18 trains. 100 hours and 9 minutes. If it all goes to plan for the trip from Kemijärvi to Lagos.
But what happens if it doesn’t go to plan and something doesn’t work?
Re-plan and reschedule accordingly.
But there are limits.
First, 100 hours 9 minutes is the fastest trip I can plan, total. There is literally no faster way I can find. But of the 100 hours, more than 40 hours is not in trains. So the skill is trying to allocate this time in the most appropriate manner, to lessen the risks, but there are limits to how well that can be done.
Pretty much everywhere between Sundsvall in the middle of Sweden all the way to Strasbourg in eastern France there are alternatives for everything. Even a risky 3 minute connection in Boden in the north of Sweden is not a show stopper – by Hamburg I can have caught up all the delay. Even København H – Hamburg Hbf that has dreadful reliability (just look at those stats for ECE 395!) should not be a problem, as I can take a train 2 hours later if I need to, or even route via Fredericia and Flensburg if the direct train does not run.
The problems instead are on Day 4, 10th September. That day I intend to travel Offenburg – Strasbourg – Lyon – Barcelona – Madrid. The trains for most of this are fast, and generally they are reliable, but if something goes wrong I am going to be stuck – there is no redundancy whatsoever. TGV 9877 09:04 Strasbourg – Lyon Part Dieu 12:59 is the only service between those two cities for a four hour period. If I miss it, or it is cancelled, the schedule all the way to Lagos is broken. Likewise AVE 9742 14:35 Lyon Part Dieu – Barcelona Sants 19:23 – if that one racks up more than an hour of delay I cannot get to Madrid on 10th September.
Were I need to depart Barcelona only early on 11th September, a further problem rears its head. Speed restrictions post-Adamuz accident in Spain mean the first train of the day Barcelona – Madrid arrives in the capital 10 minutes after the train to Badajoz on the border to Portugal has departed. No-one thought to do a wider re-coordination of the timetables.
And then a further problem cropped up. Spain has not been uploading its timetable data to UIC Merits for trains even next week, meaning an alternative route to Badajoz via Ciudad Real was only shown on Renfe’s own website and not on DB’s planner or in the Interrail app. And to think the EU wants to have all these sorts of things fixed 5 months ahead! Good job I know where trains ought to run, thanks to OpenRailwayMap.
Anyway, if something breaks down on 10th September it is likely to add 14 hours to the total trip – meaning a Lagos arrival at 11:53 on 12th September rather than 21:09 on 11th September.
If I get to Madrid on schedule on 10th, I am almost certain to get to Lagos on 11th, and if not at 21:09 as scheduled then with a minor delay of a little over an hour – at 22:28, because even if the only tight connection of the day is missed (4 minutes in Entroncamento), there is an alternative connection a little over an hour later. Joys of redundancy, eh?
That I am travelling on Interrail adds to the flexibility here – it allows me to take trains other than the ones I had planned, either for no extra cost or a small reservation fee. And if I need to, when disrupted, I can also explain my predicament to train managers and try to get myself let on even if I have no seat reserved.
The whole backup planning, including 12 different alternative partial route variants, can be found in the tab “Record Trip – backup plans” in the main ALL-ROUTES.xlsx spreadsheet that can be found in Nextcloud here. And a summary of that as a PDF is here.
