My son & I are planning to spend 2 days in each city in June as part of a 2-week trip and have rail passes. My question relates to getting from Dresden to Rothenburg. I see that we can take a train from Dresden to Rothenburg which will take about 6 hours. There are also overnight trains which take anywhere from 10-12 hours and leave in the early evening or later at 10pm.
Instead of "wasting" 6 hours of precious daylight hours in the train, would it be better to take the overnight train and thus also save the hotel cost for that 2nd day in Dresden? I don't see any downsides to this as my son & I don't plan on doing much in the evenings. The overnight trains do have "stops". Would we need to actually change trains here? One of them is at 12:45am, so I would hate to have to get up in the middle of the night if that is the case. I can't tell from the train schedule what we'd need to do.
For overnight trains, does Deutsche Bahn consider that to be using up 1 or 2 days?
I am also confused as to the different train designations and which are part of the rail pass program: I believe that ICE and CNL are part, but I don't know about RE, RB and SBA. Any help and suggestions on which to take or avoid would be much appreciated!
TIA,
Cindy