Trust

How this site works

Who is listed

Every operator whose rail vacations we can verify: 73 companies and 3,793 trips at the last count (data version 52622606c0). Listing is free, automatic, and unconditional. No operator asked to be here, none pays to be here, and none can pay to be removed, promoted, or ranked higher.

What counts as a train tour

A seller of rail holidays does not make every product a rail holiday, so one rule decides which listings join the 3,793trips that search, the destination, train and route pages, the market report and the exports count: the listing itself must evidence a train journey, through a named train, a train leg in the operator's own itinerary or inclusions, or the operator's transport field saying rail alongside a published itinerary. The other 144active listings stay on their operator's page, labelled: an add-on (a hotel night or excursion under three days with no train), a product the listing says has no train travel, or one whose train content we could not confirm. Neither the operator's brand nor a generated score decides it, and the label on each page states the evidence.

How ranking works

Hub pages order trips by data completeness first (a trip with a full published itinerary, imagery, and a price outranks one without), then by price. Best-of pages state their criteria on the page. There is no hidden score and no commercial input anywhere in ordering.

Where the data comes from

Each listing is taken straight from the operator's own public product page: itinerary, prices, departures, hotels, named trains, what is included and what is not. Every trip page shows when its prices and details were last updated. Images are the operators' own product photography, served from our copies.

What we add

Two kinds of information sit on every trip page and they are labelled differently. Sourced facts(price, currency, duration, itinerary, inclusions, departures, named trains, the operator's own wording) come from the operator's listing, and each carries the date it was last read from the operator's page. Editorial estimates(the one-line essence, days by rail, pace, comfort tier, honest notes, FAQs) are written from that same listing under a strict grounding rule: if the operator's information does not support a statement, we do not make it, and a sentence that no longer matches the record is suppressed rather than rewritten.

Days by rail, defined

The figure on each trip is our estimate of the share of itinerary days on which the operator's itinerary describes a train leg, with the trip's day count as the denominator. It is a share of days: not of distance travelled, not of hours on board, and we never invent timings to make it more precise. Confidence is high only when a day-by-day itinerary names the trains or rail legs, medium when trains are listed but the itinerary is partial, low when it was estimated from a description. Where we have not assessed a trip the figure is absent, which is not the same as zero.

Which date means what

Every page carries a data version and up to four dates, and they are deliberately not the same date. Catalogue generated is when the site was last rebuilt from the data; a rebuild never refreshes a source check. Prices last readis the day we last read a price on the operator's own page; each trip page shows its own. Details last readis when the itinerary and inclusions were last taken from the operator's page. USD at ECB rates ofis the reference-rate date behind any dollar figure; the operator's own currency is always the primary number. The news section on the homepage is dated separately again: that is when the market watch was updated, not when every trip was checked.

What we do not know

Live availability and today's price: both live with the operator, and prices change after the date we last checked. Some operators publish no day-by-day itinerary; those trip pages say so instead of guessing. Where a from-price excludes something significant, such as rail fare sold separately, the trip page says that too.

Money

We take no bookings, hold no inventory, process no payments, and earn no commission. Every booking link goes straight to the operator's own page for that trip, at their price. This site exists because choosing a rail vacation across 73 operators' separate websites is miserable, and one honest index makes it better.

Catalogue statistics live on the data page. Machine access is documented for AI assistants.