[HN Gopher] The Man in Seat 61
___________________________________________________________________
The Man in Seat 61
Author : BerislavLopac
Score : 279 points
Date : 2024-03-08 08:39 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.seat61.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.seat61.com)
| miniwark wrote:
| Thanks for the nice discovery, i know now how to go to Siracuse
| by train.
| opjjf wrote:
| How the internet should be. A guy sharing his hobby, providing
| useful information.
| tosbourn wrote:
| I was just coming on to say this.
|
| I live somewhere where travelling by train is limited to
| basically local journeys, but love when I see this site get
| mentioned anywhere, because it reminds me of what the internet
| can be!
| ant6n wrote:
| It's a little bit more than a hobby for this guy...
| opjjf wrote:
| True! But it certainly started out as a hobby and still has
| that feel to it.
| tathagatadg wrote:
| This is one of my favorite sites - I came to know about during my
| first trip to Europe and used it the next time to get information
| on even which side of the train to get the seats on for better
| view and a table. I am so glad it has retained its look and not
| become like every site on the internet that require a GPU to
| load.
| luzojeda wrote:
| Same here. Travelling to Europe for the first time from South
| America and it's been a godsend. Naively thought that train
| travelling was simpler than it really is (which is completely
| understandable that's why I say I was being naive). Eurail
| community posters pointed me to that webpage and didn't need
| anything else.
|
| Love the simple design too, a godsend nowadays.
| ghaff wrote:
| I often say that train and transit travel often seems to
| assume that you're a local who knows what they're doing
| rather than a potentially first-time visitor who doesn't
| speak the language.
| bombcar wrote:
| Most transit systems (and leaking into trains) are oriented
| toward commuters, because that's the vast majority of the
| ridership.
|
| The most common "concession" to visitors is often a
| (slightly overpriced) day or week pass that lets you ride
| anything anytime.
| ghaff wrote:
| Oh, I understand the reason.
|
| At least with transit, just tapping a credit card is
| becoming more common which generally reduces the need to
| dig into how payment works.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Basically, the reason that it's not simple is that every
| country has its own rail operator.
| rconti wrote:
| Or more!
| dougmwne wrote:
| One of the best sites remaining from the old internet. I am
| always happy to learn it's still going.
| matricaria wrote:
| I recently went to India and was looking for recommendations for
| traveling by train. Found this site and was amazed by the
| information on there. Great site!
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| An invaluable resource. I've used this before for travelling
| around Europe by myself for the first time, and it immediately
| took the stress out of planning "what can I even do" and "how do
| I even do anything". The trivia about recommended sides to sit on
| to get the best view in certain directions is added fun.
| noneeeed wrote:
| Likewise. When we went to Spain last year I was trying to
| understand how to book tickets and this site was invaluable in
| explaining how it was all set up and what we could and couldn't
| do online or in advance.
| marsvin wrote:
| I love this site! Certainly helps to find and travel the
| beautiful routes like Sarajevo-Mostar or Bar-Belgrad.
| sph wrote:
| I love the comment about a similar hobby website that was posted
| a few weeks ago (the one about the gates of Hell found all over
| England [1]) saying that it's part of the British culture to
| become obsessed with quirky and frankly underwhelming hobbies.
|
| I adore stuff like this, I think it's nerdy and a bit daft yet
| the world is much richer thanks to gentlemen like these. This is
| what the Internet is about, let's not lose our founding culture.
|
| ---
|
| 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39356066
| ghaff wrote:
| For a number of years, I toyed with building a site about US
| lighthouses with maps. Then I discovered this guy's site who
| has visited every one with photos, maps, and descriptions. I
| decided I'd find another project :-)
|
| https://www.lighthousefriends.com/index.html
|
| I love all the essentially remnants of the old Internet that
| obsessively chronicle some niche thing.
| petesergeant wrote:
| Classic site, and used to be the only way to find out anything
| sensible about train travel in Thailand. I wonder how hard it'd
| be to throw an LLM interface on top of it for natural-language
| queries
| imurray wrote:
| I've found advice from seat61.com useful a few times.
