I Took Europe’s ‘Best’ Train London to Berlin—Here’s Why I Flew Back

Taking the train in Europe is meant to be better, right?
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If you’re new to my channel and videos, hi! I’m Evan Edinger, and I make weekly “comedy” videos every Sunday evening. As an American living in London I love noticing the funny differences between the cultures and one of my most popular video series is my British VS American one. I’m also known for making terrible puns so sorry in advance. Hope to see you around, and I’ll see you next Sunday! 🙂

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it’s currently 5: in the morning and I’m here at St panr International station about to take a 13-hour train journey to Berlin sounds a bit excessive right why take a train for 13 hours when the plane is less than two well that’s exactly what I aim to find out today you see trains in Europe are often held as the gold standard you know you got no long security lines you got no baggage fees it’s more comfortable you got cool sounds like that but is this reputation so deserved today I’m going to be comparing the train journey to Berlin from London with the reverse by plane to see how it really Stacks up not just in time convenience and price but in some hidden trade-offs I feel like a lot of people don’t consider and if you’re new here hi my name is Evan Eder that YouTuber that has his hand in every single Niche I’ve taking Planes Trains and everything in between I should probably get going my train leaves in 45 minutes and I still got to pass through passport control cuz you know brexit let’s go time to board [Music] one of the big selling points of taking the train is you don’t have to wake up as early to head to an airport far out of the city but unlucky for me my train was scheduled for 6:04 a.m. meaning the only way of getting there in time was taking the Night Bus All Things Considered though not that bad when I did finally make it to S pagers International it seems I wasn’t the only one traveling this early hello good sir you you also going to Berlin what there he goes security for international train travel is by and large less stressful than via plane but once you get through security you’re usually kept in a very small holding area with not to do except wait in an enormous queue for a pret coffee and as a proper Brit I know what to do when I see a queue so I got a coffee it was still 5:30 in the morning eventually our train arrived at the platform and we lagged it to our Carriage I got very excited to see how comfy these seats looked only to realize oh that’s the first class cabin the door shut on me automatic Al poetic unlike on a plane this train offered lots of space to store my suitcase at either end of the carriage and even some more space overhead and I wasn’t charged for it I found my seat on the very packed train quite comfortable All Things Considered usually as a 192 cm tall guy traveling can get quite uncomfortable but the Earth star seating was honestly not that bad my knees weren’t even hitting the front that right there is a tall win once the train got moving and I had some people’s butts in my du lingo League I decided to have a little walk around this is probably the nicest part of taking the train versus the plane there’s just more freedom in space I did envy people who’d gotten the seats with the table in between but hey my ticket was only 100 quid so I was not complaining eventually I made my way to the dining Carriage which was quite plain even though it was a train but the croissants looked surprisingly good and they even had this little area you could stand that to eat if you so pleased I did not so pleased but while this croissant did look surprisingly good we are also quickly approaching the point where everything starts to go horribly wrong the Euro star might be nice for now but let’s just say the second leg of this journey left me questioning everything thank you for your patience this is not good before biting to micro I looked out the window to see something I’ve never seen before yeah apparently even cars want a taste of that European train experience who knew cars could be so eco-friendly yeah I’ve just never seen a train carrying cars like that before the American and me has only ever seen like big tractor trailers carrying like eight different cars on its back and it makes sense that there would be trains that did that as well for cars i’ just never seen it before so hey this experience got me a first now one thing that can’t happen in a plane stopping all of a sudden you just fall out of the air our train came to a complete stop for some reason in Belgium but we soon found out why the people in the tracks are caught by the police will be probably arriving in Rotterdam on time thank you for your patience and of course I hear you you’re saying Evan please show us the toilet that’s so specific but all right I did actually film myself in the toilet and hey look I can stand up straight without bonking my head on the ceiling that I genuinely cannot