1. Public transit is usually inexpensive. I’d figure 5 euros a day as a generous average. I doubt you’ll ever have a day that’s more than that other than getting to/from airports for your arrival and departure flights. Some days you won’t spend anything on public transit if you have a well located hostel and don’t mind walking. Other days you’ll only spend a couple of euros.
2. A five day eurail pass is 5 days of rail travel. A day is midnight to midnight and when you take a train you mark the date on your pass. You can take as many trains as you want during that 24 hour period and it counts as one day. The “7:00 PM rule” means that most overnight trains only count as 1 day (arrival day). It looks like you’ve got 6 rail days in your itinerary, but a 5 day pass, plus a cheap point to point ticket for the trip from Rome to Naples will probably be the best deal.
3. For your itinerary, a Eurail pass will serve as your ticket on virtually any train you take except Eurostar (the chunnel train between London and Paris). Your pass will not cover reservations which are required on some express trains. Most reservations only cost about 5 euros, but the Thalys trains between Paris and Amsterdam and some of the premier trains in Italy have reservations as expensive as 20 euros. You can usually avoid reservations by taking slightly slower local and regional trains and for the Paris/Amsterdam run making a couple of connections. However, you’ll probably end up buying at least some reservations. For example, there are two trains each hour between Florence to Rome that require reservations and take less than 1 1/2 hours. The trains that don’t require reservations generally take over 3 hours and they run less frequently.

Thank you .

The railsaver tool is telling me to get a 4 country pass for 5 days. Using one day to travel from Paris to Amsterdam; another day of use for Amsterdam to Berlin; one from Berlin to Munich; one from Munich for Kufstein, Austria, then us a city to city pass from Austria for Brenner, Italy and the same day Munich pass from Brenner to Florence; then the last day from florence to Rome. To get from Rome to Naples a city to city pass like you suggested. I don’t know if that will work, due to time constraints and other things. Do you think we can pull it off?

I don’t see how time constraints have any impact on this and I can’t think of any “other things” that would matter. Why is it you think you’ll have trouble pulling this off?

Im just trying to make sure everything is exact because I’m sorta of the “planner” of the group so I feel that I have a lot of responsibility. Thanks for the help.

You need to check train schedules as there are some serious distances involved in this itinerary. It’s doable in 27 days assuming that doesn’t count the 2 1/2 days involved in flying back and forth from North America. The German national rail company website is the most complete and easiest to use in English for schedules anywhere in Europe. http://reiseauskunft…

I’ve calculated a total of 30 hours and 39 minutes. But I notice there are trains that take like 12 hours, from Berlin to Munich for instance, and there are trains that only take 5 hours. What is the difference? Will my pass allow me to take the shorter trains because the longer trains cost more.

1. London – Paris 2 hrs 17 mins
2. Paris – Amsterdam 3 hrs 18 mins
3. Amsterdam – Berlin 6 hrs 23 mins
4. Berlin – Munich 5 hrs 48 mins
5. Munich – Florence 10 hrs 10 mins
6. Florence – Rome 1 hr 33 mins
7. Rome – Pompeii 1 hr 10 mins

That longer train from Berlin to Munich is probably either a slower local train that will make more stops and/or require a few changes, or an overnight train. Some faster trains require you to pay a supplement if you’re using a rail pass, but you don’t have to pay one to take that Berlin-Munich train using your pass. Make sure you consider overnight trains. Do Munich-Florence overnight so you don’t waste the better part of a day’s worth of sight-seeing time sitting on a train.

I’ve not been to all the places you are going, yet, but I can tell you what worked where we have been. Incidentally, I’m too old to be hanging around a backpacker’s board like this, so your walking ability is probably far better than ours.

Paris was a fairly large city, so we used the metro a lot (some people say the buses are better). For the metro, you can buy a carnet, which is a strip of tickets that gives you something like ten tickets for the cost of 7. It helped a lot. We were there two weeks and used a bit less than 4 carnets combined for the two of us.

Florence is a very small city and we were there a week and walked everywhere with the exception of one bus visit to Fiesole, a small town about 7 km from Florence.

We spent two weeks in Amsterdam and I bought the equivalent of a carnet to ride the trams, but when we realized how compact it is, we didn’t even use the whole thing and I gave it to our landlord when we left.

We spent two weeks in Rome, which is a large city, but everything we wanted to see was in the center so we never used public transportation. I did use a taxi to get from our apartment to the train station when we left, but only because of time constraints, and my wife’s not liking to haul our luggage on a possibly crowded bus.

We were in Naples five days and walked everywhere except Capri, which we reached by a ferry. The sidewalks were crowded with probably illegal immigrants selling purses and whatever, but we could get by. We bought two pairs of day passes on the local railroad that runs between Naples and Sorento, passing Pompeii and Herculaneum (the uncrowded Pompeii) along the way. With passes we could get off and on anywhere so one day we went to Sorento, then Pompeii; the next we went to Herculaneum.

Since we don’t drive and do walk a lot, local transportation has never been a big item in our budget.

You’ll find that the longer trains are often overnight. Overnight trains are specifically timed so you theoretically get 8 or more hours to sleep.

thank you guys,

The description of the cities and the advice on what I should do tram wise is very helpful. I’m trying to certralize our hostiles so we do walk more and use public transportation less. The days i will be staying in certain cities are very tentative, I’m keeping your advice in mind about the time constraints of the trains and which train I should take.

Thanks again,

Shea.