|
| He recommends https://raileurope.com/ -- When I used them back
| when they were loco2, I was impressed by the customer service. I
| needed to change my train ticket, so emailed them and they sorted
| it all out for me with minimum fuss, emailing me replacements. At
| the time it was a lot easier than dealing with the local railway
| companies in countries where I didn't speak the language. I don't
| know if they would be as good now that they aren't a startup
| though.
|
| History of loco2/raileurope: https://www.seat61.com/websites/who-
| are-raileurope.htm
| gmac wrote:
| Since Loco2 became Rail Europe I've found the website has gone
| heavily downhill.
|
| I now find thetrainline.com often more efficient and more
| likely to find viable routes at a reasonable price.
| roggy wrote:
| Glad you like it :)
|
| During my days as a systems engineer I build the underlying SAN,
| compute, network and the VM itself.
|
| ...about 8 yrs ago I did say it should probably be behind
| cloudflare and on azure/aws etc...looks like its still on the
| machine I built!
| sph wrote:
| Why should it be behind AWS or CloudFlare? Can't anybody
| maintain their own servers in 2024, especially when everything
| works and doesn't crash after a HN spike?
|
| Not to pick on you in particular, but I hate this laziness
| trend from sysadmins that are the cause of the whole
| centralisation of the Internet. If you have the knowledge to
| build a SAN and entire architecture yourself, teach that to the
| youngbloods, instead of just telling them to get AWS credits.
|
| Make the Internet decentralised again.
|
| ---
|
| Don't give a junior dev a cloud server, but teach them to
| administer a UNIX machine and they won't need free credits from
| anyone.
|
| - Confucius
| rconti wrote:
| It seems very unlikely that it's the sysadmins pushing stuff
| onto AWS.
|
| Devs who don't want to be sysadmins, managers who don't want
| capex maybe.
| Fripplebubby wrote:
| Not the OP, but the thing that springs to mind is to make it
| resilient to DOS attack and similar. As you say, it didn't
| crash after the HN spike, but it seems likely that a
| motivated attacker would not have trouble bringing it down.
| Also the request latency is quite bad, which doesn't bother
| me a bit for the type of site that it is, but that's solved
| easily enough since it should be super cacheable.
| ydant wrote:
| This is impressive. I poked around and for the (few) routes I'm
| aware of it has excellent information. I can see using this for
| future planning/dreaming.
|
| I've found train travel sites can be fairly hard for non-locals
| to find / navigate through and you get waylaid by third parties
| that aren't as good for the actual booking as the less SEO
| optimized first-party carrier sites. Ends up being frustrating. I
| appreciate this site just gives you the facts rather than trying
| to do everything.
|
| Everything about this is tastefully "old school". So much
| information density, and none of life story fluff most train
| travel blogs throw in.
|
| I appreciate the advertising through fairly non-intrusive
| banners/links embedded in the pages (seriously, coming back in
| the HTML and not injected by JavaScript - who does that anymore?)
| that bypasses the adblocker. I was curious enough by the ones I
| saw that I disabled my adblocker to see if that was it -
| unfortunately there are also Google ads on top, but at least not
| cranked up to ridiculous levels.
|
| I've "pinned" it in Kagi so now it comes up when I'm searching
| for train travel in the future.
| ghaff wrote:
| I've used it quite a bit on a number of trips as I'd much
| rather travel by train within Europe than deal with airports.
| Train travel in Europe is pretty good but can also be a bit
| arcane if you're not familiar with the ins and outs of the
| country in question; this applies double if you're traveling
| around multiple countries. As you say, it's often not even
| clear where you should be doing your bookings.
| deeel wrote:
| Definitely. But Seat 61 is absolutely the best source for at
| least trying to make it easy. The site has saved me hundreds
| of hours of research.
| DominikPeters wrote:
| The whole website is apparently all static hand-edited HTML files
| (https://twitter.com/seatsixtyone/status/1679954215588823040), so
| any train company policy changes involve a large-scale find-
| replace operation
| (https://twitter.com/seatsixtyone/status/1671815739236401153).
| ydant wrote:
| He should add AI to his site!
