Your pass will be good on trains run by the national rail company in all of the countries covered. That may help with local transportation, but it doesn’t usually cover the trams, subways and buses you’ll be using to get around most cities. For example, in Paris your railpass is good on the RER (regional commuter light rail) but not on the sections in the center of Paris. Your pass isn’t honored on the Metro (traditional subway). Thus, the pass would be useful for getting from CDG to Gare du Nord, but not for sightseeing in Paris. In German cities and Vienna it’s good on the S-bahn (Commuter light rail) but not on the U-bahn (traditional subway), trams or buses.

Unless you have a consecutive day pass (which isn’t, IMO, the best financial deal) you won’t want to waste a day your railpass on a few euros worth of local transportation or inexpensive day trips anyway.

The exception to the local transit thing is in Germany, where in most larger cities, there is an “S-Bahn” commuter rail system, on which Eurail passes are valid (except in Berlin, of course).

I am in the minority here though who actually prefers the Global Pass to the other varieties. Yes it is expensive, but the one year when I didn’t use a Global Pass, I spent almost its equivalent cost in a Select Pass and regular point to point tickets. To me, the extra 100 dollars or so was worth the peace of mind of being able to jump on almost any train whenever I felt like it.

i think i will take the 10 days within 2 months

coz i go trow 10 countries and the 1 month pass costs to much

and one more thing i got one long ride from paris to barcelona and it will be on an night train
i wanted to how much money it will cost coz no mater what pass you got you need to add money coz its an night train
if someone knows how much it will cost it would be great

thx

A couchette in a 6 berth compartment will cost 30 to 40 euros.

I actually got a couple for as low as 10 Euro this summer… it all depends on the route, I think.

hey there.. i planning to do eurotrip middle January 2010 and would like to know whether i need to have visa each time I’m passing through each country in europe. Im from Malaysia (South East Asia) and will start my journey from London. What is the best and cheapest way to go from London to Paris then to Brussel and maybe to Milan, Amsterdam and Barcelona. I’m planning to have 15 days trip to those cities and hope anyone can give me some good tips on this. Tq

London to Paris can be done in 3 ways: train to the English coast, ferry across the channel, train to Paris; Eurostar from London St Pancras station to Paris Gare du Nord station; and a flight from one of London’s many airports to one of Paris’s 3 airports.
The Eurostar train is the easiest and most convenient (city center to city center), and once you figure out transport to the airport or the coastline+ferry travel, it’s probably comparable in price as well.
Paris-Brussels-Amsterdam can be done on the Thalys train. If you have a Eurail pass, reservations are between 13 and 40 euros a segment depending on your pass and how early you reserve. You can also sometimes get cheap tickets for 40-50 euros a segment. There are slower trains that run this route, too, which don’t require recommendations but probably require train changes and take much longer.

If you are only going for 15 days, I think London-Paris-Brussels-Amsterdam would take a good 11-12 days at the least among themselves. you MIGHT be able to add one more small city to the mix that would only take a couple days (maybe Bruges, Belgium, or perhaps a smaller city in Germany like Cologne).

I’m with Feicht as high on the Global Pass, at least for longer stays. (3 months is WAY less than three times one month). I’m going to be doing a lot of daytripping from central hubs, and not having to deal with the mechanics of buying point to points—or deciding enroute to X that Y on the way looks interesting to stop at—is worth the extra expense, if any (I started pencilling out the comparison and soon realized it won’t be that much extra). Plus, over three months your pass will wear out from dragging it out to mark the little boxes.

You always pay for convenience. That’s why milk costs more at a 7-11.

Is it true that the S-Bahn in Berlin isn’t covered? I thought at least some of them were.

Is there any list of which “private” regional railways in Germany are not really subsidiaries of DB? Many are, but it takes a whole lot of Wikipedia-ing to figure out if the line called X#$% on the DB site is or isn’t covered by Eurail. What happens if you guess wrong? Can you pay on board for that chunk of the trip? I’m gong to some minor type places served only by our friendly X#$96 as part of the route, with not much time between them and the regular DB to look around to ask.

usually, if the train isn’t covered it has some special fancy name. the ones that are covered are regular trains run by the train company of that country, i.e. RENFE in Spain, SNCF/TGV in France, Deutsche Bahn in Germany, etc. About 98% of all trains in Western Europe are covered, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it. (many of the special trains are ones that run scenic routes, esp in Switzerland)

I don’t know of any trains in Germany that aren’t covered. There are some scenic lines in Switzerland that aren’t covered, but those are pretty well mapped on the on-line rail maps that are on just about every site that sells railpasses.

The S-bahn in German cities is a commuter subway. It, like most local buses, trams, and subways, isn’t covered. The U-bahn (commuter light rail that’s generally underground) in German cities and Vienna is owned by bahn.de and covered.

It’s also worthwhile to note that even on some of the lines that aren’t fully covered by Eurail, you may still get a discount by showing your pass.
http://www.eurail.co… gives a list of scenic trains in Europe, and tells whether they are covered or not, and any discount which may be given to a Eurail holder if tickets aren’t covered. (All the ones in Germany are covered)

Actually, Old Lady, in my experience all of the S-Bahns DO accept the Eurail pass except for the one in Berlin (unless they’ve changed their rules in the last six months!)…I don’t like using the U-Bahn so I could be wrong, but I always kind of thought it was sort of the reverse of what you say: the S-Bahn is covered while the U-Bahn is not.

Also, as far as which railways are covered, it is true that the Eurail pass works on the majority of trains, but you have to be careful sometimes because in some places, they could inexplicably demand seat reservations on lines that it just doesn’t make any sense. I always thought this was restricted to actual good trains like the TGV and whatnot, but it happened to me in France last time; I forget the actual “type” of train it was, but the one I was using to shuttle back and forth between Nimes and Arles would sometimes seemingly randomly NOT be an SNCF train, but some other kind (they looked exactly the same, though). I rode it once or twice without a reservation and the conductor never came through, but when I was asking for info at the station one day they’re like “oh yeah, you need a reservation for those trains!” so I finally got one and lo and behold, the conductor was walking through that time. The next time I bought a reservation for it, he wasn’t

So yeah… I’d recommend checking at the station in one of the bigger cities you go to in each country or like…. I dunno, just stay in Germany where they don’t have these kind of problems! haha