Three weeks interrailing across Northern Europe: How I did it and how you could too
With Interrail currently offering 25% off their rail passes until mid-December, I figured now is the perfect time to finally polish off these notes from my recent trip, in case anybody else fancies taking a well-planned, stress-free holiday across Europe, with a fraction of the carbon footprint of flying.
In this post:
But first…
A note about how I’m “misusing” Interrail
The whole point of Interrail is flexibility, but I booked all my trains and accommodation in advance. Why?
Partly because international express services require seat reservations in addition to your interrail pass, and those seats get booked up in advance. The true “interrail” way is to take the slow, local, stopping services, where you don’t need reservations. But I wanted to pack as much as possible into my trip, which meant covering the most distance in the least time – and so, booking in advance.
But also because if you don’t plan your trains in advance, you can’t plan your hotels in advance either. The true “interrail” way is to use hostels on the fly – they’re apparently cheap, a great way to “meet people”, and unlikely to be booked up in advance. But I’m not a hostel person, so I booked hotels and apartments well in advance, which meant also reserving my trains in advance.
Planning the trip
The fun part of planning your trip is choosing your destinations. You’ll probably already have ideas for this. Make a short list of cities/places, then use something like Google Maps’ public transport direction planner to see how those cities/places are connected by rail. I used sites like Byway and The Man In Seat Sixty-One for inspiration.
Then think about how long you’d like to spend away, and how many ‘days’ of travelling between cities/places that’ll require. Interrail’s ‘Flexi’ passes are valid for a set number of travel days in a 1- or 2-month period. You’ll want to pick the number of travel days that match the cities you want to see, factoring in ideally 2 days’ stop in each location, to enjoy the destinations as well as the trains 😉
Next comes the geeky part – checking train (and accommodation) availability before booking your seat reservations. Again, Seat Sixty-One and the r/interrail wiki will help you work out how to book with the various different train companies in each country. I was able to book pretty much all of my seat reservations between the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Brussels via the Deutsche Bahn website, which cost about €5 per seat, with no additional booking fees. The rest, I had to do direct, with Eurostar, DSB, and SJ.
With 12 train journeys and 3 ferry journeys to coordinate, I made a monster spreadsheet, cataloguing the availability of each train, each day, over a two month window…
I then picked a 3 week run where everything was available, and there was a day’s leeway afterwards too, in case disaster struck and I needed to take a train a day late.
I ended up with a plan like this…
My final itinerary was:
- Travel day: Liverpool – London – Amsterdam (9h)
- Day and night in Amsterdam
- Day and night in Amsterdam
- Travel day: Amsterdam – Osnabruck – Hamburg (5h)
- Day and night in Hamburg
- Travel day: Hamburg – Copenhagen – Malmö – Stockholm (12h)
- Day and night in Stockholm
- Day and afternoon in Stockholm, then overnight ferry to Tallinn
- Day and night in Tallinn
- Day and night in Tallinn
- Day and night in Tallinn
- Morning in Tallinn, then afternoon ferry to Helsinki, night in Helsinki
- Day and night in Helsinki
- Day in Helsinki, then overnight ferry to Stockholm
- Travel day: Half-day in Stockholm, then train Stockholm – Malmö – Copenhagen (5½h)
- Day and night in Copenhagen
- Travel day: Day in Copenhagen, then train Copenhagen – Fredericia (2h)
- Day trip from Fredericia to Lego House (Billund), night in Fredericia
- Day and night in Fredericia
- Travel day: Fredericia – Flensburg – Hamburg – Cologne – Brussels (11h)
- Day and night in Brussels
- Travel day: morning in Brussels, then train Brussels – London – Liverpool (7h)
I had originally planned to visit Oslo, but trains times up the western edge of Sweden, and then back to Stockholm, were a pain. So I figured it was better to spend an extra day or two somewhere I was already visiting, than struggling to visit a city I’d already been to once before.
Not just trains!
The observant will have noticed there are some ferries in the middle of that itinerary. Yes! That’s because Tallink Silja offer discounts on their cheaper cabins if you have an Interrail pass.
They don’t actually verify your Interrail pass when you book online, but when you come to check in at the terminal, the self check-in machines will tell you to go to an attended check-in desk – the human needs to verify you have an active Interrail pass.
Note that ferry days do not have to be on active Interrail ‘travel days’, so they don’t eat into your pass’s day allowance. Just having an active Interrail pass is enough.
Booking
In all, it took me a few weekend days/evenings to plan everything, and then, with my massive spreadsheet in hand, one nerve-wracking afternoon to book everything in one go.
Once I’d bought my Iterrail pass (which could be used any time in the next 11 months), I booked the riskiest stuff first – all the things that would send me back to the drawing board if they turned out to no longer be available. So Eurostar seat reservations both ways, then seat reservations for the other international express trains (via the DB, DSB, and SJ websites), then ferries, then hotels, and then finally, optional seat reservations for local services.