do in most plain toilets a little over 4 hours after leaving London we finally made it to Amsterdam here’s where I was given over 2 and 1/2 hours of a layover to do whatever I liked I’ve traveled all over the world and usually when you have a layover at an airport that’s where you kind of have to stay so you don’t ever get a chance to actually do anything in the city that you’re in luckily for me the Eurostar dropped me off right at Amsterdam Central Station which meant I could pretty much do anything I wanted in the city for the next 2 hours so I dropped off my suitcase for about 8 at the station I like my suitcase and immediately headed out to hit up as many things as I could in the short amount of time I had If This Were a flight and I had a layover I’d kind of just be stuck at the airport cuz even if you do have 2 hours layover that’s barely enough time to get through the airport and get to boarding and all the other faf here I could kind of enjoy what we do in Amsterdam get some stroke waffle you know if you’ve seen my video on uh Amsterdam before you would know my top stroke waffles let’s go get it I saw some Dutch bikes I saw some Dutch cheese and I went into one of those Dutch coffee shops I’d heard so much about I don’t know what type of caffeine they’re putting in this stuff but woo boy really felt that after picking up one of my favorite stroke waffles in the city that I made a video about linked above and walking on various streets and soaking in the beauty of the Dutch canals I found a place you can go to change your pot but they wouldn’t accept any of the weed that I just bought so I went into an American Supermarket Instead This American Supermarket had all the Staples of my childhood sugary cereals Sour Patch Kids Pop-Tarts and of course maxi pads as I headed back to the station I was feeling so happy and excited to carry on the rest of my train journey to Berlin absolutely sure nothing could ruin this perfect trip little did I know the real journey was about to begin all right well this is not good according to the sign it looks like my train is no longer going to Berlin which is where I’m going so that is troubling um I now need to figure out what the heck I’m going to be doing it’s already a long journey so any little mishap like this is going to cost me oh god oh I forgot to tell you Eurostar arguably a pretty great train can only take you as far as from London to Amsterdam the second half of my journey was run by Deon turns out deoban decided to not have my train take me to Berlin anymore if my name were Ben I’d be sure to be having a bad Ben time bad benheim as you can see on this map is very much on the complete other side of Germany as Berlin so I was quite miffed but surely Doan couldn’t make my journey any worse right our train departed Amsterdam and at this point I realized I was just kind of dead I’d been traveling since 4 in the morning and despite the lovely refreshing time in Amsterdam I was starting to feel the effects of traveling all day sure the views out the window were quite nice as we passed by some lovely scenery Dutch cycle paths and we even went through that Dutch City I vlogged myself cycling through and called a town angering the entire country as it’s like one of their biggest cities sorry guys I’m from London what can I say the seating on this docheon train wasn’t nearly as nice as the Eurostar one but obviously that wasn’t the worst part about the service the seats had this interesting reclining feature where it only worked if you actively put a large amount of pressure against it but the moment you tried to relax it would just slide itself back forward who designed this for whom why Jans do not like to relax also one thing I found interesting was this little bin they put in between the the seats it truly felt so small for mostly anything but the image on the front with an apple core felt like a nice recommendation so I put my banana peel in there and closed it back up but it honestly felt like I was pulling a prank here did they actually have someone check every single one of these tiny bins after every Journey sounds like a rubbish job to me then a rainbow out the window felt like a sign from God maybe just maybe I’d have a good bend time after all that is until the conductor dropped even worse news on us ladies and gentlemen there’s problem with the engine engine drivers Tred to solve it be patient would I’m not having a good B time I’m not even having a bad B time I’m having no B time at all they’re not taking me there they’re not even taking me into Germany reason being they’re just W enough trains I guess the train I was on didn’t count so now I had to spend an extra 2 hours in the small Dutch town of hangal so I did a little little Shaka there cuz I’m hanging low anyway surely nothing else could go wrong I stopped by a local place for a kebab which was better than anything in London but still nowhere near what you get in Berlin and then had to wander around the town to get the most out of this unfortunate delay weirdly enough it was 400 p.m. on a Friday and the place was super dead this looked like a nice square but where was everybody this was a nice little park but yet again I walked alone does anyone even live in hangal it just felt like I was in some sort of like film set I found a puddle and sat here for ages to try and get a nice photo but these were the best I could come up with then I headed back to the station only to face Europe’s worst feature paid toilets not only does this toilet charge you 50p to enter it’s disgusting smelling room it also doesn’t actually let you in I tried two different toilets which happily took my money but then wouldn’t even open the door actual robbery luckily for me I got one of the station staff to let me in as I began to wait another hour for the next train to pull in except it wasn’t just an hour because it’s docheon so even that train that was delayed was delayed another 35 minutes at this point I was starting to wonder how could anything be worse than this surely the flight back to London would be smoother right well let’s not get too ahead of ourselves when the train finally arrived everyone was freezing everybody boarded and then at long last we entered Germany I still had a long way to go at least I got a seat with a table to rest against but this seat interestingly had its little apple cor bins at the edge of the table I sadly did not have an appealing gift to give it this time the train traveled and traveled and traveled and traveled and traveled as I lost my sanity until finally at long last my train finally arrived at the Berlin hhof the station is so incredibly massive and a beautiful piece of infrastructure especially with all the Christmas decor up but at this point I’d been traveling for a full 18 hours so I hopped on the nearest tram rode it to East Berlin and finally on foot I came to my hotel which had been expecting me 4 hours earlier I’m almost there I’m almost there but Germans are so used to DOA Bond’s awful service at this point it was actually expected at long last I made it to my room and collapsed all in all I would not do this again I honestly would not recommend it it’s just so draining to spend the entire day traveling sure I could get up I could walk around I could enjoy seeing out the dirty Windows the Eurostar but it just doesn’t make sense to spend 12 13 14 15 18 hours traveling when you can do it in two a lot easier even considering the time it takes to get to the airport and secure security and whatnot especially when there are more variables involved especially when one of those variables is deuts Bond all in all it kind of felt similar to when I’ve taken 13-hour coach trips much more cramped yes but energy depletion Wise It’s very similar I’m actually looking forward to taking the plane back because I really really never want to do that again didn’t help that there was no place to charge my computer so after like 4 hours I couldn’t do anything I I’m just on my phone like God didn’t even practice German I practice Spanish it’s currently midnight I’ve been up for 18 hours that’s not true I’ve been up for 21 hours just to take a train from London to Berlin shouldn’t have taken this long I’m going get some sleep after an amazing couple days in Berlin shooting an upcoming video on public transit and having some delicious kabs with my friend Dodie it was time to finally head to the airport it only took about 45 minutes to get to the airport via train and then a further 45 minutes to get through security really not that bad so I’ve just gotten to Berlin’s airport the be the Brandenburg uh honestly we went through security very fast took about 15 20 minutes obviously not going to be filming in security took about 45 55 minutes to get there on the tram so we’ve got to add that up into consideration but uh you know how I fly I just we’re already here we’re about to board so let’s get on the plane after wondering why people always stand up like 18 hours before their own boarding section is called our boarding session was called so we stood up it is boarding our group I believe so we scanned our passports and we were then told some rather for booing news so very similar to my train journey to Berlin I’ve now experienced a bit of a first B bit of a delay because there’s a huge storm happening in London at the moment so the the plane is taking off at the right time but we’re just going to circle around London to the airport for about a half hour before that they probably so we made our way to the long passage of the door of our flight today which was on an Embraer 110 where I snapped this thumbnail pick they were so over booked for this flight though that the people that did stand up super early got to put their random items in the overhead compartments leaving no space for anyone else’s stuff so we were told we’d have to check our bags luckily for me I always have a way out of this my bags hold way too many lithium batteries for my cameras and things which are not allowed in the hold so after shuffling around we got to put our luggage overhead somewhere up front and we made it to our