Train from Istanbul to London

[colacubes]

Me and memespring are off with me rellies for a week in Dalaman later in the year and we've decided to separate off after a week and possibly get the train back from Istanbul to London. We've had a look on Seat61 and it's recommending a route of Istanbul-Bucharest-Budapest-Vienna-Munich-Paris- London which looks v cool.

Has anyone ever done this route before and got any tips experience of it? We'd probably do it over 10 days so have a couple of days in Istanbul, Bucharest and short stops at the rest. We've done a similar thing before from Florence back to the UK doing train to Milan, Nice, Bordeaux, Bilbao and then the ferry and it was ace (apart from the ferry which was like 24 hours in a really rough pub )

Also does anyone have any tips for getting Istanbul from Dalaman? I've had a brief look and we could fly but we'd prefer not to as we both loathe it. It seems there's an overnight bus which would be ok, or possibly train and ferry from Izmir.

 

[Spark]

Many years ago when inter-railing I went to Istanbul by train. We went London-Amsterdam-Berlin-Prague-Krakow-Budapest- Brashov-Bucharest-Istanbul. Our route was determined where we wanted to go though so probably not the most direct. It took us about 3 weeks, but we stopped off for a few days in most places.

We took overnight trains between quite a few places, definitely Berlin-Prague and Bucharest-Istanbul, which were pretty good and saved some time.