Welcome to today's thread - #CrossBorderRail 2026 Tour Day 03 - 18 Feb - Ravières - Dijon - Culmont Chalindrey - Paris – Genève
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@jon How TF is a one-off user (eg tourist) supposed to navigate that?
@TimWardCam why are tourists taking trains? They drive like any normal person.
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And as the train is (partially?) compulsory reservation, but of course they don’t show what’s reserved on signs on board… they do have a website to tell you https://www.maplaceabord.com/maplacelibre/details?service-name=839552&from-station=87142000&to-station=87113001&travel-date=2026-02-18
@jon how low effort is that site.... give me 10 minutes with that data and you get at least a visual seat map.....
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And as the train is (partially?) compulsory reservation, but of course they don’t show what’s reserved on signs on board… they do have a website to tell you https://www.maplaceabord.com/maplacelibre/details?service-name=839552&from-station=87142000&to-station=87113001&travel-date=2026-02-18
@jon hosted by "e-Voyageurs Technologies (groupe SNCF)"
Days since I last discovered yet another dedicated for-profit company within the public group: 0
*sigh* -
Ah
There’s a regional train (to the right) running as an Intercités (Nancy-Lyon)
And an intercity train (to the left) running as a TER (Belfort-Paris)
The Intercités is not compulsory reservation. The TER is
@jon I'm starting to try to plan train travel and this stuff is giving me agita...
I always had admiration for you train advocate folks...deep knowledge. But now I'm really bowled over by how long and hard you must have worked to amass the skills to pierce all this stuff...
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Ah
There’s a regional train (to the right) running as an Intercités (Nancy-Lyon)
And an intercity train (to the left) running as a TER (Belfort-Paris)
The Intercités is not compulsory reservation. The TER is
I’ve seen some pretty weird stuff on #CrossBorderRail but for the sheer “no one even thought about the passengers”-ness this is one of the most extreme cases I’ve seen. Anywhere.
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And as the train is (partially?) compulsory reservation, but of course they don’t show what’s reserved on signs on board… they do have a website to tell you https://www.maplaceabord.com/maplacelibre/details?service-name=839552&from-station=87142000&to-station=87113001&travel-date=2026-02-18
@jon the URL looks so shady as well - at least make it a subdomain of sncf-voyageurs or something…
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@stefanlindbohm @jon Both ÖBB and the Interrail app show those with five digits only, too. Maybe it is a Hafas limitation (which would make sense, the old Hafas exchange format used fixed witdh fields and was a wee bit conservative).
@partim @jon Ah that makes sense. But they are reported with 6 digits and we (Railfinder) show them like that, so there’s some processing on their export/import then.
Starting a project after Postgres became magic helps a lot with this stuff. The liberation of ”external data? just slap it in a `text` column” without downsides :). Compared to Hafas which originally had to run on the phones of 2-3 decades ago, phew!
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@jon hosted by "e-Voyageurs Technologies (groupe SNCF)"
Days since I last discovered yet another dedicated for-profit company within the public group: 0
*sigh* -
@jon I'm starting to try to plan train travel and this stuff is giving me agita...
I always had admiration for you train advocate folks...deep knowledge. But now I'm really bowled over by how long and hard you must have worked to amass the skills to pierce all this stuff...
@meganL I don’t even know if I had the right reservations today or not. If even I don’t know the railway has a serious problem.
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@meganL I don’t even know if I had the right reservations today or not. If even I don’t know the railway has a serious problem.
@jon Now that I read back in the thread, I can see how that would be.
At least the multilingualism must help...
Fingers crossed for you. Thanks for illuminating for folks how cross-border rail is working in practice...
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@partim @jon Ah that makes sense. But they are reported with 6 digits and we (Railfinder) show them like that, so there’s some processing on their export/import then.
Starting a project after Postgres became magic helps a lot with this stuff. The liberation of ”external data? just slap it in a `text` column” without downsides :). Compared to Hafas which originally had to run on the phones of 2-3 decades ago, phew!
@stefanlindbohm @jon My internship back in uni was at Hacon to build a Japanese version of their Windows app. The code (obviously) assumed single byte character sets and did some formatting on it, so I built a string translation layer. That was quite fun!
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And as the train is (partially?) compulsory reservation, but of course they don’t show what’s reserved on signs on board… they do have a website to tell you https://www.maplaceabord.com/maplacelibre/details?service-name=839552&from-station=87142000&to-station=87113001&travel-date=2026-02-18
@jon Voiture 6 is unreserved for non-Paris travellers?
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@TimWardCam why are tourists taking trains? They drive like any normal person.
@jon A couple of years after the wall came down we toured round Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary by train, as that was the preferred mode of transport for all the eastern bloc spy movies.
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I’ve seen some pretty weird stuff on #CrossBorderRail but for the sheer “no one even thought about the passengers”-ness this is one of the most extreme cases I’ve seen. Anywhere.
#CrossBorderRail 2026 Spring Tour Train 7 of 80
TER 39552
09:26 Culmont Chalindrey - Paris Est 12:16
SNCF for TER Fluo Grand EstTrain type: Alstom Coradia Bi-mode MU, 6 short carriages
️, 
️ (25kV ac)
: 
🦽: (step free if station allows)
🛜:
️
️: ️
🧳:
🧽:
Interrail:
(needs compulsory reservation, costs €1,70)
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I’ve seen some pretty weird stuff on #CrossBorderRail but for the sheer “no one even thought about the passengers”-ness this is one of the most extreme cases I’ve seen. Anywhere.
@jon another fine installment in the chronicles of the Société nationale des chemins de Fuck You
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🤯
So @12train makes it clear
The train is COMPULSORY RESERVATION
AAAAGGGGHHHHH
It’s a regional train for a 47 minute trip
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@jon A couple of years after the wall came down we toured round Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary by train, as that was the preferred mode of transport for all the eastern bloc spy movies.
@TimWardCam you should have bough a Trabi. Obviously!
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#CrossBorderRail 2026 Spring Tour Train 7 of 80
TER 39552
09:26 Culmont Chalindrey - Paris Est 12:16
SNCF for TER Fluo Grand EstTrain type: Alstom Coradia Bi-mode MU, 6 short carriages
️, ️ (25kV ac):
🦽: (step free if station allows)
🛜:️️: ️
🧳:
🧽:
Interrail: (needs compulsory reservation, costs €1,70)TER 39552
09:26 Culmont Chalindrey - Paris Est 12:16Distance: 307.1km
Average speed: 108km/h8 stops:
Langres
Chaumont
Bar-sur-Aube
Vendeuvre
Troyes
Romilly-sur-Seine
Nogent-sur-Seine
Paris EstThis train, mapped: https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/crossborderrail-2026-spring-tour_1361108#9/48.361724/3.900146
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@_Hemmschuh fuck off SNCF really. Let’s make it extra hard for irregular travellers, just the ones we need to entice to take the train!
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@TimWardCam you should have bough a Trabi. Obviously!
@jon
We saw plenty - they were still around.
