A blog post about getting to the Lipica Open 5-day orienteering event in Slovenia by train instead of plane!
Why the Lipica Open?
Slovenia is one of my favourite countries outside the UK for orienteering. The terrain is fantastic – intricate karst limestone formations leading to lots of rock detail and depressions (interspersed in places with old ruined boundary walls and/or green vegetation!).
Why travel by train?
I wrote in my 2024 review that I’ve become increasingly conscious of our carbon footprint, and thinking about what more we can do individually to reduce it. This was partly triggered by attending a carbon literacy course via work (Ourea Events), and then reading several books (notably by Mike Berners-Lee: How Bad Are Bananas, The Burning Question, and There is No Planet B (this last was actually reading matter for the journey!). Flying is undoubtedly one of my largest carbon contributions personally, but I love orienteering for the variety of places it takes you, so how hard/easy would it be to get across the continent by train?
The Planning
Oh my gosh, so many options! If you talk to anyone who has travelled around Europe by train, or thought about it, they all point to The Man in Seat 61 website as if it contains all the answers. Well it sort of does. It at least tells you all the options. But then you have to figure out what is right for you. Want to go to Slovenia? Choose from 5 different options! Except they all land you at the capital Ljubljana, whereas the Lipica Open is near the border with Italy near Trieste. So let’s look at travelling to Italy – here you can choose from a mindboggling 11 different options! Have you given up yet? I was sorely tempted, but I persevered – I do like a good “route choice…”
Decisions included which route, and where to overnight (we are talking 2 full days of travelling here!), whether staying somewhere or with a sleeper train. The quickest route was ruled out as there has been a landslip on the TGV line direct from Paris to Milan with very few trains running (dark blue line below).
Eventually we chose a route down to London and onwards with Eurostar to Paris (yellow on map above), spend a night there, then high speed train to Zurich in Switzerland, down through the Alps to Milan in Italy (one of the orange “Scenic routes via Switzerland”), then across to Verona (light blue) where we hired a car and drove 3hrs from there. We could also have continued on train to Venice and drove a bit less, but avoided Venice as it is a busier terminus (and previously bad experience hiring a car there which they didn’t want us to take out of the country).
Exact details below.
Outward journey
- Thursday 6th March
- Kendal 08:10 – Oxenholme 08:14 (Northern Rail)
- Oxenholme 08:27 – London Euston 11:12 (Avanti West Coast)
- London St. Pancras 13:31 – Paris Gare du Nord 16:51 (Eurostar)
- Paris metro RER D across town
- Hotel near Gare de Lyon
- Friday 7th March
- Paris Gare de Lyon 07:22 – Zurich 11:26 (TGV / SNCF Voyageurs)
- Zurich 12:33 – Milan Central 15:50 (Trenitalia)
- Walk across town
- Milan Porta Garibaldi 16:13 – Verona Porta Nuova 17:28 (Frecciarossa)
- Hire car and drive 2.5 hours to Slovenia
Return journey
Mostly the opposite of the above
- Thursday 13th March
- Verona Porta Nuova 09:02 – Milan Central 10:15
- Milan Central 11:10 – Zurich 14:27
- Zurich 15:34 – Paris Gare de Lyon 19:38
- Paris metro RER D across town
- Hotel near Gare du Nord
- Friday 14th March
- Paris Gare du Nord 11:09 – London St. Pancras 12:30
- London Euston 13:30 – Oxenholme 16:09
- Oxenholme 16:32 – Kendal 16:36
The Costs
Another decision to make is what tickets to buy and via what ticketing agency. Man in Seat 61 gives indicative prices, but they are the best possible prices you might get for advance purchase, whereas in practice you will end up paying more (supply/demand). When I initially costed up buying all the individual tickets it was £1000+ for each of us. Then found the better option of getting an Interrail pass, after which you just have to buy seat reservations (mandatory on many trains, but relatively cheap).
You can also decide 1st or 2nd class. Ordinarily I’d not travel 1st class, usually seems unnecessary and significantly more expense, and has more climate impact (certainly for flying). However, Interrail passes were not that much more expensive (£359 vs. £283) plus a little more for reservations, and seemed worth it, for the extra comfort for two days of travelling, and some free meals thrown in on Avanti and Eurostar, and drinks/snacks on one of the Italy trains!
Overall travel costs looked like this (for two of us):
- Two first class Interrail passes, 4 days travel in month = 718 EUR
- Eurostar reservations = 160 EUR
- All other European train reservations = 284 EUR
- Avanti West Coast train reservations = Free!
- Paris hotel on way out = £143 GBP
- Paris hotel on return = £103 GBP
Plus of course car hire and accommodation in Slovenia, but we’d have those costs whatever, so ignoring here.
Total about £600 each. Cheaper than buying train tickets individually. More expensive than flying, which would have been about £400 each (flights plus car parking at airport). No-one said it would be cheaper to take the more environmentally friendly option, but it isn’t that much more expensive.
