100. Regional Travel #1.1 - Allegro train from Russia to Finland
Helsinki is the easiest big city to reach via ground transportation from St. Petersburg. A bus trip, the least expensive option, takes roughly 7.5 hours from start to Finnish (pun intended). More comfortable, though, is a train ride - often the best way to travel around Europe. A standard commuter train takes around five hours between cities, whereas the high-speed Allegro train service gets you there in 3.5 hours. All immigration paperwork is taken care of right on the train, so the journey couldn't be easier. It's not cheap (around 50-75 euros for a round trip ticket), but still less expensive than a flight would be, and much quicker when you factor in all the additional inconveniences related to air travel and getting to and from the airports to the city centers (where both train stations are more conveniently located).
The Allegro trains are clean and quiet - very similar to German trains which I've traveled on a few times in the last three years. I purchased the tickets online, had the seats assigned, and there was no check-in process to worry about. The most confusing part was that I did not have a paper ticket or e-ticket. Our reservation was attached to our passport number, as far as I could tell. This isn't always the case because I've already purchased train tickets for a return visit to Helsinki in September, and this time I was issued an e-ticket. So there's a lack of consistency on how ticketing works. I'm sure it would be less confusing if I could read the information on the web site in Russian rather than the English translation. But overall, this is about as easy as it gets for an international trip.
The Helsinki train station is an impressive presence right in the center of Helsinki:
The Allegro trains are clean and quiet - very similar to German trains which I've traveled on a few times in the last three years. I purchased the tickets online, had the seats assigned, and there was no check-in process to worry about. The most confusing part was that I did not have a paper ticket or e-ticket. Our reservation was attached to our passport number, as far as I could tell. This isn't always the case because I've already purchased train tickets for a return visit to Helsinki in September, and this time I was issued an e-ticket. So there's a lack of consistency on how ticketing works. I'm sure it would be less confusing if I could read the information on the web site in Russian rather than the English translation. But overall, this is about as easy as it gets for an international trip.
The Helsinki train station is an impressive presence right in the center of Helsinki:
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