Reservation not compatible with select pass

If you are going via Switzerland, of course you must have a ticket or pass valid for the Swiss portion of your trip.
But, you don't need to go from Milan to Vienna via Switzerland. Italy borders directly on Switzerland, if you take a train via the Brenner pass then you are not going via Switzerland. This is actually the quicker route. For example:

Milano Centrale depart 09:05, Verona Porta Nuova arrive 10:27
Verona Porta Nuova depart 11:02, Innsbruck Hbf arriove 14:32
Innsbruck Hbf depart 15:05, Wien Westbahnhof arrive 19:30

Via Zürich it takes 2 hours longer.

Thanks. I was just exploring what came back on RailEurope. On that site Milan->Austria comes back as the two legs. Maybe these are high speed trains?

The main thing is that I was trying to decide if a 4 country select pass would be a better deal than individual bookings. This is my first rail trip through Europe and although it's not an extensive trip I wanted to keep things super easy. So I'm probably going to book it the RailEurope way, I don't mind the extra time.

But RailEurope still doesn't cooperate on this trip when I try to use Select Pass, even when I include Switzerland.

berkqq, Milan --> Zürich and Zürich --> Wien (Vienna) are definately not High Speed trains. The lines wind through the Alps, slow but picturesque. Zürich --> Wien (Vienna) is going lengthwise through the Alps, at least until the last section in the Danube valley which is faster.

As is said many times on this site, when pricing individual bookings, the national railway company which actually runs the trains is 9 times out of 10, a lot cheaper than Rail Europe. http://www.trenitalia.com/ and www.oebb.at (Austrian Railways) both have prices for May starting around €104 / €108.

Why don't you buy the ticket from Trenitalia? One connection at Venice Mestre. Looks like 89 euro for the random date I picked.

Good advice - I'm pricing those right now. Thank you.

I think maybe this is a situation where a passholder is required to purchase a "passholder" reservation. Rail companies limit these passholder reservations to less than the available seats on a train. When all passholder reservations are sold out, you can only purchase a ticket for that train. (This is one of the dirty little secrets of using a railpass.) Perhaps passholder reservations are already sold out. Or maybe the train is already sold out.

berk,

You might just try buying reservations at local stations, perhaps the day prior to travel. That will be the easiest method. Use the bahn.de website to determine which routes require compulsory reservations.

As this is your first experience with rail travel in Europe, one important point to mention regarding trains in Italy. Reservations are compulsory for trains other than Regionale (ie: Freccia, InterCity), and these are specific to train, date and departure time. Even with a Railpass, you can't just board any train with your Railpass and reservation in hand, as If you're caught without a valid reservation for the train you're riding on, you'll face hefty fines of about €50-60 PP which will be collected on the spot! If you're unable to pay on the spot, the fines double and increase from there.

If using Regionale trains with P-P tickets, Buses, Metro or whatever, you MUST validate your tickets prior to boarding on the day of travel, or again hefty fines.

As said above by others, RUN AWAY don't walk away from RailEurope when looking at prices. When looking at train times, too, because they only show you some of the available connections.

great advice from all thanks, I'm looking to book on http://www.trenitalia.com and www.oebb.at and before I go through with it, in what form will those sites deliver tickets? Once I pay will I be able to print the ticket at home in U.S?

Trenitalia and OEBB offer tickets to either print at home or to pick up in the station. You must verify which it is before entering your credit card or PayPal info. Trenitalia does not sell international tickets to/from Italy for printing at home; only for picking up in an Italian train station.

Flying from Milan to Vienna is another option, but the cheaper rates that I saw at www.skyscanner.com all required a connection and fairly long layover.

Rail Europe can sell most train tickets or reservations before you go, or both are also sold in train stations and some travel agencies in Europe. Rail Europe's web site works better if you book each leg separately, especially for pass holder reservations. Doing it that way, I do find pass holder reservations available from Milan to Zurich for my test date of April 14, for instance. Reservations are not shown from Zurich to Vienna, but also are not required on that train, so it is not an issue of them selling out. The countries where the limited number of seats for pass holders more often causes traveler issues are France, Spain, and Sweden, not the areas you mentioned.

I'm sorry if you could help me by clarifying and confirming

1. Since I'm in the U.S. I cannot buy and print at home my trenitalia ticket?
2. I can buy the trenitalia ticket online but have to pick it up at any Italian rail station? Or a particular train station?

1) No, the reason Trenitalia will not sell you a print-at-home ticket IS NOT because you are from the US, it is because your trip is an international one (Italy to Austria). If your trip were wholely within Italy, you could buy a print-at-home ticket.
Laura does not say if ÖBB will sell you a print-at-home ticket for the complete trip, and I don't know either. The only way you can find out is to go to the ÖBB site ( www.oebb.at ) and try. I know SBB have recently been advertising that they can do print-at-home tickets through to Italy, but that might not apply to ÖBB.

2) You can pick your ticket up at any Trenitalia station (which is the vast majority of the stations in Italy). But, you can't pick it up at a station in another country (France, Austria, USA, ....).