standard short Hall seats nothing to write home about but it does Beat Ryan A’s Fleet that causes immense pain fitting my legs in it’s always a bit of a battle trying to fit both my long legs and my camera backpack under the seat but that’s sadly what you get when you’re flying short hole economy All Things Considered this British Airways variation of this plane wasn’t that bad and luckily for me the person in front didn’t recline if they had there would have been a scream doy and I then diligently paid attention to the flight safety demonstration as you know it might differ slightly from any other time you’ve flown before just take your heels off before riding the slide out the window we then took off no matter how many times I’ve flown I do always enjoy how peaceful everything looks out the window of the [Music] plane Dodie showed me a feature of these airplane seats I’d literally never seen before where you can place your phone in this Nifty little spot on the back of the seat in front of you that’s so handy for me though I pulled out my laptop to edit some photos from the trip now clearly British hairways has it out for its cleaning crew as the inlight snack for this flight was a Nature Valley bar you know the ones that turn into a powdery mess the second you open it but I mean actually I didn’t do too badly maybe maybe they formulated it differently for the flight bit of a crummy snack Boo as this was a British Airways flight I also got a free drink as well and so the free drink I went with was tomato juice nice after an interesting veritasium video talked about how it tastes better to drink tomato juice on flights due to the change in air pressure on our like taste buds or something I just wanted to try it out and you know what it wasn’t that bad what was bad though on this particular flight was just how painful that air pressure felt in my ears this is quite a rare thing for me to go through but it’s definitely not something I would have had to worry about on the train however here’s where the turbulence started to kick in a very large storm was currently battering the UK with c getting 100 kmph winds and London where we were Landing wasn’t much better off I checked out the inflight reading of safety manuals to put Do’s mind at ease but the passengers were really being tossed about and the flight attendants did not appreciate me capturing that may I have your ATT recording or Dodie is really not a fan of turbulence so to make her feel better I informed her that pilots flying into London City Airport have to go through a lot of extra training just to land there so they’re actually some of the most experienced Pilots we have of course this is due to lcy being one of the most challenging airports for commercial pilots to land in in all of Europe due to how incredibly steep the approach is at 5.5 de compared to the usual 3° couple that with a very short Runway of 1,58 M compared to Heath’s 398 M and with the massive skyscrapers of canary Warf and overall Urban environment around the airport this makes it one of the most difficult airports to land in on a non- windy day somehow all these extra facts did not in fact make Dodie feel better so after some tight hand squeezes and a very shaky descent we safely made it to London city but despite being such a difficult airport for Pilots to land at lcy is a Utopia for passengers which is why it’s one of my all-time favorite airports from the second the wheels of your plane hit the tarmac to being at the door of the DLR train it’s just shy of 10 minutes and then normally you can just ride the DLR wherever you need to go and that cuts the usual hassle that the bigger airports have of dealing with massive cues getting through immigration traveling all the way back into the city look at this map London city it’s in the city it’s even in the name listen this whole trip I had some major bad luck and on this day even towards the end where I was so excited to just get on my train and go home the drr decided to go down for maintenance so the streets filled with replacement buses that was complete bumper-to-bumper for a full hour I waved goodbye to Dodie and I had to sit like this for what was meant to be about eight minutes and it turned out to be a full hour and a half bad luck indeed I managed to get home with a cumulative travel time from my hotel in Berlin to my home in London in about 4.5 hours that could have easily been under four on a normal day oh uh well that’s a bit of a weird continuity error isn’t it I wasn’t wearing this that it’s not even the same suitcase well I was hoping to you know make a little conclusion with this and give you some uh key takeaways are you a brand deal in the living room yeah today’s video is sponsored by nordvpn if you’re stuck using the train Wi-Fi nordvpn helps keep your connection to the internet secure and private and unlike my train nordvpn is blazing fast with the click of a button can easily Place me and my connection in Germany if only deutan were that efficient now I can access a lot more German content not available