Antwerp

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Location: Train from Amsterdam to Brussels

For the Europe trip, we had bought Eurail passes. They cost about $1,000 each. Our understanding was that they were basically train tickets that allowed us to travel on any train in Western Europe for a month.

The first time we used our passes was to travel from Cologne to Amsterdam. It was great. We walked on to a high-speed train and found a private cabin for ourselves. The ticket-taker accepted our Eurail passes without complaint.

In Amsterdam, Mike read somewhere that we were supposed to get "reservations" for trains even if we had Eurail passes.

After a couple days in Amsterdam, we decided to go to Brussels. At the train station, we had a debate about "reservations." Why did we need reservations if we essentially already had tickets? We didn't know. Ultimately we decided that, if we were able to travel on the previous train without reservations, we probably didn't need them.

We got on the train, found some empty seats, and set off.

We got most of the way to Brussels when a ticket-taker entered our car from the rear. We decided to grab our things and (discreetly) move to the car in front of us, rather than test our new theory about reservations. 

It turns out, we were further from our destination than we thought, and we had to move forward several cars to stay ahead of the ticket-taker. Eventually, we found ourselves at the front of the train with nowhere else to go. Literally. Mike was leaning against the front bulkhead. We tried to look nonchalant. By then, the ticket-taker had enlisted the help of two other crew members to confront us.

He looked at our passes and yelled at us (in Flemish, with a few English words sprinkled in) about how the passes were not tickets and how we were riding the train illegally. Our high-speed international express train made a stop at a neighborhood train station near Antwerp just to kick us off. The ticket-taker was still yelling at us as the train pulled away.

We looked around. The "train station" was a single platform with some stairs that led down to an enormous parking lot for bicycles. There was nobody to ask about reservations. We waited for another train to stop at the platform, got on, and hoped for the best.

We arrived at Brussels without incident and confirmed that, yes, we did need reservations to ride on the trains, and we could get reservations at any ticketing office.

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