SNCB still dead to me. Privacy-hostile enshitified protectionist website and yet very high prices (winner: the bus)
I quit using the trains a couple years ago because SNCB started blocking Tor, which is a form of privacy abuse.
As an experiment, I stepped outside of Tor to see what the UX is like these days. For national trips it works but:
- prices are lousy.
- PDF feature was dropped. That sucks. We used to be able to enter two stops in Brussels (train or de lijn) and it would generate a PDF book of all times at the stops so you could put the PDF on your phone and have an offline on-the-fly way to see the bus times.
For international travel searches have a variety of issues:
- users are forced to solve a CAPTCHA (generally Tor users get CAPTCHAs but b-europe.com apparently pushes them to everyone.. bizarre that the general public actually puts up with that shit)
- Cloudflare is in the loop at some point which means a US tech giant gets to snoop on your transactions
- Pricing is unclear. There’s a 50% off promo on weekend travel, but when you get a price quote there’s no indication if the promo was applied.
irail.be is the free world option where you can get access to rail data that’s liberated by Belgium’s open data law. But sadly it seems to be missing a lot of trains (e.g. you can get TGV schedules on some routes but not IC trains). And no pricing info.
In any case, the quoted price given was 2½ times higher than the price of a bus ticket to the same destination. So the bus is still a clear winner.