Trains at Christmas time

Steve,

as mentioned by Sarah www.bahn.de does not give out schedules for Christmas 09 yet. I've tried it several times over the past month and there are still not there. I've been using Sunday schedules for an October date to get some idea. But this is only an approximation.

How did you manage to get a schedule for Christmas?????

Yeah, bahn.de is only showing schedules up to Dec. 12th at the moment. I've already looked at the Golden Pass website and they don't have schedules available yet either. The main reason why I want info right now is because I'm in the process of making hotel reservations for various places so I can be sure to get what I want before they all book up. But it's a bit hard to do that when I don't know how often the trains are running--or if they're running at all--on certain days!

Trust me...I've already mapped everything out...several times. I know it's a lot, but we're actually timing everything very carefully, to where we'll have about 6-15 hours in most of those cities (2 whole days in Belgium, Munich, Prague and Amsterdam), and where we'll either be taking the first train in the morning or the last train in the evening for each connection. The morning trains we'll be generally be taking for shorter rides, and the evening trains we'll be taking for longer rides...and sleeping. And of course this is assuming that those trains will be available on those questionable days.

I have some prior experience crunching in a ton of sightseeing in one day or less. I saw about 90% of Copenhagen and Hamburg in one day (two separate trips)...it can be done, especially in the more compact European cities. Though my anal early itinerary-planning may suggest otherwise, we're not very touristy people who insist on seeing every little thing, and we're not too interested in museums. We're giving ourselves much more time in the main cities that we want to visit for longer. Sure we might not see everything there is to see, but as Rick Steves says, always assume you'll be back, right? Trust me, we've been preparing ourselves for a whirlwind adventure around Europe for about two years now.

Now if I could only get my question answered, instead of receiving advice that I didn't ask for...No offense, but I've already done everything you've suggested so far multiple times.

PS: We're flying from Dublin to Brussels via RyanAir, not taking the train. The actual Eurail trip will begin in Brussels. We're only starting in Dublin because it was the cheapest flight from Dallas.

Ah. When I said "any info" I meant info that related to my question, but I can see how that could be misunderstood and I apologize for that.

THANK YOU for the link and the information about looking at last year's trains; I didn't know that was possible. That should help me a lot. I appreciate it!

And yes, it is very ambitious. My husband only gets two weeks of vacation so we're cramming in as much as possible. But really, our main wish is to experience a different city/country every day, hence the ambitious itinerary. I'm a lot more flexible than I'm making myself out to be. If we determine that we are not ready to leave a particular place, then screw it, we'll stay longer and try to cancel our hotel reservation for the next city. If we get charged for it for late notice, it won't really suck that bad, because we make it a point to reserve super-cheap hotels for that very reason. If the Golden Pass isn't running on X-mas day, oh well...we'll just spend time exploring Geneva instead of simply crashing there for the night when we arrive from Paris (which I didn't mention before...we are not planning on spending a lot of time walking around the Swiss cities; we mainly want to see the scenery, hence the Golden Pass plan).

But anyway, knowing how things have gone so far with this planning, this itinerary is probably gonna change at least a couple more times. Different people have different wishes regarding their trip to Europe, and ours is simply "Wow, we're in effing EUROPE, let's try to wake up in a different city each day", because in general, anything that isn't Texas is usually A LOT more interesting to look at, and we wanna see as much of that interesting stuff as possible. I lived and studied in Finland for a while and therefore had quite a bit of the northern European experience, but when I traveled around, I didn't travel too far south since it's a pain to get anywhere from Oulu, where I lived. So now I wanna see the rest of Western/Central Europe. My husband's never been to Europe, so his goal is simply to be able to say he's been there and that he got to smoke weed in Amsterdam. Please note that I'm mostly joking here...we're not that shallow lol. :)