Due to the crowds at Schiphol (and Eindhoven Airport), traveling by train through Europe has never been so attractive: with these 5 apps you are completely ready for your train journey.
By train through Europe
Queues, lost suitcases, delays: the crowds at Schiphol make it not a pleasant place to start or end your holiday, and Eindhoven Airport isn’t much better. Fortunately, you can avoid the airports, because you can travel across Europe just as easily by train – and it’s better for the environment. You do need the right apps for such a European train journey, and let iPhoned that have just been collected for you.
1. Train line
Trainline should be seen as an all-in-one app for train travel within Europe. You can use it to plan your trip, but also directly book your tickets with a Trainline account. This is especially useful to avoid the incomprehensible websites of railway companies from abroad. In the app itself, you have access to your ticket, which can simply be scanned by the conductor – so you don’t have to bother looking for a printer while you’re somewhere in Italy.
2. NS International
Like Trainline, NS International collects information about your entire journey, including all transfers you make to foreign railway companies. Unfortunately, booking from the app is often not possible. What is very useful is that you can keep track of all malfunctions and work, just like in the normal NS app, but then for routes from the Netherlands to foreign destinations. This way you know if everything runs normally when you travel!
3. Google Maps
Not only is Google Maps extremely useful for planning your train journey in Europe – you can immediately see your route on the map and the traffic on the train – but this app is also essential during the train journey. If you ‘lock’ a journey after a search, you will see live on the map during the journey where you are on your route via the GPS of your iPhone, and whether that one transfer is already close. That’s a lot easier than listening to a Spanish conductor.
4. 9-Euro Ticket
Traveling through Germany by train is very cheap this summer, thanks to an initiative by the German government to allow more people to travel by public transport. For 9 euros you can therefore travel a whole month by train, bus, metro or tram. And although the cheap ticket is actually intended for Germans, the 9-Euro-Ticket app also works in the Netherlands – provided you have a credit card! You have to delve into it a bit setting up the 9-Euro-Ticket: the app is mainly in German.
5. Waterful
Dutch trains generally have good air conditioning, but that is often a different story abroad. Before you dry out on a foreign train, we recommend downloading the Waterful app. You enter your gender and your daily activity, after which the app determines for you how much water you need per day. You will then be reminded via push notifications when it is time to take your water bottle out of your bag.
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