Does anyone remember student trains?

I travelled on the Transalpino train across Europe in the late seventies.

It travelled overnight from Belgium to Czechoslovakia. I was a student and had a discount ticket and the train was full of young people all having a great time, but I wasn't aware it was a uniquely student train. On the way back there were plenty of more mature and even elderly people catching it.

We got off in Austria. I recently tried to recreate the journey but it was much more expensive but probably more comfortable!

Yes, it was a red card, wasn't it, or was it pink? I used to love having various cards in my little wallet entitling me to student discounts anywhere and everywhere.

I can remember if they were separate trains, but they were certainly separate carriages.

You could only book them through the Students' Union. This wasn't just regular trains with a discount on the fare for students.

The Transalpino trains were for young people up to 25 years, you didn't necessarily have to be a student. If I remember rightly, the office was on Victoria Station.

I once remember a run in with a German guard on a train because he said my ticket wasn't valid for a particular train journey. I can only have been 19 or 20 and felt very intimidated when he proceeded to take my luggage to put me off the train. I remember having to pay for a new ticket which made a big dent in my money. I think I was heading for Kassel, strange what train memories stick in the mind!

Thanks for clearing that up escaped! Although I was a student nurse then we weren't classed as students, so that is the difference. I was on a salary.

The ticket office may have been Victoria- but my journey started up north and involved getting a channel ferry.

I remember being fast asleep in a carriage and some soldiers came in and woke us up. I thought I'd stepped into a war film!

I realised they were after our passports and thankfully we weren't thrown off the train- that must have been pretty scary!

I was 20 and travelling with my 15 year old sister.

He recognised you by your gait?!?! Lol

I was 20 in 1976, the only young person on a train from Bucarest out of Romania into what was northern Yugoslavia (in those days), some soldiers came round with guns demanding 50 Lei money from everyone as Ceaușescu did not pay the armed forces, I showed them I only had a 20 Lei note & some loose coins saying I was a British student, They shouted & swore at me & snatched the note. I was warned this would happen, they can't touch you for fear of an international incident, but could only put me off at the next stop which was the border, so I'd just get back on it again.

I wasn’t a student til my mid 30 s but did travel alone to Germany when I was just 15. It was an ordinary train and the ferry was basic, quite different to those today. Passengers were mainly outside, and there were no seats apart from a few, which had ‘gratuit’ painted on the back. I avoided them as I thought I had to Pay, and my budget was low, so sat on the wooden deck while someone played the guitar.
It was a while before I realised gratuit is French for free.

Sorry, I cannot help you. I think it was only Germany, or West Germany as it was then that had Students' trains.

In Denmark, we had students' reductions, as did the young men doing National Servvice, but we all travelled on the ordinary trains and had to reserve seats if we wanted to sit down, or travelled on the expresses where you had to have a seat reservation as well as a ticket.

I went to Germany in 1973 when I was 18 (straight after A levels) to work in a hotel. I don't remember students' railcards or reductions. I do remember arriving at the station and phoning the hotel owner to say I'd arrived. Unfortunately, he spoke so fast I didn't catch the car number, so I had no idea which car was going to turn up. I stood around hopefully - thank goodness I ended up in the right car. I can't believe how naive I was, especially as I didn't have enough money for the return trip to the UK.

Never heard of student trains in UK. Takes the railways to provide a service for all here never mind only students.

Never heard of it

1976

My friend and I got cheap student travel by plane from from London to Paris. A coach took us to the English channel and then there were a few minutes in a tiny plane and a long coach trip from the French side of the Channel to Paris.

A little later when I was doing a post graduate degree at Reading University my Scottish studentship included free train travel every term between London and Scotland. How privileged the few who went to university then were.

In 1965 I went to Munich for a semester at the university there. It was a long journey, train to Harwich, ferry to the Hook of Holland, night train to Cologne. One of my most vivid memories is waking up and thinking Cologne cathedral was coming towards me. Then a wonderful journey up the Rhine (southwards) and eventually to Munich.
Many years later, in about 1990, I took 12 of my exchange pupils by ferry and train to our partner town not far from Cologne, changing at Brussels. They loved it. "Much better than a stuffy coach."

In 1965 I caught the student train from London to Athens (though we may have changed at Munich, my memory has faded) with my boyfriend. The journey took three days and we had to provide food for ourselves to last those three days. Some people had truly eccentric ideas of what to take and ended up cadging from the more prudent of us. I remember it as being enormous fun. We were all students and pretty mad and we talked and laughed all the way though I shudder now to imagine the loos and washing arrangements. I remember the excitement of seeing all the wonderful evocative names of the stations we were passing through. We hitch-hiked home after a month of island hopping and I never went on another student train. I don't know when they stopped running.

escaped

1976

I went in 1976! Maybe we got the same train lol!

keepingquiet

escaped

1976

I went in 1976! Maybe we got the same train lol!

😆