diff --git a/haystack/reader/farm.py b/haystack/reader/farm.py
index 2a1731879..03be48b1a 100644
--- a/haystack/reader/farm.py
+++ b/haystack/reader/farm.py
@@ -87,10 +87,12 @@ class FARMReader:
         except:
             logger.warning("Could not set `top_k_per_sample` in FARM. Please update FARM version.")
         self.max_processes = max_processes
+        self.max_seq_len = max_seq_len
+        self.use_gpu = use_gpu
 
     def train(self, data_dir, train_filename, dev_filename=None, test_file_name=None,
-              use_gpu=True, batch_size=10, n_epochs=2, learning_rate=1e-5,
-              max_seq_len=256, warmup_proportion=0.2, dev_split=0.1, evaluate_every=300, save_dir=None):
+              use_gpu=None, batch_size=10, n_epochs=2, learning_rate=1e-5,
+              max_seq_len=None, warmup_proportion=0.2, dev_split=0.1, evaluate_every=300, save_dir=None):
         """
         Fine-tune a model on a QA dataset. Options:
         - Take a plain language model (e.g. `bert-base-cased`) and train it for QA (e.g. on SQuAD data)
@@ -120,6 +122,14 @@ class FARMReader:
             dev_split = None
 
         set_all_seeds(seed=42)
+
+        # For these variables, by default, we use the value set when initializing the FARMReader.
+        # This can also be manually set when train() is called if you want a different value at train vs inference
+        if use_gpu is None:
+            use_gpu = self.use_gpu
+        if max_seq_len is None:
+            max_seq_len = self.max_seq_len
+
         device, n_gpu = initialize_device_settings(use_cuda=use_gpu)
 
         if not save_dir: