Comment by ghaff
1 day ago
In fairness, "amber waves of grain" can probably get old after a while. But absent time (and, to some degree, money restrictions), I'd probably get somewhat bored after a while given that I've seen a lot of that scenery from a car or hiking around.
But to the point some people here are making, I've done some fairly long distance train travel in Europe, including sleepers, and, while I tend to prefer it to planes especially budget ones which I basically never take, I'm not sure it's an especially efficient way to travel for the most part if you want to get from point A to point B as quickly and cost effectively as possible.
It really never wins against a plane or even car except where everything lines up perfectly and you can treat an overnight sleeper train as a rolling hotel, check in, eat, sleep, eat, walk out where you need to be.
It’s such a good experience that building the rest of the trip around it can be worthwhile, but it is still not terribly fast.
Yeah, if you get a sleeper and figure you're saving a night in London or Edinburgh and you don't need to deal with airports, something like the Caledonian Sleeper isn't a bad deal or really consume a lot of extra time. But if you're not in a hurry, it's still a good experience for a lot of people.
But then I've also done a trans-Atlantic crossing but I was semi-retired at the time. Which I would do again at some point but was certainly neither cost nor time efficient.