PKP – Tczew to Gdansk

After a week of visiting a number of towns in Northern Poland, it was time to go back to Gdansk. As mentioned when I arrived in Tczew, this is a modern railway station but it’s a bit soulless and lacking in much character.

The main foyer area isn’t as grand and historic as the one in Malbork. There’s a fair amount of seating dotted around the station, both in this area and in the corridor above the platforms, although it was warmer in this bit.

The usual sheet of train times, mine was the 11.25 into Gdansk.

It’s not easily visible from this photo, but the train was delayed by 15 minutes, which was far from ideal. The train going to Vienna is listed above the train to Gdynia and it was apparent to me that it was unlikely to come in on the same platform as listed here, as the trains were coming from different directions. My train knowledge is sufficient to know that two trains due within one minute of each other and coming from different directions is a problem for signallers.

As an aside, this train on another platform belongs to http://shortlines.pl/ who were an open access operator with high hopes, but their services have been dramatically reduced over the last few years.

I’m not sure what the police (I think these are the equivalent of the British Transport Police) were doing with their big dog, but it looked quite friendly and was safely muzzled. This is the Vienna train coming in and it’s by now apparent that the train I want is coming in shortly and they’re going to have to use another platform. And that’s what happened, in Polish only (I mention this as in Gdansk there would usually be an announcement in English as well) there was a last-minute announcement that they shifting the Gdynia service to platform 2. So we all rushed over there…..

I have to add, this travel can be a bloody nuisance and public transport operators don’t make things as easy as they perhaps could as they must have known some time before there was a platform change needed. There was a fallback that I could see a train to Gdynia with the regional network was leaving soon if I missed my booked service, but it’s all quite challenging to work out where to go.

Apparently this is steam engine TKh 5699, in use on the Polish rail network between 1961 and 2002, when it was brought here to sit on the concourse.

On board the train, I frankly couldn’t be bothered to find my reserved seat as I was getting off at the next stop and this group of chairs was empty. The screen gives updates on the service and that it’s running 15 minutes late.

They’re quite a comfortable arrangement, the table extends for those wanting to use a laptop of spread out their bakery purchases, with power available under the seat.

My ticket wasn’t checked during the journey, and there’s the train to the right and Gdansk railway station (still under modernisation) on the left.

And back into Gdansk….. The journey was a nuisance in terms of trying to board the appropriate train, but everything was comfortable enough after that. The cost of the journey was about £2 and I purchased my ticket on-line in advance, although there are ticket machines at the railway station.