Züge nach Warsaw

The city of Warsaw deserves a far better press. It is overshadowed as a tourist destination by smaller Polish cities such as Kraków and Gdansk. Yet, for a first taste of Poland, Warsaw is hard to beat. There is a beautifully restored Old Town, and a lively bar and café scene, much of the latter well removed from the tourist haunts of the Old Town. Stroll down Poznanska to the beautifully restored Hala Koszyki (Koszyki market hall, reopened in late 2016) to see how young Poles enjoy cosmopolitan style. The city has some first-class parks and gardens.

Warsaw has a rich Jewish history, superbly showcased in the new POLIN Museum on the history of Poland's Jews, and a rich thread of contemporary Jewish life which spills out from synagogues into bars with klezmer music and cafés with Jewish food (most of it not kosher!).

Warsaw is the hub of Poland’s comprehensive rail network, with routes fanning out from Warsaw in all directions. Daytime international trains run direct to Prague, Vienna, Grodno (Belarus), Berlin and many other cities.

The city benefits from an excellent range of overnight services (all with comfortable sleeping cars) with direct trains leaving most evenings for Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Kiev, Minsk and Moscow. There is also a weekly direct train to Paris, taking 20 hours for the journey to the French capital. Other cities served weekly include Milan, Verona, Genoa, Nice and Monaco.

For those who prefer to travel by day, Berlin is the obvious intermediate stop for travellers from western Europe bound for Warsaw. The Berlin-Warszawa-Express (BWE) links the two cities four times each day, taking 6 hrs 30 mins for the journey of just under 600 km.

All international train services serve Warsaw’s two main stations: Wschodnia and Centralna. The latter is much the more convenient for the city centre. Many trains also serve Zachodnia in the western suburbs of the city. Warsaw has a dense web of suburban rail services, complemented in the city centre by trams, buses and two metro lines.