photos forever it seems. I keep wanting to do a train post but I never know what to write about so it never really happens. Today I've decided to just go for it - to freewrite a little and see what comes of it. Bare with me, it could be a rocky road.
Inserts a photo of a tunnel, words "Depart" written overtop of it. Writer is subtely implying that a journey is about to begin
We only took the train on a few occasions while living in France. We always found the trains to be way too expensive with very little benefit to make it worthwhile. The routes almost never got us to our destination faster than driving would which was very surprising and always begged the question, "why would we pay more money to travel at the same speed, on someone elses schedule, to get to our destination later in the day, and then not have our vehicle with us at the location to be able to branch out as needed to go on day trips?" Okay that was a long question but you get the idea.
That last part (renting a car at the destination location) would also mean spending even more money on top of an already ridiculously high train ticket. As you may have gathered by now, we found trains to almost never be worth it in the end.
The long distance train system worked for us just one time when we took the high speed rail from Paris to Marseilles. This is where the pictures in this post were taken. I used a different filter on the photos because the skies were cloudy and white that day and ended up washing out the images. The filter gives them an interesting sort of look in my opinion though.
The St. Charles train station in Marseilles was quite large, as one would expect in a major city. It was situated at the opposite end of the city from the Notre Dame de la Garde Basilica. It was on top of a hill and had an amazing view of the church and the sprawl below it.
The station was built in 1848 and had this really impressive staircase out front. The staircase became the main focus of my picture taking that day. It just had so much character about it.
So as I was saying, this was the only trip that the long distance train system actually worked out for us. We got to our destination within 3 hours, which was incredible since the drive would have taken us at least 8-9 hours otherwise, if not more. We only spent a long weekend in the city also and didn't branch out to the surrounding area, so we didn't need to rent a car for this particular trip. The high speed rail made it worth while from a travel time perspective but it did still cost us a fair bit of money. The price of our combined tickets were a few hundred Euros for sure. I'm going by memory now but I recall it being a minimum of €245 - €350, plus 32 euro for the train to Paris and back, plus the fee for parking our car at the train station. It was like that anytime that we tried to book anything. As such, we could never make the train system work for us after that trip to Marseilles. Tickets always had to be booked way too far in advance as well, weeks if not months before departure, so spontaneous travel was completely out of the question. We would always do the cost benefit analysis and total up all of our driving expenses (fuel, tolls, parking at the hotel...etc) and driving always came up significantly cheaper, not to mention the expense of renting a vehicle or taking other trains, if we planned to branch out from our base camp.
And so we almost always drove.
As I write this I'm starting to think that I've said all of this before. I can feel the familiarity of myself windging about train systems. But the question is, was it on Hive, or was it a conversation with someone, or better yet a conversation in my head? I'm not sure, but what's done is done. This is another case of "I've come too far and I'm not turning back now."
The moral of the story is that trains tend to be hit or miss in their travel value in my opinion. When they work out for you they are great but many times they are just more hassle than they are worth.
But it did work out for us on this trip and we were even able to bring the dog with us that time. Here we are in a pub on the last day or our trip, killing some time before heading back to the station. He's a tired boy, as were we all on that trip. I will say that the one major benefit to train travel is that you can sleep while you travel. I think we all needed to catch up on some sleep that day, so we took the opportunity to do so on the train ride back home.
Ends post in similar way as the begining, with a photo of opposite tain station tunnel dedicated to "Arrivals." Writer subtely implies that we have now arrived at our conclusion. Also note the reverse order of the post. Writer had a choice to start with the arrival shot, to showcase the travelers arrival at the destination - Marseilles, but instead writer chose the reverse to demonstrate that the subject of the post is not the travel destination but the written verbage. Writer pointed out at the begining of the post that he was unclear exactly what this post would be about... anyway, this is all very complicated and completely irrelevant information so don't spend much time thinking about it. Goodbye.