Lithuanian railways in a mess :)
Yesterday I was supposed to take a 19.40 train from Kaunas to Vilnius. That's what I often do, but this time this routine thing didn't end without adventures.
My dad and brother brought me to the place which pretends to be a train station. Since the tunnel near Kaunas was discovered to be in a dangerous condition, they are repairing it now - for years. So the train between the two biggest cities in Lithuania stops in the middle of nowhere, in Petrasiunai. It's an open air place with a parking lot, three stinky public toilets and a kiosk for tickets.
Buses and trolleybuses passing by this place are poorly synchronised with trains, and there hardly any microbuses later in the evening. Overall, the place leaves a rather negative impression, I would guess, on someone who is visiting Kaunas for the first time. But for me it's OK, as long as I can get a ticket and go to Vilnius and back.
When we arrived there yesterday, it was 19.10, and we saw a bus saying "Kaunas-1 - Vilnius". While my dad went up to ask what it's all about, the bus left. A lady in a uniform approached us and told us that more reparations are taking place, so the train leaves from Palemonas instead of Kaunas-1 station. "You can still catch it with a car", she said. The bus was supposed to take people from Kaunas to Palemonas, but it left 30 min before the usual departure of the train. We hurried to Palemonas. It's a small village near Kaunas, probably with a status of a town, where a famous writer Salomeja Neris was born. There are no signs indicating where the station is, but we found it after asking three people. The station has no ticket offices. The train was already waiting. After running back and forth in the train, I finally found an attendant and asked him how do I buy the ticket. He said that I have to buy it from him, pay as if I'm going from Kaunas, and pay LTL 3 extra, because I buy the ticket on the train (which, as you know, is not my choice). Not like I'd go bankrupt from paying 3 LTL (EUR 0.87), but I felt like it was a waste of money trying to catch this train instead of taking a bus. I mean, we had to go to this village to catch the train, and then pay extra for buying the ticket in the village. The worst thing was that it felt like nobody knows anything and nobody cares - as always in this country. I would say it would've been more understandable if the bus left Kaunas by the time the train is supposed to leave, and arrive in Palemonas, Vilnius, etc later. People who are used to taking this train could have caught it then. The way they did it, how was anyone supposed to know that they have to arrive in the station earlier and take the bus? There were no signs or anything saying that one should get on this bus, which was waiting in the parking lot.
Lithuanian railways recently got some EU and government money for renovation, so they have some of the most modern trains in the Baltic states. It takes more or less an hour by train from Vilnius to Kaunas, and it's a very convenient and pleasant trip. All people under 26 get a discount during the summer season, and all EU students with ISIC get a discount during the academic year. However, as always, where technology and infrastructure can be upgraded quickly, human resources and respect for customers in Lithuania are usually lagging far behind.
The problem with the railways which caused the mess should be fixed by 30th of July. Yet it's still unclear when trains start running to the Kaunas station proper.
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Comments
Quite vexing! How long is the bus ride from Kaunas to Vilnius?
What an idea to take train in Baltic States !!!
At pic hours, you have buses leaving every 20 mn and taking 1 hour 1/4 to go from Kaunas center to Vilnius center .....And you can buy ticket at the driver's without any extra charge !
Gilles, in Vilnius
This story is so true. I live in Northern Lithuania, and what hit home for me is the comment "nobody knows anything and nobody cares" and the comment from Dzilis? Thats right- why take a train in Lithuania- Why go to a grocery store? Why go to a restaurant? Why try to buy ANYTHING- Anywhere? You will get the same- nobody knows anything and nobody cares. Its actually quite humorous- oh one thing they do do well here- take bribes and drink vodka.
Cheers,
Danielius
What makes you think that Salomeja Neris was born in Palemonas?
Nėris was born in Kiršai , in the current district of Vilkaviškis.
...
She was buried in Kaunas, in a square of the Museum of Culture, and later re-interred in the Cemetery of Petrašiūnai.
( Wikipedia).
Probably, she lived there for some time. Other than that is sad, but true. Thank you for pointing out that grotesque reality we are living in here in Lithuania.
Train is cheaper even with this extra charge (I'm 25), immune to traffic jams and more convenient (it's possible to stretch your legs). It's as fast as bus now.
Danielius: Come on, it's not that bad. There are some very helpful people from time to time. And I appreciate them a lot, because they earn near to nothing. Also, living in Hungary taught me to appreciate some things in Lithuania
That country does have the rudest waiters and service people in general ever. Yet it also has the nicest immigration office bureaucrats I've ever encountered.
