Arriving into Mannheim on a DB Regio ‘RE’ service from Trier, I had just over an hour until my booked ICE service to take me south into Switzerland. With a journey time of just over three hours, I had decided to treat myself on this leg of the trip with a first-class ticket through to Zurich.

Day 1 of (Not Quite) All the Small Things was a success with over 600km travelled by train, 4.5 countries covered (England, France (kind of), Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany) with one of those (Luxembourg) being a ‘new’ country for me to tick of my list. As such day 2 of the trip started in the German city of Trier, close to the Luxembourg border.

Having arrived in the Belgian capital onboard a Eurostar service from St. Pancras, I had just 40-minutes to make my way through Midi station before my next train departed. As the main station for Brussels, Midi station is served by a number of international operators such as Thalys, DB and SNCF, however despite my journey crossing a border it was with the Belgian national operator, SNCB.

January means one thing for Flights and Times, a big trip spread over a few days that I wouldn’t get chance to do at other times. Unfortunately, owing to Covid, this didn’t happen in 2021 but last year saw me exploring Budapest, Bratislava and Prague as I started to travel again. For 2023’s trip I decided to do something a little bit different and so was born (Not Quite) All The Small Things, where I aimed to visit a number of Europe’s smaller countries, all whilst relying on the European rail and bus networks.

Having enjoyed a weekend in South Wales with friends, we were back at Swansea station to undertake the journey back to London, the reverse of our journey a couple of days earlier. This journey was supposed to be a little bit different but wasn’t (I’ll come to that in a bit) and so was very similar to the outbound journey.