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I need to get me and my bike to Geneva in July. Looked a flights and driving - all working out quite expensive. Just had a look at Train and there looks to be a very fast service all the way from London to Geneva with only one change in Paris (7 hours total). Seems like a return ticket could be as little as £150 return! Of course there is the bike issue though. A quick look suggests it might be possible to take the bike in a bag in the luggage car on the Eurostar bit to Paris for a fee. After that I am not so sure?
Has anyone done this route?
A lot of hassle?
Infamously un-bike-friendly I'm afraid.
I'm particularly peeved about this on the fast direct service to Avignon which would be handy for Mt Ventoux.
They don't guarantee oversized luggage on the same train and I think you have to get to the other side of paris for the change
How flexible are you with airports? Should be plenty of flights to pick from?
That's a shame - could be a great service
Has to be Geneva to be picked up by Whiterooms
Its looking like £250 minimum, easyjet and a trip to Gatwick airport which is one of my least favourite places on the planet
I think that they now can get bikes on the train, and you no longer have to pack them into a bike bag (which seemed to completely defeat the point of going by train rather than flying)...
https://www.eurostar.com/uk-en/travel-info/travel-planning/luggage/bikes
Looked into it recently. It is a ****ing pisstake, especially given how cycle friendly some of the Eurostar destinations are! So expensive as well. £55 (I'm guessing each way?) if you want to take an assembled bike & book it less than 2 months in advance!!
Plus there are only 4 stations where you can load/unload bikes. My GF lives about 10 minutes cycle from Ashford Intl. Perfect for a short bike break for the continent! **** off. We would have to find our way to London first, and then get the train back through Ashford, obviously.
There is a previous thread on here about it somewhere. I went by train to Bourg St Maurice (for Bike Village) two years ago. OK to Paris, the metro (to get from Gare du Nord to Gare de Lyon) was kind of fun, the TGV was not really satisfactory though. I was able to pack my bike into a box of the dimensions* they said, but there was no room in the train which was rammed, so it was getting in the way (which nobody minded but it made me nervous). Then the local train was also packed but actually had a bit more room for a bike box. The other option would have been to keep the bike intact and ride it across Paris, with a trailer or something, there are a few bike spaces on French trains and I think you can book one on a TGV, but I am not sure. Overall not worth the faff, but it was an adventure.
I did get back to Cardiff in a day, 7 trains in all.
* max 1.2m I think, OK for old school geo, my current bike wouldn't have made it without the fork off.
I’ve done it. North of Scotland to north of Spain. Door to door on the train. It was great. I had the bike in a normal CRC bag. The bit across Paris I was dreading but the Parisians were super friendly and it was great despite being at the start of rush hour. I just risked it and went. It was very tough physically (before the days of EVOK!) and I arrived to the eurostar soaked to my baws, I had to change clothes in the toilets! London crossing was a nightmare, I had people swearing at me and one woman kicked my bike bag! Then the bit from London to Tain was amazing, full on party mode in the sleeper with a full carriage dancing and buying each other drinks. It was a great experience. That was 8 years ago.
We are going to give this a go in July. Burnley to Verbier by train. Rucksack and fully assembled bikes that we will ride across Paris to catch the train to Geneva. In a bag for that leg. Stopover in Paris. Train from Geneva to Verbier.
So far the research suggests the trickiest part will be Burnley to Manchester. Getting bikes on trains there is a lottery and you can’t book.
Anyway, it’s all for the adventure and to see if you can train to the alps and avoid flying and have fun doing it.
We have yet to work out the best way of bagging two full Sussers into the tiny bags for the Paris - Geneva leg
We’ll be documenting it all for Singletrack of course 🙂
this is a good resource https://seat61.com
So far the research suggests the trickiest part will be Burnley to Manchester.
Ride 🙂
Thanks for all the info. Tickets for August don't seem to be on sale yet but def worth looking into. Maybe just take the bike and a rucksack.
On the US one I got the nasty surprise of $100-150 fee's for a bike, seems they don't really have oversize screening and need a rent a cop to try and find the weed/bomb/immigrant in your bike bag.
BA flights £72 each way from LHR if that makes it better for you, baggage fee's not too bad normally and heaps of flights every day
Yeah looked at BA...it seems you need to upgrade the ticket to take hold luggage... and then its £65 each way in excess baggage? Is that right?
Just run through the booking to see
https://www.britishairways.com/en-gb/information/baggage-essentials/extra-overweight-baggage
You can cancel at the last minute and it means nothing, check out business too, some bargains there and you get 2x32kg and food/wine chucked in, did it down to Nice was quite nice 😉
Also worth looking at the level of train below the TGV once in France.
Slower cheaper and will take bikes.
Have a look on the SNCF website.
We went as far as Paris a few years ago, then on to the 'normal' trains. It's a fair faff but not as bad as flying with bikes as far as I'm concerned. We were touring, so took off the worst of the luggage (on the French side on the way back they were a lot less bothered about this) and then passed the bikes over. Doing it with a couple of larger panniers would be easier, other folks went through while we were faffing and just unclipped luggage and handed the bikes over.
We rode/pushed through Paris, aside from a couple of nasty roundabouts it's fine really.
Interested to hear what the route further south is like as we might try it.
It used to be; 'if you can carry it to the train, you can put it on the train' but not any more. Last time I took my carbon road bike to Belgium it was in a bag which I had to take to to some fairly remote handling centre in St Pancras for x-ray and check in, where thankfully it was loaded on the same train as I was on. As others have said, this is not guaranteed. On arrival at Brussels I saw the guard trying to cram my bike into a small luggage trolley with no care as to the fragility of it, despite my having labelled it 'fragile'.
Bikes on TGVs are difficult as they have to conform to pretty strict size regulations. In the past I have done a TGV trip to Valence for a touring holiday which worked, but we did have to assemble bikes in the station car park and carry the bike bag with use for the duration of the trip. Local train are sometimes easier as you can put fully assembled bikes on them for a fairly small fee. Some still have guard's wagons but these are becoming rarer.
I've flown BA with a bike in a placcy bag as part of the std baggage allowance. £55 to Turin for TNR rally iirc.