Six Days in Basel; Day 3 - A trip to Strasbourg and the Cité Du Train in Mulhouse

As Michael Portillo pointed out in an episode of  his splendid ‘Great Continental RailwayJourneys’ TV series, a quirk of Basel station is that it’s shared by Swiss national railways, SBB, and French national railways, SNCF. 
The platforms used by the SNCF trains are in French territory, so the border crossing is in the station itself.

To board the train to Strasbourg we had to pass through the sliding doors under the entrance marked ‘France’. 
Why this is necessary we couldn’t work out, as the Lyria trains to Paris depart from the SBB (Swiss station).

We didn’t have much time to ponder this quirk of international relations, as we only had 5 mins to catch the train to Strasbourg. 
My French language skills were just about good enough to work the SNCF ticket machine, we’d already wasted valuable minutes working out that you couldn’t buy tickets to  Strasbourg on the other (SBB) machines at the station - and there never seemed to be less than 50 people queuing at Basel SBB’s main ticket office.
Though in contrast the very posh international and reservations ticket hall – which would be a great bonus for rail pass users,  always seemed to be empty.

As we raced for the Strasbourg train I screamed out that we’d forgotten to stamp our tickets – I always forget to do this in France, Italy etc despite all the advice I dish out on ThereByTrain along the lines of ‘never forget to do this’.

We then rushed from one stamping machine to another like headless chickens, to the great amusement of the  guard on on the platform who kindly helped us by showing me something else I’d forgotten - namely you have to insert the ticket to the left hand side on the SNCF ticket stamping machines and not in the middle.

Strasbourg was a perfect day trip destination from Basel, its beautiful city center was an easy 10 mins walk from its magnificent station.

We meandered through its lovely streets 

and then even though there was no need, we couldn’t resist hopping on to one of its futuristic trams, which enable the entire city centre to be car free, for a ride back to the station. 
If they ever hand out awards to cities for ‘world’s best public transport system’, then Strasbourg would be a contender for the prize.

We cut our visit to Strasbourg short because in a late scan online of ‘things to do near Basel’ I'd discovered that Europe’s largest railway museum, the Cité Du Train, is located in Mulhouse.

The train from Strasbourg to Basel goes right passed it, 

so we had to get off and take a look.

We’d asked at the SNCF railway information desk in Strasbourg station if our ticket back to Basel would still be valid if we got off the train at Mulhouse, but my French wasn’t up to making the staff there understand and then the guy manning the info desk at Mulhouse couldn’t speak English at all.

It may have been a tad presumptuous to assume these staff would speak English, after all I doubt whether many station staff in the UK can speak French.
But this is a good example that unless there’s a specific international desk at a station, don’t assume that you’ll always be always to receive an answer to a question about train travel if you’re not fluent in the local language.

The fortunate citizens of Rotherham will be first in the UK to benefit from a tram/train system, but Paul was thrilled that it was one of these that delivered us to the museum from in front of Mulhouse station.

The Cité Du Train comes highly recommended, the English language audio-guides were great and it soon became clear that the TGV is no fluke, French trains have always been at the cutting edge of design.

However, the museum’s shop was a bit of a let-down, I’d have loved to have purchased some reproductions of the posters that were on display within the museum, but most of the items for sale only promoted the museum itself.

We left the museum as it was closing, but 99% of the other visitors had obviously opted to get there by car, but the tram-train soon had us back at Mulhouse station and within an hour of leaving the museum we were back in Basel.