The Bookings
- Trainline is good for exploring options for connecting trains across Europe.
- Interrail passes bought via interrail.eu and then available in Rail Planner app (note you need a charged and working mobile phone to show the pass on the trains).
- Reservations for Paris – Zurich – Milan – Verona reservations booked via interrail.eu and emailed to you.
- Reservations for Eurostar booked via interrail.eu and then downloaded via some convoluted redirect to eurostar.com.
- Reservations for Avanti West Coast obtained by messaging them on X https://x.com/AvantiWestCoast (just say date/time of train, and include screenshot of Interrail passes).
The Journey
What were the highlights and lowlights of the journey and the whole experience? Well mostly the travel went smoothly, no delays, we made all our connections, and no big dramas. Just a couple of minor things:
- The A/C in our outbound Eurostar carriage was broken, but they moved the dozen or so passengers into another carriage (which was some higher business class and seemed to offer more food!).
- There was a train replacement for first bit from Zurich towards Milan with no seat reservations. But plenty of space, connected to the real train at an intermediate station, and still got to Milan on time.
- On the outward journey we came into Milano Centrale and were departing from Milano Porta Garibaldi, which was about a mile away, with only 23 minutes for the change. Just what the booking tool suggested and I hadn’t investigated in detail beforehand. Maybe it made sense if you got public transport between them (bus or tram or subway?), but didn’t scope that out (and would have meant delay figuring out how to buy a ticket), so resulted in a brisk walk across town. We were booked for the same transfer on the way back, but I rebooked the first train to one 30 mins earlier that came in and out of Milan central.
- Minor delay on Avanti on way home, but connecting train to Kendal waited for ours.
We did admittedly get lucky with the trains – the day after we took the outward Eurostar it was cancelled all day because they found an unexploded WW2 bomb in Paris! Sadly some friends were not so lucky, had been planning their own holiday to Spain also by train, and rebooking around the cancellations wasn’t viable for them (everyone trying to do it!), so they ended up cancelling and staying in UK 🙁
The big plus with trains is you have time to experience the journey, beyond a bustling airport, a crowded aeroplane, and the travel just feeling like a thing to get over and done with. Highlights:
- Spending two nights in Paris, including an evening wander around the environs, and couple of cafe / restaurants. Think of this as an integral part of the holiday, rather than an inconvenience of train travel.
- The train from Zurich to Milan, with amazing views across beautiful lakes and towering snowy mountains on all sides (but not as snowy as I think they ought to be in mid March?).
- Seeing the countryside zipping by on all the trains (although I do also like the views from the plane over the Alps!), and the way it changes from one country to another.
- The walk from one Milan station to another – despite being a brisk walk it was very scenic with some cool architecture and buildings en route.
- In fact all the big old stations are amazing buildings: London St. Pancras, Paris Gare du Nord, Gare de Lyon, Zurich and Milan. So much more beautiful than your typical airport.
The main downside, other than modest extra cost, is how long it takes! Two full days of travel each way. Although flying would have been two flights each way (no direct flight to Trieste or Ljubljana) and takes most of at least one day each way.
Some things balance out with train vs. plane. I haven’t looked at stats, but I’d guess both are just as likely for delays, and risk of missing connections. There are more connections to make with the trains, but I deliberately allowed plenty of time where it mattered. Plane has added risk of losing your bags (or being constrained to hand baggage – no good for bringing back the honey we won at the orienteering!) – something that happened to me last year on way out to the Lipica Open in fact!
The Future
Would I do it again? That particularly journey definitely yes, especially now we know a couple of things about how to go about it.
Would I always swap flying for trains in Europe? I would love to say yes, but sadly not quite yet. We are going to a friend’s wedding this summer, in Tromsø in the north of Norway, which would be a 3 day journey by train, vs. two flights in a day. We are flying.
Admittedly that is an extreme example. One could get a decent way into Russia or the Middle East in the same time, if you were so inclined. Most of Europe is reachable in max 2 days, and I would certainly look at the train again for other European destinations. I am sure some journeys to popular destinations with direct flights will make me think twice about the cost (e.g. we flew to Alicante in Spain to go climbing in December, and there were lots of direct and cheap flights to choose from) but no-one said saving the planet was ever going to be the easy option.
The Orienteering
What about the orienteering?! After all, this wasn’t just an excuse to spend 4 days travelling by train across Europe and back (nice though it was)! The Lipica Open was excellent as always. Detailed and challenging terrain. Good courses. Excellent maps. Friendly relaxed organisation. Lovely spring weather. What’s not to like?
And we had some success. There was a “weekend cup” for the first two days, and an overall 5-day cumulative competition, and we won our respective 45+ age classes in both. Probably more a reflection on the strength of the competition although we did both orienteering mostly competently but not very rapidly. The prizes? Four 900g jars of local honey between us!
