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Title

Ordering Train Tickets

Description

Imagine, if you will, that you would like to take a trip from Zürich (to pick an arbitrary starting point) to Copenhagen (to pick an equally random destination). Imagine further, if you will further indulge, that you would like to take the train in order to see Germany along the way instead of flying over everything. Imagine that you have a vague notion of nobility in doing so because of the ghastly wastefulness of flying, as far as carbon footprint goes. You will be surprised---and not just once---when you embark on this adventure. Your first surprise will be to discover just how bloody expensive train travel is, as compared to the seemingly much more costly air travel. Two <b>plane</b> tickets round-trip Zürich--Copenhagen cost about CHF425.--, give or take a Franc or two. Two <b>train</b> tickets round-trip Zürich--Copenhagen cost twice as much. That it also takes 5 times as long to go by train as to go by plane is entirely expected and will therefore not count as a surprise unless you're just silly. Let us continue. It gets worse. Obviously with such a long journey, you'll want to reserve seats. On the first, longest leg of the trip (Zürich/Hamburg) all window seats were already reserved. Every last one. I will let you guess as to the seating accommodations on the plane. However, the train that leaves from Zürich at 06:00 has open seats, but is wildly inconvenient to catch (it involves a 30-minute walk to a local train station at 04:45 in order to catch the earliest train). We are now a good two hours into comparison price-shopping. This primarily takes so long because there is no central dealer like Kayak or CheapTickets or Orbitz in the train world (that we were able to find, mind you ... perhaps we're just a bit too silly for the Internet). We have decided not to care. We are ignoring the siren song of the airplane and want to <i>travel by train, dammit.</i> We <i>want to see Germany, dammit.</i> We want to <i>stop in Hamburg on the way there and Frankfurt on the way back, dammit.</i> We thought this would be a good deal easier and rewarding. Let's just bite the bullet and buy tickets. The first leg will be purchased at the SBB---the Swiss national train system web site. Tickets are selected. Reservations are selected. Credit-card information is entered. Hold on now. Something seems a bit fishy. Can you spot the problem in the screenshot below? <img src="{att_link}screen_shot_2011-03-21_at_22.28.25_.png" href="{att_link}screen_shot_2011-03-21_at_22.28.25_.png" align="center" class="frame" title="SBB Store is NOT encrypted in Opera" scale="50%"> For some reason, the SBB is willing to sell us tickets through a storefront that is completely and entirely unecrypted. That we are using the Opera web browser does not enter into it; if the SBB doesn't support Opera, then they should <i><b>NOT</b></i>...<i><b>EVER</b></i> offer to collect credit-card information over an unencrypted connection. Fine. Let's check with another browser and start the purchase all over again. Let's take the most popular browser on the Mac---Safari. <img src="{att_link}screen_shot_2011-03-21_at_22.27.48_.png" href="{att_link}screen_shot_2011-03-21_at_22.27.48_.png" align="center" class="frame" title="SBB has an invalid certificate in Safari" scale="50%"> Wow. The SBB is serving up an invalid certificate. Opera probably refused to even chat with that server and was shunted off to the non-secure site. Safari opens the connection but cannot verify the certificate. I've seen expired certificates before and it's unprofessional, but I've never seen an unverifiable certificate on such a huge site. No wonder everyone flies. <hr> <n><b>Update:</b> the site seems to be encrypted again in both Opera and Safari, so perhaps they were just performing an upgrade. Hat tip for a seamless web-site upgrade, though.</n>