I’ve done this rail journey before, but since I was enthused by my trip on Lithuanian trains last week, I thought I’d compare and contrast how the Poles do it. There are two main types of Intercity service in Poland, I went on the cheaper one of the two as I can’t afford to be too decadent, but that is relevant to bear in mind. The two are the Express Intercity Premium (EIP) using Pendolino trains and the more standard Intercity. I started from the rather glorious Gdańsk Główny railway station which has recently gone under a major overhaul. It was built in the early 1900s and has that glorious Neo-Renaissance look, all a bit Prussian with a touch of Hanseatic drama, like it’s trying to impress its then German parents.
The main hall has been faffed about with quite a lot, but it remains an impressive structure and numerous people were taking photos of the interior. Obviously including me.
They’ve put a lot of seating into the railway station and plenty of power points, although these departure boards weren’t working.
The tracks and the city’s coach station is nearly visible in the background. Integrated transport and all that, all very positive, especially as the trams and city buses sweep past the front of the station.
The restoration work doesn’t seem to be complete as two of the large halls are empty and the track is still fenced off at this point. I’m not quite sure what the plans are, but they’ll likely involve some more shops and eating options as there aren’t a great deal in this station as opposed to somewhere like Krakow’s main railway station.
One of the empty grand rooms. There isn’t a luxurious first class lounge here as there was in Vilnius, or at least, not one that I could use.
Also not working, but the yellow posters with all the train times were up, so that’s all that I needed.
And I found a working departure board, my train was the 15:57 to Łódź. They like to advertise the platform numbers in advance in Poland, unlike the UK where they like to keep it a secret (unless you use the third party app which tells you).
I like this system of giving a platform number, a track number and then a sector. Numbering on quite a lot of UK railway stations is confusing, somewhere like Cambridge is a case in point.
And since I’ve gone down that rabbit warren, here’s a map courtesy of Greater Anglia. Platform 1 is the same as platform 4 and the same as platform 4a, but 2 and 3 are up to the left and 4 and 5 to the right. Then platforms 7 and 8 are over the footbridge. The Polish system would be much better here, you’d have Platform 1 as everything from 1 to 6 (which are then individually numbered) and Platform 2 as both 7 and 8. They’d then be split into sectors.
Waiting on the platform, there’s lots of seating around.
Boarding in coach 10 which it stated during the ticket purchasing process would be at the front of the train, so I knew roughly where to stand.
The seats are 2*1, with every set of seats (whether a couple or individual) having its own power outlet and bin. It was all clean and tidy, not least because there were bins everywhere, it was all a delightfully neat setup that gave off strong “organised European” energy.
Settled in for the journey and Poland is another of those countries where the seat reservations just work. I witter on about this, but on nearly every UK train where people are forced to get reservations there are arguments, often quite bad arguments. Many people ignore the seat reservations and there is tension when they’ve asked to move after they’ve settled in. In Poland, everyone sits where they’re supposed to sit. Many UK rail companies have given up with seat reservations entirely, not least Greater Anglia, but they might as well all give up if they’re not going to actually make them reliable. As an aside, as a top tip, I never sit in my reserved seat in the UK, I find the carriage which has no reservations (usually marked on certain third party apps) and sit there, it’s usually nearly empty as other people are trying to sit near their reserved seat.
Crossing the river at Tczew, which I visited in 2022 because I wanted to see the bridge. We also went past the impressive Malbork Castle although no photos of that as it was on the other side.
I had opted for the single seat and it was all sufficiently spacious with plenty of leg room. There was a small victory that my fluent Polish (mainly counting from 1 to 100 so I know when they call out the order number at fast food locations and also knowing the word for Wednesday) seemed to fool the guard that I was Polish. Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
And safely into Warszawa Centralna railway station which I’ve written about many times, this photo is of the train whilst I was on the travelator thing. I then discovered it was a Public Holiday (Corpus Christi) and the supermarket I planned to go to was shut. But I went to a Żabka convenience store instead and nearly broke the self-service scanner trying to buy a pistachio mullermilch.
This first class rail journey was around £17, which seems reasonable value to me. UK rail trips of the distance can be this price, but you can routinely get £17 fares on the Polish rail system for this journey even booking on the same day, which don’t require you to book three weeks in advance and go via their equivalent of Crewe (I’m not sure where that would be actually, maybe Kutno) with six split tickets. I do like the Polish network, it wasn’t quite as decadent as the train that took me from Vilnius to Kaunas, but it was still a very positive experience. Also, people on Polish trains don’t seem to feel the need to play music loudly from their phones or put their feet on seats…..
