https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/travel/first-european-sleeper-venice-stopped-short-3523315Half of the romance of rail travel is its unpredictability. That’s what I told myself as a European Sleeper train set off from Brussels this Wednesday evening, on what was supposed to be the launch of its pilot route to Venice. The train was due to depart at 6.06pm; the departures board said it would be 46 minutes late.
When it finally pulled in, a cheer went up over my shoulder. It came from a boy aged around eight whose family was loaded with ski equipment.
It was made up of a pick-and-mix of carriages, all a little grubby on the exterior. Some were burgundy with yellow stripes; others red and white. Several were tagged with graffiti.
... told me that the company had been told about two weeks before the launch that the train was unlikely to be able to stop in Venice at all. This was because it only included one locomotive, and the terminus, Venice Mestre, required one locomotive at each end of the train.
Before that, European Sleeper found out that stopping at Venice Santa Lucia wouldn’t be possible due to the lack of locomotives. Mestre is now the final stop on the new timetables – the mainland station is around 10km from Venice and Santa Lucia station on the banks of the Grand Canal.
On Monday afternoon, I had received an email to say that the train would no longer be travelling to Venice. Instead, passengers would alight at Verona and transfer to a service run by Trenitalia, Italy’s state operator.
Then, at a press launch event on Wednesday afternoon, the room was told that the route would be further curtailed. “Yesterday we got a phone call from our Italian operator that we are not going to reach Italy at all,” said Engelsman.
Meanwhile, European Sleeper says that the Italian operator hasn’t explained why our journey could not travel beyond Innsbruck. Instead, we were given seats on an Austrian OBB train to Verona, then on a Trenitalia train to Venice. It meant losing about 4.5 hours on the sleeper, a 40-minute wait at Innsbruck and squeezing through carriages to find an economy seat.
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