Train nightmare

Over the years I had heard many good stories about the European sleeper trains.  So when we looked at how we would travel from Vienna to Paris we looked at air travel and the sleeper train.  Well we did the sleeper train and I reckon it can be accurately be described as a nightmare.  Having had so many good experiences with European trains this bad experience was a real surprise.

We had a great trip from Vienna to Munich on the "rail jet".  Spent another comfortable night in Munich at Manfred and Birgit's house.  On Saturday in Munic, we took the train back to central where we did a bit of rearranging in our bags at the storage lockers.  Then we hired bicycles and rode to the English Gardens.

THE TRAIN
We got on board and easily found our room.  This room has 6 bunk beds.  On each, neatly folded was a sheet sleeping bag and a blanket. The first thing we noticed was the heat.  It was hot and stuffy which we took as maybe the air conditioning has not been switched on yet. Someone had opened a window in the corridoor and this provided some relief.  We made our beds and Dan did his usual job of plugging in the cameras to recharge.  Initially there was mains power but it came and went and was mostly gone.  I brought this to the attention of the service lady in our carrige who waved it away saying the electricity does not reach this far.

After a while, the air conditioning came on in the rest of the carrige but not in our room.  I spoke to the service lady in our carrige who spoke no english and communicated that the air conditioning was not working.  She was not happy with this second interruption and reluctantly came into our room and put her hand up to the grill and insisted that it was working.  Which is wasn't.  You could just feel a trickle of cold air leaking past the fan but that was it. The fan was npt working.  For a while we put up with the stuffy heat and eventually I opened the window in the corridor which because of the speed caused a very loud howling noise. 

As our service lady spent her time in her own little room, only emerging when the train was at a station, I went in search of another person.  I found a person who spoke English in the next carrige who again waved my complaint away.  She said that it will come back on at the next station.  Well indeed it did for about 5 to 10 minutes.  The fan started.  Our room got cool.  Nirvana.  But then it went off again and never came back on.  I managed to get the window in our room open and we found having it open about a cm gave a tolerable balance between noise and temperature.

Eventually we arrived in Paris.  By this time I was feeling quite ill.  Presumably due in no small part due to the heat and lack of sleep.  We could not find a maxi taxi so we took two taxis to our apartment.  After a sleep and a shower I feel much better.  However a sleeper train will from now on be only considered as a last resort.