Does anyone have any tips on traveling across Europe by train?

flyingscottie81

Hmm thanks sturll,

Think we will try and stick to the train though.

mummytofour

Bummpy bum as this is a good thread and others may miss it so far back!

omelette451

flyingscottie81 wrote: »

I found the Bahn website a little confusing, can anyone give some tips? How long in advance can you book?

The simplest way to get the English-language version of the site is just to type db.de/en as a URL.

The site is usually pretty good at recognising towns when they're written in English, but sometimes you'll have to look up the local spelling (using wikipedia or google maps). Good things to look out for are variations on 'central', 'termini', 'Hbf' or 'Glowny', which usually refer to the main central station in a town. As there's normally more than one station in each town you're normally asked to select which one you want from a drop-down box. Remember that some places have two or more main stations serving trains for different directions (as, for example, in Manchester, where there is both Piccadilly and Victoria, but trains never serve both).

DB gives fares and makes reservations for journeys wholly within Germany and for international ones starting there. If you want a stopover in a town that's en route (e.g. Berlin-Hanover-Amsterdam) you need to click on the word 'via', enter the station name in the box that appears, and enter a time (in the format hh:mm, so 2 days = 48:00) in the 'stopover' box. As far as I remember, reservations open 90 days in advance of travel, but some may still be 60 days.

DB will show you times for every country in Europe (even Russia, right up to the Pacific coast near Japan!), but only has fares for journeys involving Germany. Many other countries' sites will show fares for those countries, so once you've got the times using the English DB site, make a note of the local spelling of the station name and you should be able to find out more from the local sites if you don't panic when you see words written in 'foreign' (more often than not you can guess what they mean). For example, rzd.ru and pkp.pl give fare information for domestic Russian and Polish journeys respectively, and voyages-sncf.fr has fares for every train starting in France.

flyingscottie81

bumpity bump bump bump!