Day 14 – Vienna to Milan on the Overnight Train

Overnight Train in Wien Hauptbahnhof

We had a 7:19pm train tonight, so we spent the morning and afternoon touring using the second day of our Vienna City Pass. It was supposed to be a rainy day but it really didn’t start raining until about 1 pm, so the rain wasn’t much of a problem. It did turn colder and the day started out in the upper 60s but dropped to around 50 by the time the train left.

Habsburg Gold Table Pieces

We mostly toured museums today due to the threat of rain. First stop was the Habsburg Apartments in the Hofburg palace and the Sisi Museum. Sisi is very famous throughout Austria and Hungary, but she lived a very sad and tragic life. She was a beautiful girl who married Austrian Emperor Franz Josef when she was 16 and he was 24, but she couldn’t adjust to the public life of the court and began to escape from it by travelling whenever she could. She was rarely in Vienna in her later life and she was assassinated in Switzerland at age 60 by an anarchist. While she was alive she wasn’t a well-known figure but she grew into cult status after her death and is now the main icon of Austria. After the Sisi museum, we looked in on a Lipizzaner training session (not too interesting) and actually saw them close up as they were being moved from their stalls (still not impressed). We then did a exhibit called Journey Through Time which was fun and took us through a thousand years of history in an entertaining, “Disney” kind of way. After that we went  through the Albertina Museum, which has a decent collection called from Cézanne to Picasso. When we left the museum it had started raining so we took the red tour line around the inner city, had an early dinner at Café Prückle and headed out for the train.

Sleeper Compartment

It seems there is always a problem with the trains in Europe. We had reserved a coach with its own bathroom and shower, but when we got on they said there was a problem and we were downgraded to just a private double sleeper compartment. Supposedly I can get some kind of refund. In any case, the sleeper compartment was really fine and I would probably reserve that the next time as it is significantly cheaper. The bathroom was a few steps away and we can shower at the hotel.

The train itself was interesting. There were ten coaches in all, mostly sleepers, but the last seven were headed to Rome while the first three cars were going to Milan. Sometime in the night, I think at Venice, they decoupled us from the Rome bound cars and we went off with a different train. We both slept reasonably well and the only sounds we heard were the noises from the train. The compartment was a little cramped and we slept in bunks, which the porter set up when we went to bed. In the photo the two chairs on the right fold down into a bed and the second bed folds down just about at the height of where the chairs were. Fortunately we didn’t have to use the top third bunk as that would have required a ladder.