Train Travel advice Lisbon -> Krakow

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I checked the German rail planner, which is mostly pretty good, and it comes with results of 55 to 60 hours, with two 'change trains' in the night which basically leaves you stranded on a station from around midnight till the first train in the morning.

There might be 'once a week' or 'only in times of high demand' trains that go through the night. And with 8 to 16 changes, duration from 10 minutes to 8 hours (in the night.)

Besides having it check from start to finish, you can also look on a map and find a place where you would like to overnight (or stay longer) and have the planner find travels from the start to that station and from that station to your finish, try it out for several locations and see whether you get better results (with or without a longer stop there.)

The German rail planner will also sell you many tickets in Europe, but you will have to call them to find out whether they can sell you the tickets and if so, for how much.

When traveling to and from England, or through Paris, The Man in Seat 61 will often help. And the German planner has you going through Paris, so you can use that site to see what they have to (London) Paris Lisbon and (London) Paris Krakow, and see if they know some night trains.
As mentioned in a comment by @Berend, the site even has a page on which you can find how to travel from Lisbon to Krakow, but you will have to scroll down the page quite a bit. I see this site now also sells tickets, and again I am not sure whether they can sell you this.

There are more sites/travel agencies which specialize in train travel and if you speak either Polish or Portuguese I would try to find one in the country on one end of the journey where you speak the language.

Looking on google maps, to find a nice stopover I happened to have it on public transport and they find a combination of trains and buses which takes 'only' 40 hours.

(I am not connected with the sites I linked to, just a user of them.)

Upvote:2

Its not tricky at all, it just takes a while. I lived south of there for a bit in Lagos on the Mediterranean coast. Made the rail trip to Prague once and to Amsterdam twice. It's been a few years but believe its still similar.

It's going to take a while cause you have to change trains a few times, (luckily they usually have connections timed really well). I would usually just wing it & if I hit any major delay from a sold out train or something, it would be somewhere like Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, or Amsterdam where I could easily find a cheap hostel for a night.

My route was-

  • slow train up the coast to Porto, then 2 options from there-
    1. train to Madrid followed by the high speed overnight to Paris
    2. train to Barcelona to catch the other (faster) high speed train.

Once you get to the Paris Nord station you can get east to a hub like Amsterdam fairly quickly where you can catch trains &/or tour buses to Eastern countries like Poland, or Czech Republic.

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