Nerijus: Sorry about misinformation about Neris. I was at this museum of hers in Palemonas when I was like 12, on a school trip, so it stuck in my mind that she had to have been born there.
Daiva, I don't know if you've had the misfortune of taking a train on the east coast of the United States but we're just as bad if not worse, and in many of the same ways. Right now I don't have the inconvience of having to be driven to the middle of nowhere to catch a train but many going to other stations do. I do have the same thing with having to buy the ticket on the train because there is no other option and being charged extra for it. That's standard here. Here's the situation on that: you're supposed to buy tickets at the ticket stations before bordering. But the government has run out of money to pay them and has laid many of them off. So a ticket booth that should be open from 6AM to 9PM is now open from 12PM to 5PM. But if you take the train at 6 and buy the ticket onboard they'll tell you that you should have gone to buy the ticket IN ADVANCE and will charge you a three to five dollar fee for buying the ticket on the train.
And it gets worse from there. On the east coast we have two sets of train lines, public transit and Amtrak. Amtrak is a partially governmentally run network that is a non-profit that is used as a tax-shield by prominent members of the last four administrations who run it into the ground to hide their money in the pits of financial mismanagement. I go from northwestern Philadelphia (Pennsylvania) to NYC roughly once a week now either for work or Yiddish stuff, visiting family or often all three. An Amtrak train to go the 80 miles through three states is 75 dollars "on-peak", and 60 off and must be bought days in advance. When not bought two days in advance it's usually around 90 dollars. And that's ONE WAY! It is, however, realiable, ie it will show up and leave on schedule. I can't afford that kind of expense so I take the public transit trains. In Philadelphia we have SEPTA (Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority) which is so misrun that they've stopped even printing time schedules for buses, ie they show up when they do and its random (ie wait an hour, then have six buses show up at once). So I take one train from Philadelphia to Trenton New Jersey which is about a third of the way to NYC. That's the only train that goes that far north on the Septa system and the only reason anyone takes it is to take a second train on New Jersey's Transit system into NYC (remember every one of the 50 states has its own transit system). So after a certain point in suburban Philadelphia the only reason the train exists is to serve the other one. Unfortunately, the states of New Jersey and Pennsylvania don't get along (well the citizens actually get along better than those of most neighborhing states but the governments are actually suing each other over who owns what islands, over trash being dumped, over construction contracts, and the police departments don't cooperate too well either) and accordingly the trains are being fucked with so that they don't coordinate to strain relations between the transit agencies. So my train to Trenton that only exists to connect with the train to New York will often arrive EXACTLY as the other train is leaving, complete with the conductor telling us to complain to the other state's transit authority. Then there's a 1.5 hour wait to be had for the next one in a train station with no vending machines that's constantly under construction. Going the other direction, coming from NY or New Brunswick, my college town (I have the awful luck of being a dual resident of two states whose governments hate each other so in addition to transportation nightmares they find ways to fine my taxes), the train going to Philly will leave ten minutes early so that a hundred people coming from New York or New Brunswick will be stranded waiting for an hour for the next train. This happens every other time I travel. I've seen this happen twice with the last train of the night and both times I ended up at the station in Trenton from 11:30 to 5:00 AM, having to stay awake all night to make sure the crackheads who come in at night don't run off with my backpack. All because two state governments don't like each other!
Of course, I shouldn't be complaining. I should just accept the fact that I live in a poor country that can't afford a health care system or a public transit system (remember all the American auto companies are now bankrupt so carshops don't really fix cars anymore). I should just accept that the US can't afford this and that the country where my great-grandparents left in the era of "goat-droshkes" now has a superior transportation system to the USA. One more thing: on the New Jersey trains there aren't enough seats, about a third of the passengers end up standing the whole way. The joke someone told me the other day was "don't worry about a Holocaust in America Jordan, the trains aren't good enough to pull it off." Well, there are other means but the point remains, compared to Europe our trains are shit. Think of it this way: of course the trains in Eastern Europe are highly functional. If the type of purposeful waste/incompetence that's going on now im America had occured during the Soviet era people would have been lined up and shot. And I think the general habit of running professional public transit has stuck. The idea of doing something poorly in order to discourage people from using your service seems foreign to most Europeans.
I was actually quite impressed by my train experience in Lithuania, not with the trains themselves by with the fact that I got where I was going and back with handsignals, pointing at maps and remembering not to smile too much :). All the best.