For just £54, there are 11,000 miles of track to explore with stops including Poland’s Saint-Tropez and pastel-painted towns
I’m speeding from Poland’s capital city, Warsaw, to its best beach, Sopot. The country’s fastest train gets close to Formula One velocity.
Scenes flash by like a travel show on mute: bobtailing deer, swooping swifts and medieval castles.
The live cooking restaurant on my intercity train is set to full volume. In the adjoining restaurant car, I devour a dill-infused cucumber soup, followed by pork-stuffed cabbage dumplings, paired with a craft beer made in the 15th-century Olbracht brewery in Torun. All for £10. If this is a taste of 21st-century Polish travel, I’m sold.
My rail trip around Poland is a personal pilgrimage. Thirty years ago, as a woefully naive backpacker, I traced a similar journey, not long after the fall of communism.
Trains in Poland are comfortable and affordable (Photo: Michael Nosek/Getty)
The trains have changed, but the prices are comparable. With a €63 (£54) Interrail Poland Pass – Europe’s cheapest alongside Bulgarian and Macedonian equivalents – I can tour more than 11,000 miles of track for four days over a month.
For comparison, a monthly rail pass in Italy or France costs €147 (£124) and €167 (£140) in Spain.
Poland features everything from high-speed Pendolino trains, like those used mainly on the Gdansk-Warsaw-Krakow corridor, to modern intercity trains and TLK local lines. For a taste of history, board one of the dated Polregio regional trains that putter through Poland’s countryside.
I started my journey on top of Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science, which was one of the world’s 10 tallest buildings when it was built in 1955. When I visited in 1995, the lobby was SMERSH-chic – politburo decor included plastic sofas that looked wired up to electrocute a Bond baddy.
Now £5 buys a fast elevator ticket up to the institution’s 30th-storey viewing platform. From the top, I watched laser shows light up skyscrapers and beach clubs on the River Vistula.
The Museum of Modern Art’s striking staircases add to its appeal (Photo: Wojtek RADWANSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Next door is the city’s shiny new Museum of Modern Art. Inside, staircases worthy of MC Escher spiral up to infinity.
My Warsaw hotel is fresh, too. Puro is a Polish chain that embraces regional design and the brand-new Old Town hotel riffs off Poland’s Baltic connections with Scandi minimalism and a Danish bakery serving smørrebrød lathered with horseradish and gravadlax. I take a free macchiato for my journey to Warszawa Centralna station.
My first high-speed train from Warsaw drops me in Sopot, Poland’s answer to Saint-Tropez. This modern model zips in at just under three hours, with reclining first-class seats in a 2+1 configuration. The carriage contains laptop tappers who work until Gdansk and tourists with wheelie luggage.
Between Gdansk and Gdynia, on the so-called Polish Riviera, Sopot’s three miles of icing sugar sand is where the country’s elite comes to play. At White Marlin Beach Club, I pair a Zubrówka vodka bloody mary with a plate of Baltic oysters for £16.
It’s possible to mistake Sopot beach for one in the south of France (Photo: pawel.gaul/Getty Images)
Sopot’s wooden pier – Europe’s longest – is like a catwalk. Accessories include TikTok tripods, bichon frisés and glasses of frosé.
Back in the 1970s, Sopot had a socialist-chic vibe. Illicit imports were embarked on the pier so that cool cats could score a box of Marlboro and a Jack Kerouac novel. Poland’s first discotheque, Musikorama, pumped out The Beatles and Jethro Tull.
Sopot also has a direct railroad to Hel. The Hel Peninsula is a svelte sandbar that reaches more than 20 miles into the Baltic Sea in an endless scroll of beach and pine forest.
There’s also a highway to Hel until recently served by bus number 666. The route was recently renumbered following an outcry from Polish church elders.
The little electric train starts from Sopot’s quaint station, and then calls at delightful hop-off stops along the peninsula during a 90-minute or so ride. Jurata is something of a Baltic Bahamas, where families alight to spend a day in wicker beach chairs.
Chalupy is one of Poland’s only naturist beaches, which became popular in the 1980s when baring all was seen as a riposte to the shackles of the socialist era.
My devilishly pretty destination is Hel town on the peninsula’s furthest point. Some previous holidaymakers arrived evidently at the end of the line, fell in love with herring fisherfolk, and never left. Their homes are converted railway boxcars festooned with fishing buoys and frescoed with floral mandalas.
I also use my rail pass on Poland’s newest train route, which launched in December. With a few taps of the Interrail app, I booked the Baltic Express, which can be done in advance (seats are generally also available on the day).
The route makes a photogenic zigzag from the Baltic Sea into Poland’s cultural heart, from the seaside city of Gdynia and over the Czech border to Prague, four times a day, on an eight-hour journey.
Stops along the route include art nouveau Bydgoszcz and arty Wroclaw. The train itself isn’t particularly fancy, and has no dining car, but the stops read like the “Best Of” section of a Polish guidebook. I settle on fairy-tale-pretty Poznan.
The old town is crowned by church frescos and decorated with pastel-painted townhouses.
Arriving in the evening, I order dinner from dumpling shack Pierozak. Diners can point and pick from piles of pierogies, for 50p a piece. I start with a bowl of borscht (60p), followed by a plate of Poznanskie pierogies, a lighter dough dumpling, stuffed with roast duck and apple.
My final journey is Poland’s newest high-speed service, the Chrobry (“Intrepid”). It guns from Poznan to Warsaw in just over two hours. I take the 7.40am service and destroy a daybreak pile of pancakes with cottage cheese. For Polish train holidays, it’s a new dawn.
Getting there and around
Interrail offers Poland one country passes for £54, allowing four days of travel within a month, or Global Passes for unlimited travel throughout Europe from £241 per month. interrail.eu
Staying there
Puro Hotel Warsaw Old Town has doubles from €165, purohotel.pl
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