Bygone eras (Europe 2025 part 9)

 

Another day, another train. I was quite surprised to see this rather retro regional train pull up -- a nice change of pace from the uncomfortable modern trains I was getting used to! 

 

While my parents raced to get onto the train that wasn't leaving for another 10 or 20 minutes (Annecy was the first stop for this train), I walked down the platform. The platform next to ours was occupied by something a bit more modern -- a TGV Duplex, one of the only true high-speed double-decker trains. I definitely want to ride one of these some day! 

At the front of our train was this very funky old locomotive with a design that looks actively un-aerodynamic! I love wacky old trains like this.

From what I can gather, these Corail cars date back to the 70s, and the interiors have hardly been touched since them. I particularly love the semicircular booths, surrounded by smoked glass, in the middle of the cars! 

While there was a first class car (the one with dark blue seats above), we ended up settling into one of the compartment cars -- such a rarity these days, and so nice when traveling with a group! Less nice was the lack of any sort of next stop signs or announcements -- it's weird to be traveling "blind" like that these days. At least we now live in an era where everyone carries a smartphone with built-in GPS! 

We had a bit over an hour to kill in Chambery, which has another modern station building with an unusual feature -- a big climbing wall on one end of the building! We could have left Annecy an hour later and had a 7-minute connection, which is normally enough for trains... but if we had missed our connection, the next train wasn't until the evening. For some reason, there are very few trains running between France and Italy each day, compared to a whole lot more running to Switzerland or Austria. 

This is not our train. We could have left Annecy even earlier and caught a TGV to Chambery followed by a Trenitalia train to Italy, but that would have cost more (because TGVs and Frecce require paid seat reservations); in theory, that would have gotten us to Turin several hours earlier, but the Frecciarossa was so late that it was running just a little bit ahead of our train. (Also, buying seat reservations was a complete pain, definitely the most frustrating part of using Eurail.) 

This was also not our train, but I love the blue color! 

This is our train, finally, pulling in right next to the much more modern Trenitalia one. 

But you know what I say about modern trains -- they're never as comfortable as the trains they replace! These old TGV seats are incredibly comfy, and we all agreed this was our favorite train of the trip in terms of comfort -- despite it being pretty crowded. 

 I wanted to take this route through the Alps while I still could -- in the near-ish future, it's going to be replaced with a new tunnel under the mountains. That will be a lot quicker and hopefully allow for a lot more trains per day, but it will also be a lot less scenic! Plus, I really hate long tunnels... the claustrophobia gets to me after a while. 

In Turin, after a lot of discussion, we settled on a hotel right across from the main train station (which unfortunately isn't the one used by through trains to France). Sadly, this wasn't the view from my room -- this was my parents' room, and they didn't even enjoy having a non-courtyard room, complaining it was too noisy! Oh well.