Train travel help!

If you list your planned train trips, we will be in a much better position to comment on the value of a rail pass vs. point-to-point tickets. Rail fares are very different in (for example) Poland vs. the United Kingdom. I don't know for sure that the Global Pass covers Poland, but it probably won't save you money there because ticket prices are rather low. Germany is a country that has some extremely good deals on regional train tickets--a bargain price for the first traveler, then a very low additional charge for each person accompanying that traveler. Tell us where you're going (as precisely as possible), and the folks familiar with travel in the appropriate countries will be able to provide advice.

However, it is very rare for a rail pass to pay off, especially for travelers who plan their itineraries in advance. There are typically huge discounts for early purchase of (usually) non-refundable/non-changeable tickets. Buying your long-distance tickets soon after they go on sale will probably be much, much cheaper than using a rail pass. If you plan to spend time in Switzerland, though, some sort of Swiss pass or half-fare card might make financial sense; the Swiss trains (like just about everything else in Switzerland) are very expensive.

The website Seat61.com has extremely comprehensive coverage on European trains. It will tell you, for each country, where you can buy tickets. The cheapest source will be the website (or app) of the company running the trains, so that would be several different places for you. Alternatively, trainline.com sells tickets for a lot of countries with a fairly modest service charge. But I'd start with the rail-company websites.

Thanks!
If this helps sure. We fly into the first city and home from the last but here is the list:
Rome
Venice
Vienna
Krakow
Berlin
Amsterdam
Paris

Thanks for any help!

You'll find a lot of information about Eurail passes on their website, www.eurail.com. There is a map on this page showing the
counties included in the global pass. Poland is one of them. It's basically all of Europe except
1. not Russia, Belarus, nor Ukraine
2. only Lithuania of the Baltic countries
3. not Albania/Kosovo in the Balkans,
4. Romania/Bulgaria are included as is Turkey.

In some countries, the fastest trains are included but require a surcharge, called a "passholder reservation". This includes France and Italy and Thalys trains in France, Belgium, Netherlands, and Germany. Some trains, particularly Thalys and TGV in France are notorious for limiting the number of passholder reservations. If these reservations are sold out for a particular train, you might have to buy a full fare ticket despite having a rail pass. For German trains, virtually every train is available to pass holders without surcharge. Reservations are possible but not required.

As to question #3, yes it is too early to buy tickets for April now.

Each country makes its tickets available a certain number of days or months before the date.

I am pretty sure if you look on the respective country pages on The Man in Seat 61, he tells how far ahead you can buy tickets in each country.

It’s great that you are thinking about this now for April — by the time the tickets are available for purchase, you will have all your research done and know what you want to buy!

There is a very quick way to judge the value of the pass. Take total cost of the pass and divide by the number of trips. That would give you a cost/trip. Then hit the web sites of the county's train and plug in travel dates that match your day of the way for sometime in Feb or March and that should give you the price for that trip. And report for next leg. For some train systems there is a surcharge for seat reservations (required in Italy) and option in most other countries. If you want four seats together you should consider reservation for each trip.

In general, a train pass provides more convenience than cost savings especially you can take advantage of the discount prices offered by trains for advance purchases. However, like all discount tickets, these advance purchase tickets come with restrictions --- think no change, no refund. Not totally true in all case but that should be your general thought about advance purchases. Just assume no change, no refund.

For example -- Train between Rome and Venice in mid Feb will cost between 43euro (super economy) and 92euro (base fare). However the number of super economy tickets are limit and will sell out. I am guessing that one day on your pass would be more than the base fare. If you used your pass for this ticket, you would have to pay an extra 10euro for the seat reservation - required.

Allowing a day to travel between each location, you are only going to average 2 full days in each place, so you may want to consider dropping 2 locations, as you have some big hitters such as Paris, Rome and Berlin which can easily consume 5 days each.

To add to the comment of Jennifer just above, you would be helped by looking at the site Rome2Rio.com. This is a general transportation site. It's not 100% accurate, but can give you a rough idea of time. For instance, Rome to Venice on the train is listed as 3:45 with cost of $35-$130. The trip from Venice to Vienna may be difficult as no train info is shown. Vienna to Krakow is 6:42. So forth and so on. Jennifer's point about possibly revising your trip should be considered. Although we have this idea that trains in Europe are fast and cheap, that's not 100% true.

You may wish to discuss the trip with your teens. What is their thoughts about sitting on trains for much of the trip?

I agree with Jennifer about eliminating some cities. Start with dropping Vienna.

Thank you everyone! As I suspected- a train pass is probably more suitable for impromptu traveling/hopping on and off etc. Not for planned travel like ours. Thanks for the recommendations. I will definitely use them as we continue to plan!

And yeah- Vienna and Amsterdam are one nights only. We wanted to avoid night travel and the train from Venice to Krakow was long and with many transfers. We thought Vienna would be a good place to break that trip up.

Trains between all the cities you mentioned are covered by the Eurail Global Pass, but most of them also require a paid seat reservation. You can make all those reservations at the same time that you buy the pass, e.g. at https://ricksteves.mytraintravel.com/, or on shorter notice at train stations, or perhaps on the Eurail app. Some trains limit the number of places for passholders, which applies to your Amsterdam-Paris route by Thalys train. Connecting trains often require separate reservations for different sections.

There is not a 6-day version of the pass, so you'd probably choose between 5 days for $285 or 7 days for $338 per adult (sale price for purchase by Dec. 30). If either one or both of your sons will not yet be 12 on the date of activating the passes in Europe, then they travel for free with you, named on your pass when purchasing.

Rather than staying one night in a city just to break up a long trip, consider flying; see www.skyscanner.com to find many of the budget European airlines, and it's not too early to book those. Flying a longer leg can be pretty affordable. It of course reduces the amount of train travel that you'd need.

I urge you not to use the Rome2Rio website for anything more than determining whether train or bus service (probably) exists, where you might need to switch from one to the other, and the name of the company providing the service, whose website should be visited to find the actual fare, travel time and frequency of departure. I have no idea where the rest of the data comes from, but I have found it to be so off the mark as to be terribly misleading.