Cycling: Gdańsk to Bydgoszcz
I cycled from Gdańsk to Bydgoszcz the other Saturday with a work friend. We took the EuroVelo 9 trail along the Vistula river bank south from the Baltic Sea coast into the Polish inland, travelling 230km in a single day.
We cycled the entire day from 6:30am to 9:30pm with plenty of breaks and pauses without any trouble. There were lots of towns to stop in for supplies and the starting city (Gdańsk) and the destination city (Bydgoszcz) were both fairly big tourist friendly cities.
The trail was excellent at some points (especially at the start of the river), with perfect tarmac. But parts of it were deteriorated, gap-filled concrete slabs which were only rideable because we had gravel bikes. We lost a lot of speed at certain parts of the trail due to that. The trail had a mixture of this over the course although after the 50% mark it mostly becomes road. Overall I’d rate the trail as great for gravel bikes but road bikes should hunt for real road as an alternative.
While it was an interesting trail, I found it more interesting learning more and discovering how to traverse the Polish-German border with a bicycle using the train system. I discovered quickly that it’s almost impossible to buy a bicycle ticket for a train that crosses the Polish-German border.
There is a convenient intercity train that runs from Berlin to Gdańsk that has allocated bicycle spaces. It’s not a big train so you need to pre-book tickets in advance to get a seat. This would’ve been perfect for me travelling from Berlin to Gdańsk and in reverse, but I simply could not buy a bicycle ticket that crossed the border online.
I didn’t want to line up for an hour at a Deutsche Bahn office where in the past I’ve been told they cannot either reserve the bicycle space (because the Polish office blocks all of them and you need to order via them… In Poland). I had to get creative.
I broke apart the trip into two parts: the German side and the Polish side.
In Germany, I have the Deutschland ticket that enables me to travel on the regional trains which can trivially take bicycles. I simply need to buy an additional bicycle ticket in the Deutsche Bahn app with the VBB association which is only ~6 Euros for 24 hours.
I took the regional train from Berlin to Frankfurt an der Oder, a border town on the river separating Poland and Germany. From there, I could ride my bicycle across the border into Słubice (the neighbouring Polish city to Frankfurt an der Oder).
In Słubice, there is a small train station from which I could catch a Polish regional train with the bicycle. I could book the ticket last minute with the Koleo app (including a bicycle ticket). I took the train from here to Rzepin.
Rzepin is where the intercity I mentioned above stops first after crossing the border from Germany. I could buy online a ticket and bicycle ticket, with bilkom.pl, to board the train at Rzepin and ride it to Gdańsk. The bilkom.pl site is the only website I found where I could book the bicycle ticket online.
This completed the journey there. By cycling across the border, I could work around the blockers that stopped me to buy a ticket for my bicycle online.
Coming back from Bydgoszcz to get home to Berlin was an issue however. It was not possible to get a last minute on-the-day bicycle ticket on the intercity line in reverse as it was sold out. This meant instead I needed to travel on a series of regional trains to get to the city of Kostrzyn.
Kostrzyn is an alternative border city which is north of Frankfurt an der Oder. This city is a very popular border crossing to get back to Berlin because there is a regional train on the German side in the small town of Küstrin-Kietz almost every hour (more regularly than from Frankfurt an der Oder).
I could book last minute tickets on the Polish regional trains from Bydgoszcz to Kostrzyn (with bicycle tickets) using the Koleo app again. The journey time was very long however, so in the future I would prioritise trying to buy the intercity train ticket earlier, probably on arrival in Poland.
Once in Kostrzn, I cycled across the river back into Germany and to the small town of Küstrin-Kietz where there is a small train station. Be warned, there are no shops open in the area and there are no ticket machines after office hours so you need to buy the tickets on your phone. From there, it is a quiet ride back to Berlin and you’ll find yourself in company with many other cyclists also heading back to Berlin.
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