Traveling through Europe for a month – with the backpack as a pillow and the concourse as a bedroom. The Interrail ticket has been a gateway to the world for generations of teenagers. What happened?
When an inconspicuous piece of paper appeared on the travel market 50 years ago, probably no one suspected that it would change Europe’s youth in the long term.
The so-called Interrail ticket was introduced – and with it the opportunity for people up to 21 to travel all over Europe for a whole month at a flat rate of 235 marks. Since then, generations of teenagers have spent their summer holidays in train compartments and station halls, following their desire for freedom on the rails. Initially without a mobile phone, without internet and without reserved seats.
Spartan circumstances
Young people covered thousands of kilometers in this way and at the same time rebelled against bourgeois family holidays in bungalows, on campsites and at bathing lakes. The Austrian Werner Schröter counted around 10,000 kilometers in 1975 at the end of his four-week trip – including France, England and Scandinavia – as he says.
“The food was spartan: shopping in groceries, rarely going to a restaurant,” Schröter recalls 47 years later. It was the first time that the then 21-year-old had gotten to know so many cultures, before that he had almost only traveled in Austria.
Born in the Saarland, Elke Tesche was 18 years old when she set off on her first Interrail trip to Greece with a friend in 1984. Via Paris and Zagreb we went to Thessaloniki in northern Greece and from there further south. The Interrail ride shaped her personality: “Because I met many people from other countries and cultures on this trip, I’ve become more open, tolerant and outgoing,” says Tesche, who now lives in Berlin and runs the travel blog “Elkeunterwegs”. .
Uncomplicated change of location
A lot of Interrail travel was new and special: for example, being responsible for organizing travel routes, accommodation and food, getting on in areas without a train connection, managing money, communicating with people in remote villages.
Tesche particularly enjoyed the feeling of spontaneity and freedom. When she arrived at Marseille train station one day and didn’t like it there, she boarded the next train without knowing exactly where it would take her. “I ended up in Toulouse and thought it was great there.”
Beate Bandelin from Berlin also appreciated the option of being able to change places easily if she didn’t like something. “It made the whole thing more relaxed than fixed train tickets. Register your journey and off you go, that was an attractive option,” the 59-year-old recalls of her Interrail journey through England and Denmark in April 1980.
Great idea
But how did this momentous innovation on the European travel market come about? In 1972, several European railway companies introduced the Interrail ticket to give young Europeans the chance to travel 21 countries on just one ticket, according to a Eurail company brochure. “The idea behind it was of course grandiose,” says the head of the Historical Archive on Tourism at the TU Berlin, Hasso Spode. The Interrail ticket has developed a feeling for Europe among young people. “Even if the young people saw nothing but train stations,” adds the historian with a smile.
Initially only for young people up to the age of 21, the age limit was gradually raised later until the ticket became accessible to everyone in 1998. Travelers can now travel through more than 30 countries with Interrail and Eurail tickets.
Destroyed spontaneity
However, not much is left of the spontaneous boarding of the early days. The itinerary can now be viewed using an app on a cell phone, and some trips are only possible with a reservation. One-country tickets are available, as are first-class tickets and two- and three-month tickets.
“If you really want to experience the old way of travelling, then you should go on the Way of St. James,” says Spode. The basic ideal according to the motto “See where you land” still exists when traveling via Interrail. But: “The new means of communication destroy all spontaneity,” says the expert.
In March, the Interrail ticket celebrated its 50th birthday. Spontaneous travel was valued long before the legendary ticket was invented, as a look at world literature shows. In Joseph von Eichendorff’s almost 200-year-old classic “From the life of a good-for-nothing”, the French horn player reflects on what is the most beautiful thing about this kind of being on the go: “that we don’t even know which chimney is smoking for us today, and not at all anticipate what kind of special good luck we may encounter until the evening”.
Spode suspects that this ideal will not die out, even in the age of the Internet. Nevertheless, the expert is certain: “It will be marginalized.”