Polish railway timetable

[stantheman]

just wondering if there is a Polish timetable on the web either national or regional Krakow and Tatar mountain area
Thanks

 

[ainsworth74]

Whilst I enjoyed my brief foray into Poland I did find that accessing information (or at least English language information) wasn't that easy. The PKP Intercity website was quite easy to use along with the journey planner and ticket booking facility but that was about it. I certainly didn't spot any timetables (or at least any in English) nor did I find an app that was translated into English. I can understand that the company will focus on their native citizens but compared to most other companies PKP really do seem to do the bare minimum (Czech Railways for instance have an excellent English language app as do the Dutch and Germans).

 

[AndrewE]

The dB website worked for me in N Poland about 18 months ago, but you can't see an actual timetable of course.
Beware that the express and the local trains are run by different companies with different fares and tickets are not inter-available. Hence you have to specify your trains when buying any ticket.

 

[LNW-GW Joint]

You can download the full PKP network timetable via this site: https://portalpasazera.pl/en/Tablice/RozkladWformieTablic

Table 135 is Krakow-Zakopane, which sounds like the one you want.
There's the full year timetable and then a temporary one for the winter period up to 3 March - I haven't checked what the differences are.
Beware though, the timetable is full of multiple footnotes for almost every train, and naturally it's all in Polish!
The pdf file has a detailed line index at the start.
Tables starting with a letter are I think bus/tram/metro timetables.

 

[F Great Eastern]

As someone who can read basic Polish, let me tell you that the English version of the PKP website is both poorly translated and out of date compared to Polish one. Whilst the grammar makes sense, it doesn't say what they mean to say in quite a few places.

If you are traveling a lot and using non PKP trains, the Koleo app is very handy and you can buy tickets on the phone up to a minute before departure. It has an English version but PKP won't allow them to sell tickets for their services, all the other companies are happy to though. It's pointless bothering with the PolRegio app since it's just a skinned version of Koleo restricted to PR trains only.

For on the move live running information, and looking up trains, I'd recommend either the new Portal Pasażera app, or an old version of Bilkom. The PP app is more modern, a few nice features and generally works well although I still find the old version of Bilkom a little more accurate and a bit easier to use.

Oh and don't bother with the PKP IC Mobile Navigator app, it's only in Polish, asks for lots of crazy permissions, prefers payment methods that are obscure outside Poland and needs a Polish phone number to sign up for an account by forcing SMS verification.

 

[oldman]

There's the full year timetable and then a temporary one for the winter period up to 3 March - I haven't checked what the differences are.

There will be a series of temporary timetables during the course of the year, as follows:

(15 XII 2019 - 14 III 2020); (15 III 2020 - 13 VI 2020); (14 VI 2020 - 29 VIII 2020); (30 VIII 2020 - 17 X 2020); (18 X 2020 - 12 XII 2020)
They should be available at least 21 days in advance (it says).

 

[dutchflyer]

And as its a mountainous area and thus with not that many raillines for most trips you might consider the bus is better or in fact the only option. The site e-podroznik.pl is a general tripplanner including both, but will not show possible connections across the border, f.e. in SK.
F.e. for Krakow-Zakopane there are 2 buscompanies both running hourly (sharing the 30 mins offer) and much quicker as the circuitous and slow trains. From Zak. into SK (its Tatra there, Tatar is a part of Russia) there are a very few through buses, but can change at border by walking from PL to SK side much more often. The railoffer to Zak is very much seasonal and thus shows an awful lot of trains that run only a few days in the year.

 

[Polrail]

Also, beware of the Polregio offer from Krakow to Zakopane, which at times of the year is a bus that stops at every station along the way!