Interrailing

[Floating Fox]

Monk you say that inter-rail is not cheapest way of travelling? Can you give an example of this to get to say Instanbul and back in 2 weeks?

[Monk]

It really depends on the journey you are taking, how long in advance you are booking and what trains you take.

 

For example, when I went from London to Istanbul I took a longer route, via italy, croatia, bosnia and serbia - so with all of the extra stops I worked out it would have been marginally cheaper to get a rail pass.

 

For a more direct route, you may be able to do it slightly cheaper with individual tickets, but then this makes you less flexible if you book them in advance. An example of a more direct route would be London-Paris-Munich-Budapest-Bucharest-Istanbul.

 

Note that Eurostar is excluded for Eurrail, and you need to pay a supplement for sleeper trains which on this route are Paris - Munich, Budapest - Bucharest, Bucharest - Istanbul.

 

If you search on EpicRailTrip.com you'll get a bunch of options, and if you need more specific info then check out http://www.seat61.com/Turkey.htm

[danny.]

Is it wrong that I'm intrigued by the algorithm you use to find the routes? All I can think of is a near optimal shortest path one but the number of nodes must be MASSIVE. I could be barking up completely the wrong tree though, I haven't looked at that kind of thing for about five years

 

wouldn't take too long for a computer tho? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra's_algorithm

[Alexikokopops]

wouldn't take too long for a computer tho? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra's_algorithm

 

That's the badger! I couldn't remember the name when I said "near-optimal". That was a great module at Uni, I got 98% in the exam. Fun times  

 

Because the run time is a function of the number of vertices squared (THANKS WIKIPEDIA) if there were thousands and thousands of nodes I'd have thought a computer would start having issues. I'm sure we had some examples of this when I did the module but I haven't the foggiest. Understandably though there's not all stations in there!

 

Not that it's shortest path anyway. And also, I've just seen there are three million routes on there which shouldn't be a problem. My favourite is Birmingham to London via Reykjavik  

 

In seriousness, it's an awesome website and I'll be using it in the future no doubt!