If you’re travelling by train with big bags between European cities or in the UK, there’s an easier way to go. Just ask train travellers in Japan.
Ask anyone who has just wrestled a suitcase up a narrow staircase to a first-class carriage, and they’ll tell you the same thing: for all the comfort inside a train, the getting-there part can be a small ordeal in itself. Two recent trips through Europe are a case in point, and they’ve left more than one traveller wondering why hauling your own bags is still the default, when there’s a much easier way already working beautifully in Japan.
The trouble with First Class
You’d think paying for first class would take the stress out of the journey. In many ways it does. But on a number of European routes, the seating is upstairs, while the luggage storage is down below and often limited. That leaves passengers with an awkward choice: carry your bags up with you and hope for space in the overhead racks, or leave them downstairs, out of sight, for the length of the journey, not an especially comfortable feeling in this day and age.
Jenny Mack, who recently travelled through Europe with her husband Alain knows the feeling well. “It was honestly horrendous getting our luggage upstairs,” she says. “Alain is fit as a fiddle, but even he found it tough going. And getting the bags back down again at the other end was just as bad. You’re trying not to hold everyone up while you’re wrestling two suitcases down a spiral staircase with the whole carriage watching.”
It didn’t end there. At one station along their route, Jenny recalls, there was no lift at all, which meant Alain had to carry the bags up and down a narrow flight of stairs by hand, hardly the relaxing scenic journey they’d pictured when they booked.
A sprint through Edinburgh
Mary Simms had a different kind of luggage headache. Travelling from Glasgow to York, she had to change trains in Edinburgh, which meant getting herself and her bags off one train, through the station, and onto the next, all within a tight connection window. “Manoeuvring my bags through the throngs of people at Edinburgh station, trying to find the right platform for the York train, put years on my life,” Mary laughs, looking back on it now. “Everyone else seemed to know exactly where they were going, and there I was, weaving through the crowd with a case that suddenly felt three times heavier than when I packed it.”
She made her connection in the end, but not without a fair bit of adrenaline, and a firm resolution to pack lighter next time. We all make those!
The Japanese alternative
Stories like Jenny’s and Mary’s are why Japan’s approach to travelling light has such appeal. There, a well-established courier network, known as takkyubin, lets travellers drop their suitcases at a hotel front desk or even a convenience store in the morning, and have them arrive at the next hotel, sometimes hours away, before they do. No stairs, no scrambling through crowded platforms, no anxious glance back at a bag left downstairs. Just a lighter, calmer journey from one place to the next.
It helps that the system is fast, affordable, and everywhere. Delivery is often same-day or next-morning, the cost typically works out to around $20–30 a bag, and virtually every hotel in the country is set up to use it. For travellers used to European trains, it can feel almost too good to be true.
Catching up in Europe
The good news is that Europe and the UK are starting to offer something similar. Companies such as Send My Bag, My Baggage, Eurosender, First Luggage, and Luggage Forward will now collect a suitcase from one hotel and deliver it to the next, so travellers can board the train with nothing more than a small bag for the journey itself.
It isn’t quite the same as Japan yet. Deliveries usually take a day or two rather than a few hours, and prices tend to run higher, from roughly $50 up to $100 or more per bag. But for anyone who has been through what Jenny and Mary went through, that trade-off is starting to look worthwhile. A little planning ahead, booking the transfer a few days before travelling, and checking with the arrival hotel that they’re happy to hold luggage for a guest who hasn’t checked in yet, can turn a stressful multi-city trip into something closer to a breeze.
