For our recent holiday we knew that we wanted to visit Lake Constance perhaps via a European rail journey. Having considered a couple of travel companies offering this, we decided to use Tailor Made Rail (TMR) for our trip. By looking online at various options to give us inspiration we identified an itinerary which was pretty close to what we wanted. From our first phone call, TMR’s advisors listened carefully to our requirements and were able to add in/remove options to make our journey and hotel stays exactly as we wished. It is worth checking carefully who you might use as some companies may offer an almost suitable itinerary but don’t offer any flexibility. Our itinerary, using Interrail tickets, included our journey from our home station, through London via Eurostar with our first overnight stop being in Cologne before moving on to Lake Constance for a week’s stay in 2 towns, then on via Salzburg to our final stop, Vienna. We then returned from Vienna to Amsterdam using the Austrian Nightjet, sleeping in a double cabin. TMR provide you with a detailed itinerary so you know what time the train will depart each station, and when it will arrive; a separate list provides your hotel information. The hotels were chosen so they would be within walking distance of each station. We appreciated having breakfast included, particularly if we weren’t due into our next destination until late lunchtime/early afternoons. With the exception of our early departure from our home station, other journeys gave us a more relaxed start to enjoy breakfast etc. Unfortunately, having had smooth connections all the way, our luck ran out on our return; the Nightjet seemed to end up trundling around the north German countryside for some time in the morning, which meant that we arrived 2.5 hrs late into Amsterdam, missing our Eurostar connection by a few minutes. TMR provide you with an information booklet to accompany your tickets which helped us with this issue as they provide an out of hours emergency contact number. Eurostar rebooked us a crossing some hours later, whereas TMR (thank you Zak!) were able to get us on an earlier connection via Brussels telling us what trains to use to travel from Amsterdam to Brussels. London trains were cancelled to our home station but the joy of Interrail was that we were able to use a different route back without further expense or inconvenience. We would definitely use Tailor Made Rail again, and despite the difficulties on our last day we enjoyed travelling via rail rather than flying; there is so much more to see and more space to move around.
