Bratislava; Wednesday, 31 July, 2013

After breakfast I had time to rearrange my luggage ready for the final couple of legs of the journey.

Before leaving the room I made a final check on the live train details on Czech railways website and the train was running to time as it left Breclav heading for Bratislava.

So it was quite surprising when I got to the station just a few minutes later to see that the train was now 10 minutes late, and over the course of the next half hour or so proceeded to get later and later. For every five minutes that went by the delay would increase by about five minutes, until it was standing at forty.

That’s where the increases stopped, and sure enough nearly forty minutes late the train pulled it with an ancient an wheezing engine attached to another engine that looked pretty broken, so I can only assume that was the cause of the delay.

Having arrive in Bratislava they promptly detached the two engines from the front and attached a new engine which then whisked us at speeds of up to 120 Km/h across the Slovakian countryside, with a still wheezing asthmatic air-conditioning system.