Portugal Discovery

I enjoy travelling by train. It’s safe, and unlike by car, there’s no need to look for the better way to go. Portuguese train tickets are cheap, and heavily used. Living in Pombal, on the « Linha do Norte » (Line of the North) path, I often use it on the Pombal-Lisbon way. Once I’ve been using my camera all trip long, about a couple of hours. See below my pictures.

The Linha do Norte is the name of the country’s main railway. It links Lisbon the capital city to Oporto, crossing the main cities of seashore. Works had been started in 1859, Lisbon had been linked to Vila Nova de Gaia en 1864. Railway was a real revolution at this time, considered distrustly by peasants who thaught the locomotives were evil and were cause of the babies illness and bad harvests…

Nowadays all this changed, as towns fight to have their own high-speed rail service station. This is still a project on Portugal. Today the Linha do Norte linking the Lisbon train station Santa Apolónia to Oporto at Campanhã station, is the most crowded railway with passengers and freight. It crosses some of the most beautifull towns of Portugal : Aveiro, Coimbra, Santarém…

Several kinds of trains are used on this railway. You might get a « Alfa Pendular », the fastest, from Porto to Lisbon. It is also the most expansive, with of course less stops between. For me, when I go from Pombal to Lisbon, I always get the « Intercidades », which links main cities of the railway, as indicated in ist name (intercidades = intercities). You might also get the regional train which stops at each station. But it is less and less used as people get their own car for short distance.

Buying one’s train ticket is really easy. It can be done as everywhere on the world, in a train station or Internet, but also in any cash machine ! You put your bank card, select the correct options and the cash machine print yout ticket. From Pombal to Lisbon it costs me 13,50 euros. It’s not that expansive, the fees are ruled to get them easy to pay for everyone. No one knows yet how things will be with the high-speed rail service : will passengers agree to pay a lot more just to earn few minutes ? The trip between Pombal and Lisbon is about 1h45′ if you don’t pay attention to the numerous delays which are commonplace on this railway, as it is overcrowded.

While sitting in a train, I enjoy to look at the landscapes, beauty of the country. We go through pretty countryside, villages with their white churches, fields outlook. It’s very comfortable and pleasant, very different from the motorway driving. It can be walked in train, stay up or watch at a movie on one’s laptop without motion sickness as it often happen to me. I think you got it now, I like being on trains !

Pictures of a train trip in Portugal

September 13, 2010, 6:37 pm, "Landscape, Trip".