Obviously I’d already checked that I didn’t need a Visa to do any of this trip, and that my passport was still well in date. Next year, Europe is likely to introduce a €7 electronic travel authorisation called ETIAS (a bit like the USA’s ESTA), which will be another minor hurdle for everyone from outside Europe to battle with. Sigh.
I bought travel insurance a week or two before departure. I spent ages looking for a provider that would compensate for delayed or cancelled trains, but most don’t, and the rest only offer a minor compensation for delays/cancellations on your first or last public transport connection of the holiday, not the ones in the middle. Since I was bringing my laptop, iPad, iPhone, and Steam Deck with me (yeah, probably didn’t need all that, but hey) it was more important to me to get good gadget coverage, than train compensation. Note, when it comes to gadget coverage, it’s not just about the total amount covered, but also the per-item compensation limit. Some policies covered up to £2000, but had a £200 per-item limit – ridiculous. Read the small print!
What I took with me
With everything planned and booked, and a few agonising weeks of waiting out of the way, it was time to pack everything. (Obviously I did a packing dry-run a week or so before departure, just in case I needed to buy a bigger bag, or cut down my list!)
Here’s what I took:
Bags
I took a 40 litre backpack, and a 12 litre packable day pack.
I went with the tomtoc Navigator-T66 40L travel backpack because of its massive, wide-open front zip, padded dual-laptop/tablet compartment, water bottle holder, and comfy padded straps and handles. I now use it almost every week for trips home to see my parents. I cannot recommend this bag highly enough.
And for the day pack, I bought a cheap Skysper model off Amazon. I’d originally assumed this might be packed away during my ‘travel days’ and only come out when I was wandering around cities, but I actually kept it out all the time. It was perfect for holding my headphones, Steam Deck, battery, and a packed lunch, during train journeys.
Clothes
This is a massively subjective thing, but in case it helps you plan, here’s what I took for my trip, in a fairly warm August:
- 7 t-shirts
- 2 short sleeve shirts
- 1 smart-casual long sleeve shirt
- 1 pair cargo trousers (gotta love them pockets!)
- 1 pair jeans
- 1 pair shorts
- 1 lightweight bomber jacket
- 10 sets of underwear
- 5 pairs of socks (not enough for the amount of walking I was doing)
- 1 belt
- 1 baseball cap (I used this so much this trip, I basically ruined it)
- 1 pair of ‘walking’ trainers (I should have brought two pairs)
- 1 pair of ‘smart’ trainers (I really didn’t need these, and actually lost them halfway round)
- Sunglasses
- Mini foldable umbrella
I should have considered how stinky my socks and trainers would get, and discovered that wearing the same socks for two or three days (to tide me over between visits to a laundry) and the same single pair of trainers every single day just wasn’t enough, when I was walking an average of 15,000 steps a day. I ended up buying shoe deodoriser at the end of the second week, to prevent my trainers taking on a life of their own.
Along with this, I had a small-ish bag of toilettries:
- Toothbrush and toothpaste
- Travel soap and ‘soap saver’ bag (I bought this soap because it’s marketed as being suitable for washing clothes, in a pinch – I never needed it for that, but I really fell in love with it otherwise, and still use it now I’m back in the UK)
- Deodorant
- Beard trimmer and charging cable
- Tweezers
- Nail clippers
- Sunscreen
Mobile data
Having enough mobile data to use Google Maps, Google Translate, and Citymapper, while out and about, was non-negotiable.
EE wanted to charge me £25 for an EU “roaming pass” (thanks Brexit voters). Instead, I bought a Spark eSIM from MobiMatter, 12 GB for less than £10.
I enabled data roaming and “low data mode” on the eSIM, disabled data roaming on my UK (EE) SIM, and that was it. This was my first time adding an eSIM to my phone, and honestly, I was surprised how easy it was.
(Note: you’ll want to check your phone is ‘unlocked’ and can accept third-party eSIMs – it sounds like some phone providers prevent you installing additional SIMs when you’re in a contract with them. Yuck.)
12 GB covered me for 3 weeks, with 0.4 GB spare at the end of the trip. Low data mode prevented a lot of traffic, and I didn’t stream any audio or video (apart from some audio tours in museums and the walls around Fredericia) so my 12 GB was almost entirely down to Google Maps, Citymapper, and looking up stuff on the web while out and about.
Since my EE SIM was still active in the background (just with data disabled), iMessages sent to my EE number continued to come through fine, and messages I sent appeared (to my recipients) to have come from that number, but all the actual data was flowing over my pre-paid eSIM. Magic.
Money
I decided not to take any cash with me, and relied entirely on card payments via Apple Pay/Wallet on my phone (with physical cards as a backup).
I knew, if I took cash, I’d lose between 10–20% on any that remained unspent at the end of the holiday, because of Bureau de Change spread. And if I needed any emergency cash, in-country, I could withdraw up to a maximum of £1900 from my two current accounts, via an ATM, for just the Mastercard base rate, which was already 2–6% better than the GBP-to-forex rates from UK high street Bureaux De Change. No-brainer.
