Rail travel

The trains no longer roll into Belgrade’s old main station by the riverside, nestled below the same limestone cliffs that inspired the city’s name. Today, this yellow-stuccoed relic faces a towering, modern addition to the skyline: an eight-story statue that looms above the square once filled with Syrian refugees in the late 2010s. Our train-free journey from London to the Balkan region saw us cover ground in just 24 hours—Eurostar to Brussels, a sleeper train to Vienna, and onward to Budapest.

Streetlights flickered rhythmically outside the window, casting fleeting shadows over our faces as our train journeyed alongside the River Seine near Choisy-le-Roi. We had left Paris’s Gare d’Austerlitz around ten minutes earlier. Boarding the Intercité de Nuit at 9:40 PM, we were scheduled to reach the Spanish border just after 10:00 AM, with plans to connect to a Barcelona-bound train. While it’s feasible to make the trip from London in a day, my husband and I decided to extend the