|
| Not really - the site is great as-is and there's nothing wrong
| with this approach. It looks like it works really well for Mr.
| 61.
|
| But I'd imagine it'd be pretty helpful to write tools to help
| with maintaining the site which do leverage LLM models. Do a
| combination of search + AI to rewrite + reviewing the
| individual edits (e.g. through selective git adds). That's
| actually a plus in favor of flat files - it's all just code and
| the tools are plentiful. It's very "Unix" and hacker friendly.
|
| I'm imagining a tool like https://github.com/paul-
| gauthier/aider (which I haven't tried yet, but it looks useful
| for this kind of effort).
| Nevermark wrote:
| A tuned chatbot wouldn't be a bad idea. The data/knowledge is
| there in high density.
|
| Someone is going to scrape this site and benefit themselves,
| travelers, and travel providers - would be nice if it was its
| creator.
|
| There are few organizations or useful sites with immunity to
| AI's impact.
| mplewis wrote:
| The site has a perfectly functional search bar. There's no
| need for AI here.
| fckgw wrote:
| Or he could just use a bog standard CMS (and even publish to
| static HTML!)
|
| Why are we trying to cram AI into everything that doesn't
| need it?
| ydant wrote:
| He mentioned that different wording choices causes problems
| with bulk search and replace. This is the kind of thing
| LLMs can be really useful for. That and other recently
| hyped related technologies are all about understanding and
| processing natural language text and this is exactly what
| the original stated problem is about.
|
| A CMS likely just moves the text into a different storage
| medium and doesn't address the stated problem.
| brenschluss wrote:
| I looove this site. This helped me plan a Trans-
| Siberian/Mongolian train trip almost 15 years ago. So many people
| I met on the trains used Seat 61, too. An absolute classic.
| nsypteras wrote:
| Back in high school, I spent a good chunk of time reading the
| guides on this site purely just to fantasize about doing the
| trips myself one day. What a cool blast from the past,
| particularly given that the site hasn't changed!
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| Australian prices are suitably insane. Disappointing, but not
| unexpected.
| ghaff wrote:
| The listed trips are pretty long trips with sleepers. Amtrak
| would probably be in the same ballpark for similar trips in the
| US.
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| Unfortunately long-distance train rides in Australia are made
| unnecessarily expensive by our legacy infrastructure. We're
| an almost entirely "flat" country, but our train lines curve
| around on themselves constantly. The trips could be shorter
| and cheaper, but alas, nobody can afford to travel like this
| unless they're wealthy.
|
| I can't comment on Amtrak too much, but I've heard it's
| fairly poorly run?
| thriftwy wrote:
| A honorable mention of less hobbyist, more automated
| https://www.rome2rio.com/
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| This website is the real deal.
|
| International train travel can be daunting, but the author has
| amazingly compiled all the knowledge you would ever need or want
| about this topic, in an easy-to-understand format, and with
| frequent updates (as timetables change).
|
| There is no other resource that compares!
| criddell wrote:
| What a great site!
|
| My wife and I want to do the Toronto-Vancouver trip. The private
| sleeper room is something like $5000 which is doable with a
| little planning. Looking at the photos on that site make me
| excited for the trip.
|
| I wonder if the railways support this site in any way? It seems
| like they should. He does a great job promoting what's great
| about travel by rail.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| > I wonder if the railways support this site in any way? It
| seems like they should.
|
| Amazingly, the author of the site doesn't take donations, but
| he encourages donations to his fundraiser for UNICEF
| https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/seatsixtyone
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| One of my all time absolute favourite websites. The information
| is wonderfully detailed and all makes sense in context.
|
| Many are saying you could stick some AI on top of this, but I'm
| glad this is done manually. There are other websites for travel
| planning with more automation, and in my experience the
| information is typically junk.
| bloat wrote:
| This site helped me take the family from London to Rome via the
| beautiful Bernina Pass between Switzerland and Italy. Invaluable!
|
| https://tickets.rhb.ch/en/pages/bernina-express
| folli wrote:
| Now must be a good time to do the Bernina Express. A lot of
| snow in the mountains and spring-time in the South. You
| basically get two seasons for the price of one.
| bpye wrote:
| The Bernina Express is probably my favourite rail journey to
| date. I used this site a lot when planning an Interrail trip
| back in 2017.
