🥔👍 Spud Approved: A Seated Man

What is 🥔👍 Spud Approved?

This is a series I’m doing to shoutout small-medium cool or useful tools, people, sites, etc that I generally appreciate.

Been a hot minute hasn’t it? I’ve been busy, between moving house and planning trips both in and out of country and work, this little old potato hasn’t been idle. Especially as I’m currently in the middle of a 2 week journey around central Europe. Maybe I just miss the food, beer, weather or people that don’t sneer at you for existing, this has been a great and memorable part of my life so far.

What was not such a great part however was planning the bloody thing. So many travel logistics to work out, in one of the largest soft border zones in the world wasn’t an easy task. The various conflicting AI generated and/or outdated shit websites demanding that I need to purchase a “Super Early Sexy All-in-one RAIL-ME-NOW pass” did not make it easy to work out what route I could realistically take through Germany, Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia and Poland. Plus, I had my own stuff I wanted to see and following a set train route by a travel company was not going to work out.

I know I know I’m probably just anglo-pilled in that I’m used to the concept of one app for all train tickets and no border controls to worry about. However, one website made this so much easier and is the topic of today’s Spud Approved, The Man in Seat Sixty-One.

This website is DOPE. It is an extensive and painstakingly researched and updated database on all you need to know about train travel in Europe and beyond. It’s so good I even found info on it about the UK’s trains. Like, who knew that Cornwall had a sleeper train???

(this is definitely NOT something I’ve complained about Cornwall not having for years on end 😭)

I could talk for hours on what makes this site great. But I’ll leave you all on some of the stuff I’ve used it for this trip in paticular:

• Confirmation you don’t need to go through customs when travelling through Europe by train.
• Navigating unknown rail booking sites such as DB (Deutsche Bahn) and CD.
• Understanding when bookings are opened for sleeper and regular trains.
• Weighing up the costs of booking tickets on individual trains vs an all-rounder package like Interrail.
• Seeing what the trains and boarding and stations are like in each destination.
• Getting advanced warnings of closures and delays.
• Finally, finding cool routes! Right now I’m looking out the window at the northern Alps because of the site’s verrrry useful “Trains from x” page (Munich in this case).

Needless to say, this site is a must read for anyone travelling by train in a country not their own.

I’ll probably be back in August properly to blog again then. Until then, peace!