Take the Plane. (Societe Nationale des Chemins de Fer Belges SNCB (Belgium))

Member Name: Johnny17

Product:	Societe Nationale des Chemins de Fer Belges SNCB (Belgium)
Date:	27/08/02 (212 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap way to travel., Saves wear and tear on the car., You can take the car.

Disadvantages: Its uncomertable., You get little sleep., Its a bad start to the holiday.

I have just got back from a holiday in Italy. We chose to first take the tunnel across the channel and then take the SNCB train from Belgium to Italy.
The SNCB offer a service called motorail. This is when you drive you car onto the train and stay on a sleeper train over night. (As this service only operates over night.
There are many good reasons for traveling like this. It saves time on you holiday. It enables you to take your car with you on holiday, (which we found was very useful if you wanted to take lots of the local wine and olive oil). It saves petrol cost and wear and tear on the car. You don't have to pay hotel fees for the over night stop.
When we got to the station in Belgium we put on our car happily and then found out we had a two-hour wait until the sleeper carriages arrived. After a long and tedious wait the train arrived and we boarded. We (being a family on five) soon realized the reality of what our cabin was. It was like a matchbox. There were three beds on top of each other on one side and three on the other with a half a meter gap in the middle. We sat there waiting until supper. After looking at the cabins we weren?t expecting the dining carriage to be much better. However we were pleasantly surprised. It looking nice it was air conditioned (unlike the cabin). The food was good to. However the waiter was positively rude and very "moody". After the meal we retired for the night. We flipped a coin for the beds and I ended up with the highest bunk. This was not good news. The so-called mattress was a slab of wood covered in a bit of fabric. As soon as we were all in bed, the train picked up speed. This was not good news. It came to the point where you weren't aiming on getting to sleep you were concentrating on trying not to fall the long way out of bed. At about two o?clock in the morning we stopped at a station in Switzerland for about two hours for no reason what so ever.
In total that night I think I got
about two hours sleep. In the morning we were given a very mosdest breakfast and got off the train in Italy.
My conclusion is that motorail is a good method of travel but you don?t want to do it in a large group. Next time I am taking the plane.

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