Railway Dog

I’m excited to be on the mythical Saturday morning train to Riga from Liepaja with Railway Dog. The only other train out of here is the Sunday evening one, except for a a daily service during a couple of high season months. It might be one of the largest towns, but only freight and seasonal or weekend holiday makers are expected on the lines. It can’t help the poverty I witness in Liepaja that it is so disconnected.

This irregular timetabling is probably why the Interrail Rail Planner app has entirely given up on Latvia and shows no trains at all. You have to input your journeys manually to generate the ticket. The manual option only seems to come up if you put in a place name it can’t match, so I just do some random letters.

Latvian train times are easy to get hold of on their LV website and app, where you can also buy tickets if you don’t have a pass. Train tickets in Latvia are cheap, and seem about 2 or 3€ an hour at a reasonable speed.

When my ticket was checked, the conductor didn’t try to scan it. She smiled after a while and said “Interrail ” and phoned a friend for advice. After a bit of realising Interrail tickets don’t have decent numbers, she just waved a hand and generated a free ticket on her machine so that I’m counted.

Dogs: go free on Latvian trains and local public transport. There are no size restrictions, max 10 per carriage or 2 per seat block! They just must behave, be on the floor and on a short leash. So relaxing to at last be somewhere where this is so. It also means they have an expectation in Latvia that dogs are well socialized and trained. Yey, fewer aggressive or nervous dogs to encounter!

There are no charging points that I can see on this Latvian train, but there is free WiFi. Out of the window can be seen the large grandiose 19th century station building at Liepaja. When we move off there are half active and half derelict factories, rapeseed coming into full yellow bloom in late May (it was April in Hungary), and extensive marshes and young trees.

The one toilet was locked, so I found a conductor who unlocked it, waited, and relocked it, on a 3:15 hour journey!