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| >On-time performance. Bear in mind that these trains [Amtrak
| California Zephyr] run for over 2,000 miles, although they often
| arrive on time or perhaps half an hour late, they can sometimes
| arrive an hour or two late or more, so don't book any tight
| connections.
|
| This needs updating. The Zephyr trains can be 8-12 or more hours
| late (you thought you would arrive at 14:00 but instead it's
| 01:00 -- this happened to me twice, once in each direction, in
| the middle of summer). This is just due to normal work-hours
| restrictions, poor management, etc. Then add in snow storms and
| rockslides on the tracks, and your trip might just be canceled at
| Denver or Salt Lake City, leaving you stranded.
| bombcar wrote:
| That's the real trick and problem - by the way
| https://www.amtraktrains.com is a great forum if researching -
| you CANNOT use averages for 'one time' trips.
|
| If you're talking about your commuter to work, you can use
| averages to get "good enough" because you take it often enough
| that the averages will mostly work.
|
| But these long distance trains might _on average_ be two hours
| late - but if they 're 24+ hours late, you might have ruined
| everything (unless the connection was another Amtrak train,
| then they will work with you).
|
| For those types of trips, if you want to take them, treat them
| as land cruises and either be on one train to your destination
| OR plan to have a mini vacation at each connection, staying a
| day or two and seeing the sites.
|
| (I have had two long distance trains die on the rails and
| become busses, which is amusing if you're not in a rush. Seven
| charter busses descending on a Subway in some infinitely small
| town for dinner amusing. They had everyone get off the train
| onto busses, we drove to where the train that was coming the
| other way was, and got on it, because the rails were blocked by
| a corn train flipping over.)
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, based on everything I've heard, I'd never take a long
| distance Amtrak unless I were staying in the destination city
| for a few days and was arriving a good day before any event
| of importance (or pre-booked tickets etc.) Things can happen
| with air travel too of course but the probability of a major
| delay is almost certainly much higher with Amtrak.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yep - Amtrak is about the journey NOT the destination
| (because you may never arrive lol).
|
| I _have_ found that a great "in the US" vacation can be to
| fly out to your destination, do your vacation, and then
| take the train back. If you leave a buffer day you won't
| even miss work, and you'll arrive much more refreshed than
| if you flew in (at least in my experience).
| ghaff wrote:
| The problem for me living on the east coast is the
| interesting part of the trip would be in the west. If I
| ever do a long distance Amtrak it would probably be
| Denver or Chicago to the west coast.
| bombcar wrote:
| I've done some of those and can say - east coast to
| Chicago or just a bit beyond is pretty interesting.
|
| And west coast is great, starting somewhere after the
| plains.
|
| The plains are _really boring_ - unfortunately I 've not
| kept up with schedules, but if you can get the overnight
| to mostly be in the plains, you've something.
|
| But on the east coast maybe you can take advantage of
| Amtrak's only profitable long-distance route! The Auto
| Train! wooohooo
| ghaff wrote:
| No interest in Florida :-) Not that I go down to NYC much
| these days but have taken the NE Corridor/Acela many
| times which is a nice enough train ride (and not super-
| long). Love going in and out of NYC. Taking the train up
| at tail-end of a May trip from overseas.
|
| Thanks for the info. I'd probably do at least some
| section of the Empire Builder or Zephyr if I did a long
| distance run.
| alexose wrote:
| I used to sometimes catch the _previous_ day 's Coast Starlight
| when I'd travel from Salem to Seattle. The passengers already
| on board never looked too happy.
| benzible wrote:
| Another major cause, maybe the single largest cause: freight
| train interference.
|
| > Federal law gives passenger trains the right of way but
| freight train operators ignore this. [...] Federal law requires
| passenger trains be given priority over freight trains.
| However, the Department of Justice has enforced that law just
| once and that was 40 years ago, according to Amtrak. [...]
| Interference by freight trains has accounted for about 60
| percent of Amtrak's delays systemwide in recent years.
