What are the 40,000 destinations that the Eurail Global Pass is giving access to? Train stations? Cities? Something else?

Upvote:4

The Eurail booking engine does include not only train stations, but many local bus stops, especially in Switzerland (where some of the services around Basel or in La-Chaux-de-Fonds are included, for instance).

This will depend a lot on the participating "railway" companies, which are in some cases just local public transport operators.

The list above contains most of the operators, but for Switzerland there are so many that they split out most on this separate page. Note the presence of BLT (operator of trams and buses in Basel suburbs), TRN (ditto for Neuchâtel canton), or TPF (Fribourg). There are more operators where you only get a discount rather than free rides here.

So you will probably find hundreds of "destinations" for Basel, dozens for cities such as La Chaux de Fonds or Neuchatel, and so on.

The database linked to in lambshaanxy's answer which has 36000 destinations seems very similar, and 35% of the "stations" in that dataset are in Switzerland, due to the inclusion of many local operators, which results in dozens of bus stops a few hundred meters apart to be listed.

Note that you can actually travel free of charge to many of those "destinations", but whether "Biel-Benken Kirchgasse" and "Biel-Benken Bruëcke" 300 meters down the road can be considered different "destinations" is for you to judge...

On the other hand, there are many "regional" bus services which are included which probably make actual sense. I'm actually surprised that SNCF (the french national railway company) operates buses to small villages that have never seen a train in their life, when I thought they had only replaced some railways with bus lines.

Upvote:12

This Kaggle dataset lists over 36,000 train stations across Europe, so yes, it's likely that the "destinations" are mostly train stations. Which makes sense, because Eurail is a train pass and is largely limited to trains.

As for why 36,000 vs 40,000, it's not entirely straightforward to define a "train station". Do subways count? Tram stops? Cable cars? Funiculars? Cargo sidings? The answer will depend on what you include and exclude.

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