A Journey, Not Just Transit: An Open Science Conference in Budapest

I then discovered the IGUANA initiative in my email inbox one day, which opened the possibility to an “interrailing-like” work trip. Travelling on land wasn’t on my mind only to see more of Europe than Budapest. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions matters to me and rail has majorly lower carbon footprint than short haul flying (UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, 2022). I would like to do much more train travel, but the cost of trains, domestic and international, is daunting – often multiple times the cost of a flight on the same journey.

This is why for the individual sense of responsibility for travel carbon footprint, an initiative like IGUANA is so important. An organisation covering cost of work-related travel on a more expensive, but lower carbon footprint mode of transport is a step in the right direction and IGUANA sets an example for other organisations to follow from.

Our travel, involving trains from Krakow to Budapest, Budapest to Brussels, and Brussels to London (with changes on the way) accumulated to more time than we would have spent travelling on the plane. Still, this trip solidified my opinion that rail and air travel are incomparable in comfort and experience. Whilst two of the legs of our trip took roughly a day of travelling (e.g., 9 to 12 hours), it was nothing like spending 10 hours on a long-haul flight.

When taking the train, I found myself simply passing time and feeling less dissociated and disconnected by the feeling of being in transit. For example, I comfortably worked on my laptop or read my book, benefiting from internet connection and day light through the many windows around me.

When I had enough of sitting down, I was able to take a walk through the carriages, with or without an aim. If it was a walk with an aim that I was after, I walked to one of the well-stocked café carriages on Polish, Czech, Hungarian, or German rail to get a coffee or a meal. What’s more, I did not find the prices of the food and drinks on the train to be majorly higher than on land.

We did experience some challenges on that way, such as accidentally getting off at a different station in Vienna than the one where our connecting train was departing from and only realising this 5 minutes before the onward departure (we made it – you can always count on German trains to be slightly delayed, apparently). We missed a different connection due to a longer delay in Germany.

Our itinerary accounted 50 minutes for changing trains in Frankfurt but with our train being delayed by 80 minutes, we did not make the connection to Brussels. Deutsch Bahn (German rail provider) know how to deal with situations like this – whilst I would advise for more time (than 50 minutes) if you are planning to change in Germany, if you do miss your connection, the station staff are very helpful in finding alternative travel arrangements.

In our case this involved a taxi, shared with 6 other travellers, from Germany to Brussels. In the end, we were only delayed 2 hours in arriving in Brussels. If we missed a connecting train, I imagine the delay could be closer to a full day.

The train journey also allowed for many language exchanges, where I found myself communicating in languages other than English – a few times in order to chat to other passengers. On our taxi journey to Brussels, I got to use my French to find out about the interesting lives of the other passengers – learning where they were coming from that day and what was taking them to Brussels. One of them was a Belgian Olympic hopeful, another recently completed their PhD similarly to me.

The IGUANA initiative allowed me to experience a journey, not just transit, when travelling to and from a conference in continental Europe.