Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Monday the 25th of May.

Many of us, including me, planning great rail adventures across Europe. But my goodness, it can be

really tough. You can go, for instance, onto a train line and try and book a ticket from Manchester to Nice.

And the first thing it will say is, yeah, we can't actually do this even though, and this is me speaking now, we have fantastic tech.

You're going to have to sort out your Euro-style thing before you do anything else.

It's an absolute mess.

But it was not always the case.

And the man who knows that is the man in seat 61 international rail guru Mark Smith.

So Mark, tell us what was the standard way, let's say in the 1980s, maybe the early 1990s,

of booking European rail travel.

How easy or fiendishly complicated was it?

Well, it was simple, but not necessarily competitively priced.

Basically, up for the whole of the 20th century, right up until the 1990s when Eurostar started

to emerge, you had a kilometreic tariff, a very simple mileage,

kilometres-based tariff in every country. And every national rail operator gave every other

national rail operator two things, a table of distances between all their border points and stations,

and a set of tariffs for how much dots they wanted for one, two, three kilometres, 100, 200,

300 kilometres. And using this, every national rail operator, including British Rail, could

compile a set of throughfares from, in our case, London, to any major cities they like. Rome,

Seville, Moscow, Helsinki, stocker, anywhere. And of course, these tickets were built up of whatever British Rail wanted for the boat train to Dover, what Sealing wanted for the ferry crossing, the distance in France from, say, Calais to the Swiss border, what the Swiss wanted at their terrace from the Swiss borders of the Italian border, what the Italians want, and so on. So that was great. It was really flexible. Tickets

were open. They were valid for two months. If you wanted a reservation, that was separate.

You had to call the French or German computer, Eastern British Rail at Victoria. But of course,

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