Planning rail travel spanning multiple eu countries

Trying to look and see if going from Faro in Portugal to Ghent in Belgium is doable by train.

Obviously it is, it’s going to be numerous changes of train which I’m fine with but I’ve tried Trainline.eu and a few others and they all say it’s not possible by train and give me coach tickets which I’m not interested in. Trainline.eu won’t even show me trains from Faro to Lisbon!

There has to be an easier option than booking each and every step of the journey separately right?

Or is it just a case of getting an interrail pass and making it up as you go? Doesn’t seem practical if journeys are going to be several many hours and you might not get a seat or even on the train? Also imagine it’s going to be nigh on impossible to navigate the most direct route and you might end up with hours and hours between legs of the journey?

Lots of info hear in case you've not seen it yet - https://www.seat61.com/

I try these guys some times https://int.bahn.de/

Currently trying to find a way to get to Milan in August for Mille Miglia that isn't going to cost us £1000 and extra days off work (yeah yeah, nice 1st world problems to have)

I think the issue AFAIK is that there isn't a proper rail link between Lisbon and Madrid bizarrely. You have to change and do a weird route.

I found Trainline good for planning but booked with the country specific rail operator to avoid TLs chunky booking fees

rome2rio.com might give you some ideas too

As above, Seat 61 is a great resource for this sort of stuff. It sounds like Faro to Paris followed by Paris to Ghent. You might just be able to squeeze it in to 2 days depending on how late the trains run to Brussels.

We did Interrail pass last summer, it's all done with an app these days and getting seat reservations wasn't too bad. Most difficult part was Eurostar. I we had seats for all but about half hour, and travelled from Manchester > London > Brussels > Bruges > Essen > Hamburg > Copenhagen > Hamburg > Cologne > The Hague > Rotterdam > Brussels > London > Manchester.

@hippy friends did London > Milan in a day last year for around £65, Eurostar followed by direct train. Might be more expensive in August and with bikes.

Thread dredge but are you still looking to do this? I've done UK to Tarragona this week so can hopefully offer some input if you're still interested