Rental car pickup enroute from Belgium to Germany

Are you sure that a rental car works better for you?

If you're going to Cochem, my suggestion would be to buy train tickets to Cochem. Not sure if you can rent a car there though. But if you feel that you need a car, take the train to Koblenz and rent the car there.

If you really want to drive to Cochem, I would suggest taking the train from Ghent to Cologne and renting a car there.

You could try Aachen but it is a very small city and will not have the selection that Cologne would. And Cologne is only about 30 minutes farther away by train. From Cologne, you could then drive down to Cochem.

Thanks for the comments. We have 5 days/6 nights in the Model-Rhine (and whatever else we decide to do) region and depart out of Frankfurt - I was thinking a rental car would give us the most flexibility to do 1.5 days in Mosel, another 1.5 days in Upper Middle Rhine and then another day or two in either Stasbourg or Rothenburg. Still fussing with better to spend the while time biking/exploring Model/Upper Rhine or tacking on a quick trip to one of the other places mentioned above.

Aachen to Cochem and on to Trier, as you suggest, works just fine.

You'll probably need to change trains couple times Brussels to Aachen - I'm not going to check but most routes to Aachen from the west are not direct.

Plenty of cool stuff to check out between destinations. You could go to Luxembourg City as well, quite an interesting and dramatically and oddly set city. You can take the car out of Germany as long as you return it in Germany.

If you intend to drive a German rental into France that is usually OK, but if you want to drive to Strasbourg your car will either need a French Crit'Air environmental windscreen sticker or park a long way out of town and take transport in. The Crit'Air zone is large in and around Strasbourg, extending further than you might expect. If you don't have it (very unlikely that you would) you can incur a large fine.

OP per your last post to me, it's always better to spend some time on a bike then drive to take in a different area. Between the Rhine and the Mosel IMO the Mosel is nicer riding. south of Cochem down around Bernkastel and 25km on either side the best part.

Regarding Nigel's point about Strasbourg: it seems that you can request an emissions sticker waiver for 24-hour periods. The portal is only in French it seems:
https://derogations-zfe.strasbourg.eu/ but translation tools should work.
You have to register, and you will need your rental car's registration number.
I have never used it: I do not know how quick the approval is.

If you end up with a fine, it's 68€: unpleasant, but manageable in the context of an overseas trip. And enforcement is not 100% (it's not a camera system like for Italian ZTL).

You are perfectly right that a car can be handy in some parts of the area. I want to point out that "visiting Strasbourg" and "visiting Rothenberg" are not among them. I will admit that we rented our Alsace car one day early after our three nights (CDG to TGV) in Strasbourg, because we were to eat at L'Auberge de L'Ill. By comparison, we needed the car to sleep in Ribeauville, if you see the difference.

I suspect that you are over-estimating the magnificent pastoral beauty of Belgian and German motorways.

EDIT: To the first paragraph, when we had a car to drive across Belgium, and another time across the Netherlands, we made sure to book banal Business-Hotels that were away from the center of town, and that (as much as we could tell) had plenty of parking. I don't even care whether the parking is free, I just want to know there will be a space when we get back there in the evening. And when we went to a small target (say, the old-town in a Hanseatic city, now surrounded by dull, vast, sprawl of postwar development), we always took the first parking space we found, without trying the NJ devotion to "beside the door of the mall store I'm going to."

thanks for that bit of knowledge, balso, that's a new one on me.... bit of a faff but that would allow for a concession. It would make sense to put in for that as soon as the car is picked up and the precise date that mike will be in Strasbourg is certain.

I suspect that you are over-estimating the magnificent pastoral beauty of Belgian and German motorways.

and the superior driving technique of Belgian drivers. It will be fine - just cinch up the seatbelts tighter, put on the steel hat, and hang on....

Rather than deal with a French environmental sticker for our German rental, we stayed in Colmar and took the train to Strasbourg.