Maybe, if I weren’t visiting some of the most advanced, civilised cities in the world, I might take some cash just as a backup. But, surprise surprise, with my itinerary, I didn’t end up needing cash.
(Ironically, while I didn’t spend any cash on my trip, I did come home with some cash – a 5 DKK coin, refunded to me when I returned a plastic cup to the recycling machine at Tivoli Gardens. It now sits in my trophy cabinet, inside another Tivoli Gardens cup I smuggled out, as a souvenir.)
Battery pack
Back home, it’ll be an unusually heavy day if my iPhone has dropped to 40% power by bedtime – but I knew I’d be living through my phone on this trip, so bought a battery pack to make sure I always had power. I had my phone in Low Power mode all the time, but still ended up giving it a top-up charge while out and about most days (in addition to the initial overnight bedside charge).
I chose an INUI 65W 2000mAh battery pack with USB-C PD both in and out, meaning it can “fast charge” charge other devices and also itself. I knew the battery pack would be in my backpack, so didn’t need it to be pocket-sized, and also wanted something with enough capacity to charge my phone, my iPad, and my Steam Deck, in a single train journey, just in case.
As it happens, pretty much every express train I was on had power sockets at the seat, so I didn’t really need the battery pack for train journeys. But it was very nice being able to quickly fast-charge 50% into my phone’s battery in fifteen minutes on a tram or at a café or whatever, from the battery back in my bag.
Combined USB-C charger
When you’re carrying everything in a single backpack, volume and weight matter.
Before this trip, I used to carry an Apple 96W charging brick and “kettle plug” cable for my MacBook Pro, and a folding Apple 30W “cube” charger for my iPad and iPhone, for journeys away from home.
But I wanted to cut down for this trip. So I got a UGREEN Nexode 65W charger, which can charge two devices at once over USB-C, can “fast charge” one at a time, and best of all, has a metal earth pin, preventing that unrectified AC/DC buzz you get when you touch your MacBook (as long as you use the MacBook’s grounded MagSafe cable). Best investment ever. I’ve used this, and a 2-metre USB-C cable, for all my UK travelling, since I got back from my trip.
Assorted tips
Food is expensive in Northern European countries. An evening meal for one (just a main course and a drink) could easily hit £30 at most places I passed – whereas back home in Liverpool I could get a perfectly fine evening meal for £20 or less. So, where possible, I made use of supermarkets (like Coop and Lidl in Sweden and Denmark, Selver in Tallinn) to buy cheap, ready-to-eat breakfasts and lunches. Hamburg was the absolute best for street food – the cheap, plentiful, and absolutely gorgeous pastries available from retailers in the train station itself (I know!) was an unexpected treat. On-board train and ferry eateries were the absolute worst – not only eye-wateringly expensive but also really low quality. It comes to something when the best food option on your ferry is Burger King.
Speaking of which, the dinner options on Tallink Silja ferries are absolutely 100% not worth the money, and the breakfast option is maybe only 60% worth the money (75% if you really fill your boots, but you’ll still find yourself missing things that you thought were just breakfast basics everywhere, but it turns out, not on a Tallink Silja ship!). I booked onboard dinner for my first overnight ferry, but for my second one I just brought pre-made food with me and had a picnic in my cabin.
You can fit more clothes into your bag if you “ranger roll” them. I was worried about creases, but a quick smooth out on the bed, or a hang up the night before, had them all straightened out.
Shockingly, German trains do not always run to time. Two of the three times I was delayed on a train this trip, it was on a German train (and the other time was when my SJ train to Stockholm hit someone on the tracks, so I think they get a free pass for that). I feel like I’m owed a refund for years of jingoistic, “grass is always greener” stereotypes about clockwork efficiency German passenger transport.
Public transport in cities like Stockholm, Helsinki, and Tallinn is so amazingly smooth and simple – essentially Transport for London levels of integration, but cheaper. And with trams too. Toot!! Most modes of transport in most cities just worked with a tap in and out of a contactless card or mobile device, but for the others (trains in Brussels, everything in Helsinki) it was fairly quick and easy to download the mobile app and buy a ticket through that.
The best time to visit Tivoli Gardens in the Summer is around 4–5pm – you get to enjoy a few hours of rides or entertainment in the sun, then the beautiful twinkling lights during dusk, and then the full-on illuminated night-time experience after sunset. The “illuminations” on the lake at 22:30 are pretty feeble, especially for anyone who’s seen how they do it at EPCOT, but it’s a nice way to round out your visit.
Was it worth bringing my laptop on the trip? It was a worry, but I think the answer is yes, it was worth it. I’m five times faster on my laptop than on an iPad or iPhone, and there were a handful of times when I needed to do some quite messy or complex planning (such as when SJ informed me that my trains from/to Copenhagen would only be going to Malmö instead) where clumsily sliding and swiping and long-press copying and pasting between apps on one of my touchscreen devices would have been horrendous, but zipping through it on a proper keyboard and trackpad was a weight off my mind. If I did the trip again, I might investigate bringing a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, for my iPad, instead, just for the handful of times when it might have been useful.