|
| https://cnsmaryland.org/2021/12/09/historic-amtrak-funding-a...
| fsckboy wrote:
| just to round out the picture, freight trains in the US are a
| success story, they're heavily used by customers who make the
| companies profitable and self-sustaining.
|
| passenger trains lose money and are heavily subsidized to
| stay afloat.
|
| just in terms of where they fit into the national economy,
| freight trains are important and integral at every level, and
| passenger trains much less so, or only to small communities.
| bryananderson wrote:
| This is a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course. High-speed
| passenger trains do very well all over the world. Coast-to-
| coast distances are too long for them, but cities in the US
| tend to be clustered at distances that are absolutely
| viable if we cared to invest. And if we continue to treat
| passenger rail as an afterthought, of course it will remain
| one.
| greggsy wrote:
| This is why hyperloop is so puzzling to me. There's
| established processes and supply chains to deliver and
| sustain high speed rail, and quite a few routes in
| sparsely populated areas would benefit with little
| disruption to existing infrastructure, like Vegas-LA (or
| somewhere ).
| observationist wrote:
| Train and freight companies seemingly operate with
| impunity, have a crazy amount of influence over politics
| and regulation, and despite hundreds of billions of dollars
| thrown at various mass transit passenger plans over the
| decades, there's hardly any progress with regards to
| passenger solutions. These companies don't even have to
| lobby, apparently, because their influence and regulatory
| capture make them incredibly powerful.
|
| They pull down around $260 billion a year in the US. $20ish
| million goes toward political donations and lobbying, by
| all 6-700 corporations - the stuff that's trackable, that
| is. Makes you wonder what you'd find if you could follow
| the money.
| nerdbert wrote:
| Passenger trains in the USA are slow and unreliable, so of
| course they struggle to find a market.
|
| If they didn't have to queue up behind freight trains
| trundling along at a bicycle's pace, things may be
| difference.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| > passenger trains lose money and are heavily subsidized to
| stay afloat.
|
| Roads and highways also lose money and are heavily
| subsidized to stay afloat.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's a bit more complicated as I understand it. An on-
| schedule Amtrak train is supposed to have priority but if
| they get off-schedule they lose their priority slot. Another
| problem I gather is that some freight trains are just too
| long to pull over onto a siding.
| benzible wrote:
| > some freight trains are just too long to pull over onto a
| siding.
|
| Exactly, and in addition to the blocking passenger trains
| they're at greater risk of derailment [1] and in some
| communities, particularly rural poor communities with
| little political power, they block crossings for as much as
| 30 minutes at a time [2] blocking ambulances, preventing
| children from getting to school, etc.
|
| [1] https://www.propublica.org/article/train-derailment-
| long-tra...
|
| [2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/stalled-freight-
| trains-cau...
| raphman wrote:
| Aren't there any regulations regarding maximum length? In
| Europe, the maximum allowed length seems to be 740/835
| meters.
| kstrauser wrote:
| The longest cargo train in the US was 5.5km long: https:/
| /en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_trains#General_cargo
| Althuns wrote:
| Here in the midwest, the freight companies will intentionally
| pad the train with empty cars until it's just too long to fit
| in the passing turnouts and therefore forces passenger trains
| to pull off and wait. Detroit to Chicago and back is
| therefore a tossup between arriving early and arriving
| 12-24hrs late.
| dmd wrote:
| My wife and I took the Zephyr westbound the entire route back
| in 2007, and arrived _22_ hours late. The whole trip was a
| nightmare. They ran out of food several times and once served
| oyster crackers as dinner.
|
| (To Amtrak's credit, they refunded the entire trip.)
| splonk wrote:
| It's helpful to look at past history to get some idea of your
| chances of arriving on time - for example, here's the eastbound
| California Zephyr's times in Denver for the past month. It's a
| nice way to travel but it's not at all reliable for a
| connection, especially in winter.
|
| https://juckins.net/amtrak_status/archive/html/history.php?t...
