Trains and I

After figuring the system out a little better, most places I'm now not booking til the night before or the day I'm leaving. I kinda just rocked up to the train station and got my ticket half and hour before I left. Slovakia isn't part of the Eurail pass so I thought things would be all good after all the train strikes and problems I've had thus far (worse comes to worse, another night in Vienna in the hostel which is only at 1/3 capacity).

So the train gets a little out of Vienna and breaks down. Eventually a train conductor comes along telling us that another train is coming on the other tracks. One of the few times I've been with someone who can translate and man that made like so much easier.

So 3 carriages worth of people get off and a single train carriage comes along on the other side. Everyone manages to get on except for about 10 people, including me and my new found translator. The train looked like it was only going to the border anyhow and really standing room only. So stuck at some remote train station but I had my translator friend with me.

Eventually the conductor came back along, and the translated version was that an engine was coming to pull the train back to a yard, and another engine might be found so to get on and see what happens. So we get pulled back to a train yard and an engine eventually comes along and we are taken to Bratislava.

So a train trip that should have taken and hour took almost 3 hours - but just my luck. Didn't matter as the translator type dude was really interesting so we had a great conversation and was surprised to get to the station and see how long it took - I almost thought I must have crossed a time zone. Also a reason why I caught a morning train so if something goes a miss, still daylight hours to find stuff.