within the UK nordvpn is super useful when it comes to hiding your browsing history from your ISP whether that be when you’re home or abroad and with a 30-day money back guarantee it’s worth giving a shot plus if you go to nordvpn.com they just so happen to be having quite the deal on on a 2-year plan you get a little something extra as well just for using my link so be sure to visit nordvpn.com and keep your connection safe today so thanks nordvpn for sponsoring let me wrap this up so if I try to objectively compare My overall experience on the train to Berlin versus the plane back some really big things stick out one no doubt taking the train was more comfortable there was more leg room there was more freedom to move around less pressure both air pressure and stress pressure and the overall experience was just so much more fun and wholesome it felt like a just cozy Journey except for the delays two being able to actually make use of a layover by exploring the actual city of Amsterdam rather than just an airport was truly a highlight for this trip and it made it so much more memorable even if I don’t remember a lot of what happened in Amsterdam three if the trip had instead just been to Amsterdam I feel like it would have been a sure win for the train it’s the Eurostar the entire way there which is pretty much a great experience it’s at the train station near Central Security is quick and it got me where I needed to go without much delay except for the kids that were on the train tracks but eh but once you start involving other train lines into the mix you’re just adding more variables for things to go wrong and it does seem like comparing anything to do chaban is a bit unfair but deoban is one of the most prominent and widely used train networks in all of Europe yet in 2023 it was revealed from their own numbers that 58.4% of their long-distance trains arrive on time that’s horrible that is shockingly awful if you were someone who wanted a more pleasant journey by train or maybe I wanted to choose The Greener option maybe you just like trains you’re pretty much spinning a roulette wheel on how long your trip is going to be delayed and God forbid if you actually have a connecting Journey with dond because in my case well I would have had everything fall apart even if I’d given myself a 2hour buffer that is wild ntional rail in the UK might be bad but this trip really made me feel like thank God it’s better than Germany’s this doesn’t include Berlin’s transport Network by the way which has always been over 90% reliable but I’m saving more information on that in uh the future video I’m making comparing Berlin’s to London and four I think if I were to compare a flight into stanstead or luten which are the Budget Airline airports that are super far away from London it also might make the overall time commitment more balanced with the train journey plus you have to pay to get a train to and from those airports so that might balance it but a lot of times realistically making this decision for me comes down to price if the train were cheaper I’d probably get it 90% of the time but most times when I try to get a train ticket to Europe the cost is over three times the cost of a flight which basically rules out the train for me completely and it’s kind of an unfair battle here cuz flying is subsidized heavily by governments Airlines don’t pay fuel tax and they’re rarely charge the full cost of using publicly funded airports meanwhile train operators have to pay for every inch of track and infrastructure and they’re taxed on the fuel too if I were in charge of the UK government and I really wanted more people to take the train make that decision for the environment for just cuz it’s better I’d swap the subsidies I’d make rail travel cheaper and I’d invest more in better infrastructure for rail especially for those short Journeys where flying should not be encouraged also I would just immediately just destroy do jaban if I’m the UK If I was in charge of the UK government I would just ring up do Jaan and be like stop but for the time being I can only recommend this long journey from London to Berlin for those wishing to experience it just to experience it rather than it actually being a better mode of Transport if you’ve got the time though and you can work from the train you know work from home type stuff it still does get a big thumbs up from me just like you did hopefully to this video for me though I probably wouldn’t do this again unless the price was right or the time efficiency was right there otherwise I’ll probably stick to taking the plane oh that’s such a Negative ending stop leaving me negative comments whenever I fly to Amsterdam I’m sorry I I want to pay three times the price anyway hope you’re having a great New Year and have a nice day see you next Sunday I guess give me a thumbs up they don’t matter anymore in the algorithm you know that comment for the algorithm that also doesn’t do anything the only thing that works is really sharing and I guess watching it so thanks for watching have a nice day