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Send the author of the site an e-mail, he's pretty
| approachable. https://www.seat61.com/email.htm
| chpatrick wrote:
| Excellent website, I used it a lot when travelling in India.
| ta1243 wrote:
| Once you leave Europe it's depressing how badly the world has
| fallen since the site started - routes via Syria are out, Sudan
| is a no-go area, Russia is closed to westerners, ferries across
| the Med to Israel and Egypt have vanished, So many long distance
| routes simply no longer doable.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| In what way is Russia closed to westerners? Last I checked a
| few months ago, there were no restrictions on entry for British
| citizens like myself, although a land entry via one of the
| Baltic states would be necessary, and cash would be difficult
| to legally exchange.
| iso8859-1 wrote:
| Is it not possible to enter through Turkey? Turkish Airlines
| has a pretty expansive network.
| multjoy wrote:
| The FCO advises against all travel to Russia, which means
| you're on your own if you get swept up in a wave of arbitrary
| detention and find yourself on a truck to the frontline in
| Ukraine.
| nerdbert wrote:
| There's all kinds of amazing new trains in Asia, there's ONCF's
| sparkling clean TGV from Tangier down to Casablanca, even in
| infrastructure-phobic USA there are some improvements and more
| on the horizon.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| This site is the reason I and my family took the overnight
| sleeper train from Georgetown to Bangkok in 2014.
|
| An incredibly valuable experience. Hundreds of miles of palm oil
| plantations, shantytowns by the tracks, people living their
| lives...like brightly lit scenes in my memory. We talk about it
| as a family years later.
|
| Man in seat 61, thank you!
| idop wrote:
| I took the sleeper from London to Edinburgh (and back) with my
| father in 2017 because of this website as well. It is clearly a
| labor of love.
| raldi wrote:
| I just discovered this site a few days ago, when trying to plan
| overnight rail travel in Europe. Everyone else (including the
| rail companies!) had missing or outdated information and often
| sites that were simply broken, and then this guy had like seven
| different options with all the details and links, everything
| fully up-to-date, and even recommendations for hotels for the
| options that included a layover.
|
| Absolute godsend. I hope he got my referral-link bonus.
| tudorw wrote:
| Please think about looking tomorrow, HN is flooring that site and
| it's so great and been around so long.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Eh, the site has been going for at least 16 years and still
| gets updated regularly, I'm sure it'll survive some traffic :)
| skywhopper wrote:
| This is an incredible site that I've used multiple times over the
| years when planning European train travel from the US. Lots of
| practical advice on stations, routes, seating layouts,
| parking/walking, how/where/when to buy tickets, etc. An
| invaluable site, straight out of the late 90s/early 2000s when
| people used to build high quality websites that actually solved
| problems for people.
|
| No idea how all the data gets kept up as well as it does, but I
| hope this site can continue for decades into the future.
| monooso wrote:
| IIRC, there is (or possibly was) a "The Man in Seat 61" book. I
| made good use of it when travelling around Europe about 15 years
| ago.
| javier_e06 wrote:
| No info for trains in Mexico.
|
| Mexico just inaugurated one section of the Tren Maya.
|
| It will connect Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche, Yucatan and Quintana
| Roo.
|
| Someday.
| thunfisch wrote:
| Nice to see this here. I've stumbled on this page while
| researching my stop and train change in Brussels on the way to
| Config Management Camp. This is the internet that I remember from
| the very early 2000s. Just plain information, a person happy to
| share their own interest and carve some space out in this sea of
| webpages.
|
| This is what I want to see more of in the internet.
| dalf wrote:
| Previous post from 2019:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18895833
|
| (there are other posts with one or very few comments)
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _The Man in Seat Sixty-One_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20983137 - Sept 2019 (16
| comments)
|
| _The Man in Seat Sixty-One_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18895833 - Jan 2019 (117
| comments)
| system2 wrote:
| I love the design still looks like early 2000s.
| huangc10 wrote:
| Browsed through to see what the hype is. I think it needs more
| timestamps. "Updated at ...". Readers need to know how up to date
| the information is and if it's still trustworthy. I understand
| railway systems don't change much but it's still helpful to keep
| track of time and dates.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-03-08 23:01 UTC)