Know your Paris train stations

Phred , nice article , thanks for posting !

Fabulous! Thank you!

Good article, Phred. How do you know what train goes where?

Patrick, "How do you know what train goes where?"
If you mean how do you find the correct train once you get to the station, just look at the departure board. There are also indicators on each platform, and often on the side of the train, saying where it is going.
If you mean how do you know which station to use to get to a certain place, you don't really need to if you are using one of the online timetable services (for example www.bahn.de ). Just put in "PARIS" and it will pick the correct station. If you put in the wrong station, it will assume you really want to start there and show an initial journey by métro to the "correct" station.

Thank you very much, Chris, for responding to my post. I went to the link you posted and it was in some other language; and I didn't know where to key in "Paris."

On the top line you will see "Deutschland", click on the arrow next to it and you will get a drop down menu and you will see "English Version". Click on that. It is the site for Deutsche Bahn, the German National Railway, and single most useful website for information on European trains there is.
Or you could go to www.bahn.com and also get the English version.

Patrick: To find rail schedules for almost all of Europe, here's a direct link to the English version of the Bahn (German Rail) website http://reiseauskunft.bahn.de/bin/query.exe/en. And here is Rick's tutorial for using it: http://www.ricksteves.com/travel-tips/transportation/trains/online-schedules

As Chris says, rather than picking a particular station (major cities will have many), just put in the city name by itself, and see what shows up when you do the search. Rick's books do list which stations serve which destinations, but sometimes a destination is reachable from more than one station (particularly out of London), and sometimes there are changes since the book is published, so it's best to let the website show you the default.

Patrick, Dealing with multi-lingual websites is a skill you will have to learn. Most websites start in their home language, but you can switch them to different languages. The "some other language" you mention is German, as www.bahn.de is the German Railways website.
If a website is not in a langugae you understand, look on the top or top right of the webpage for the links to switch languages. It may be a list, or a pull-down menu. Sometimes you get language codes: 'en fr de es' (English, French, German, Spanish), sometimes you have a menu or list of national flags (as on http://www.trenitalia.com/ ), in which case the British Union Jack is used for English. Or sometimes you get country names (as on www.bahn.de ), in which case you just need to spot that "Deutschland" is the name of a country and click there, and you see a big list of country names, all in there own languages:

Deutschland English version België Belgique Cesko Danmark España France Italia Nederland Österreich Polska Schweiz Sverige UK / Ireland USA

Perhaps there should be a faq on this site "How to deal with multi-lingual websites without panicing"?

rome2rio is a great tool