Alan Heywood
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From
June 6, 2007
Ask our expert: Italian rail translation
Times Online Travel rail expert Alan Heywood offers advice on how to get European train times in English on international websites
I am having difficulty finding info on a train from Naples to Venice as the site is in Italian and I cannot see a button to select my language of choice. Barbara Ann Mullan, by email
Times Online rail expert Alan Heywood responds: This is a fairly common question because it is certainly true that most of the European countries produce their sites in their own language - and that's fair enough I suppose! The best site for getting Pan Europe information is the Deutsche Bahn site belonging to the German state railways and, if you need to go direct to their English language pages, the address is http://reiseauskunft.bahn.de/bin/query.exe/en.
Even this very helpful site has its quirks and it ideally needs you to know the local spellings of the place names. I decided to have a go at your enquiry and typed in Naples and Venice. It coped fine with the first and translated it as Napoli. However, for Venice it gave me Venise and then a list of bus stops from which to choose. The only way out of that was to hit the "back" button and start again. So I typed Venezia and it then correctly asked me to choose between Venezia Mestre (on the mainland) and Venezia Santa Lucia (the main station right in the heart of the city on the Grand Canal).
It's next request was to ask for my age. This is because there are different age requirements for children and senior citizens in different countries and, had I gone on to enquire about the fare, it would have needed to know this.
Having done this and selected a date and approximate time, clicking on "search" gave me a choice of trains between the two cities with departure and arrival times.
Alan Heywood is a director at rail specialists, Ffestiniog
Travel
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The link on trenitalia.it is found in the top right hand corner of its homepage.
Steve German, Kirkcaldy,