Romanian Trains, Always an Adventure

Our family of 5 almost got thrown off a train yesterday using our eurail pass, and we’re still not sure why. A fast talking young man that had some English clearly recognized our pass and that we had both the qr code and purchased seat reservations, and successfully argued on our behalf. They grudingly let us stay on.

We bought seat reservations for Bucharest to Sanaia, and the conductor punched our paper with no issue. We stopped for a few hours to see Peles Castle.

We then bought seat reservations from Sinaia to Brasov. The lady at the ticket window understood the eurail pass no problem and gave us the paper seat reservation as we got for the previous leg. This all seemed to follow what the eurail site and seat61 said we should do, and worked perfectly the first time.

However, the conductor got very angry with us and wanted to see an “online ticket” and/or qr code. We showed him our qr codes in the app (double checked that they were done correctly and matched the paper tix) and the paper seat reservations.

Another conductor came and they were both yelling at us that we would have to get off, pointing at the price on the seat reservations as too little. I tried to use Google Translate but they pushed it aside saying no no no, unfortunately (they were both older, so were maybe unfamiliar). Thank goodness for the young man that helped us, the one conductor finally threw up her hands and told us to just sit down. We started to go to our assigned seats and she said no, sit now, so we did.

The young man that defended us seemed very exasperated with the conductor too, he had my phone and was clearly going through it and trying to explain it to her.

We realized later that we did do everything correctly, and it’s likely they were asking for a little money to smooth things over…