Luxury Rail Roads Eurostar - Luxury Rail Travel in Europe

We have been in Italy for the past few weeks and, after having flown directly to Venice from New York, we've been travelling from city to city by Eurostar, the European high-speed rail network. Similar to the well-known TGV trains in France, or the bullet trains in Japan, these trains routinely can whisk you from city to city in Italy at speeds higher than 250 km per hour, in quiet comfort, while you sit back, relax, look out the window and just enjoy the beautiful scenery whizzing by. Eurostar in Italy operates as part of the "Trenitalia" rail system. (Poets can now take notice - yes, there is now at least one other word that rhymes with "genitalia".) You can select either second class (equivalent to business class) or first class service, and even the first class tickets are remarkably reasonable, providing you with transportation between almost all of the major Italian cities at a cost that would be far less than flying or driving yourself. Today, there are similar high-speed rail networks operating throughout Europe: high-speed "Intercity" trains in England and Germany, the AVE network in Spain and, as previously mentioned, the TGV service in France. The only drawback that I can see to using any of these services is that, if you're bringing a large number of heavy bags with you, you usually will have to load them on and off the train yourself and there is limited space available on each car for such heavy and large bags. But, if you get to the train station early and are among the first to board, that is usually not a problem. There are, of course, some train delays from time to time. However, it has been our experience that such delays are, in general, much less in frequency and duration than those delays experienced if you are traveling by air.