Pendolino in Poland

[whole diary]

[Bmblbzzz]

[We don't seem to have anywhere that this really fits, so I've stuck it here]

My wife's just come back from a visit to her family in Poland. While there she took a Pendolino from Częstochowa, in the southwest, to Warsaw, paying 135 złoty compared to 40 for the ordinary train. The bloke at the station selling tickets actually pointed out to her she could save two thirds the fare but it was the only train for ages and she needed to get there. "It must have been fast," I said. "About two hours, like normal. It's just quiet, because it's empty, and you get a free cup of tea. A very little cup."

So that was a bargain...   

I presume the reason it's no quicker than the loco-hauled 1980s stock on the other services is because the track or signalling isn't sufficient to allow higher speeds – probably the track itself because some of it is in a bad state, suffering from decades of lack of investment.

She added "It looked like an English train." 

[Chris from Nailsea]

Thanks for that post, Bmblbzzz, and congratulations on finding the appropriate Polish text accents (bearing in mind this forum's unfortunate ability to scramble minor characters). 

[Bmblbzzz]

Scrąmbłińg mińór chąrąćtęrś? Whatever do you męąłż#@|*$n?

[bobm]

Come back in a fortnight and see what's changed! 

[simonw]

If the DB^» (Deutsche Bahn - German State Railway - about), and application code both support utf8, there should be no issues.

I have a feeling this site started with an old version of mysql using the default latin1 characterset.

At some point the Db will need to have been exported, dropped and recreated with utf-8 enabled, and the data re-imported. This process will convert all latin characters to utf-8 no problem, but the job of clearing corrupted characters can vary from difficult to impossible.

[chuffed]

It would help if this was in plain English for the rest of us !