Minimum time I should allow at DUS to catch a train?

Depends on where you're going. When I was there in 2009, arriving around that same time, it was a busy morning and it took about half an hour to get through customs. If you're just planning to travel into the city, there are regular trains out of the airport, and it takes maybe ten minutes to get to the main station. If you're traveling to other cities that same morning, you probably want to check bahn.de for a timetable. If it were me personally, I'd give myself at least one hour from the time that I land, maybe an hour and a half if I had to catch a train from the main station so that I could find the right platform.

We did an lax to dus flight and gave ourselves 3 hours before our train from the dus airport to Paris. We purchased the ticket ahead of time and were prepared to discard it if we couldn't make the plane to train connection but the 3 hours was about the right amount of time for us that day.

Give yourself a min of 3 hours. There are a lot of little things that can go wrong that would delay an hour or hour and half window. Better to wait an hour than miss it by five minutes. Trains do not wait.

Three hours it is! Thanks for your speedy responses. --Denise

Where are you going on said train?

Keep in mind that there are really 2 stations at DUS. An S-bahn station in the actual terminal that is pretty much exclusively to the Duesseldorf Hbf. Then there is the mainline station which you need to take a monorail. It goes between the terminal stations and the parking garages and the train station which is out past the end of the runway.

Tom, we're going to Amsterdam. Looking on the Bahn website, it looks like our train from Dusseldorf airport connects at Duisburg Hbf for the train to Amsterdam Centraal. Shoot, there's a 9:09am and a 11:09am train...so tempted to get tix for the earlier one! :) But assuming we need to take the monorail to the outer train station, better to allow four hours.

Here is a modest proposal, book the train leaving at 9:09, with a stopover in Duisburg connecting to the 11:28 ICE train to Amsterdam. There are Regional Express trains averaging every 10 minutes (sometimes as much as a 30 minute gap), and you can take anyone you want, since they are unreserved trains and you have a valid ticket for that route on that date. It is only the ICE trains that require you make that particular train. The 2 times you mentioned, 9:09 and 11:09, only allow 9 and 10 minute connection times. Taking an earlier train will relieve a bit of stress. Now I'm not saying Duisburg is the garden spot of the world (it ain't), but the station beats DUS airport and its train station as a place to hang out for an hour or so.

The question for you is not really how long it would take you to get through the airport. Duesseldorf is very efficient and it goes fast. The bigger issue is whether your flight will be on time. That has a much bigger impact on which train you'll be able to connect with.

For that reason, I never buy a ticket for fixed train straight from the airport. I either buy a flexible (full prize) ticket or budget LOTS of extra time to explore the city where I arrive before heading further by train.