Now being safely in Penang and recovered from our trip, time for reflection....
Let local friends do the dealings for you regarding your freight: without ours, it would have been a very bewildering, frustrating, stressful Sunday afternoon. (Besides which, we might very well have ended up on the wrong part of the train - only two cars actually go all the way to Penang.) Check.
Take LOTS of food with you, or don't mind buying from the food on board. Eating snacks is a good time breaker and on a 24 hour trian ride, they need a lot of them! Check.
Similarly, have lots of things to do accessible. It's a LONG way, made longer by multiple station stops at first, and multiple waits at construction sites near the end. Check.
Know first (or second) hand how long it will really take. We were relying on asking train officials to call ahead so those meeting us wouldn't have to wait around (we did know the train was often up to 2 hours late). Twice they told us "another hour and a half." Both times they were wrong. So we had a truck waiting for us for nearly 2 hours, and a taxi for over 2 :( Uncheck.
Sleeping on the train is great. Kids are excited to see the seats become bunks, and love having a curtained off cave to sleep in! It's pretty quiet, and cosy. Only trying to keep a rather insecure baby alseep and not crying wasn't so nice. He did pretty well though. Check.
Beware of the border (if you're packing freight with you)! We got off and into immigration, only to be told we had to take everything off as the baggage car wasn't going any further! We had to get 260kg of stuff off the train, through customs, and back onto to the passenger cars - and quickly since the train was waiting just for us by that time. A bit more stressful than expected, to be sure. Thankfully customs came to our pile of baggage on the platform, and declined to inspect the contents of everything. Otherwise, I think we would have had a trainload of people rather upset with us... as it was, Michael had to spend a hour going up and down the train looking for and gathering up all our bags and boxes that had been thrown on willy-nilly by in a hurry train personnel. Uncheck.
Remarkably, we made it with all our boxes and bags. The only thing we lost was a footrest off our bike. Check.
Eat the food offered on the train first, then break out your own food. On the Malaysian side of the journey, the train consists of 2 passenger cars - no restaurant car - and hawkers don't get on and off like on the Thai side. We didn't know this, so our snack store had to do for breakfast - and lunch, since we didn't arrive at 12:45 as posted, but rather 3:00. Thankfully, our snack store did last, and the kids weren't hungry enough to complain. Uncheck.
All in all, it was a pleasant way to travel, and the ability to not have to build a household from scratch is well worth the stress of getting our BKK household to Penang by train. Even if it did take us a few days to recover! Check.
