train reservation

Reservations for the direct DB bus running Nurnberg-Prague are only available in Germany and Prague. Trains on this route don't require reservations, and some legs by regional train don't offer them, so I either would not bother or else book them at a train station on shorter notice.

You need reservations on the bus to Prague. Runs hour but it will fill up at busy times. On that route it probably would be cheaper to buy the tickets than use a day of the pass.

If you BUY a ticket to Prague on the IC bus, the reservation fee is included. What sort of rail pass do you have? You may not want to use a "rail pass day" for this trip, depending on the average cost of that rail pass day. A saver fare ticket w/ res. can be had at the DB website for as low as €29. So if you've paid more than €24.50 per day for your rail pass, you might just want to save that railpass day for another longer, more expensive trip somewhere else - and buy the saver fare ticket instead.

If for example you have a 4-country select pass for 10 days of travel, your cost is about €60/ travel day, so you'd pay half that for a ticket to Prague and have an extra travel day for use elsewhere.

Thank you all. I did not notice that the Nurnberg-Prague leg is a bus and not a train. The Eurail pass is also good for the bus? We have a global flexi-pass for 10 travel days, but have budgeted one of the ten days for that, so will probably just go ahead and use.
So when we arrive in Rothenburg by train the day before, we should be able to make the reservation for the bus?

Also, when the bus arrives in Prague, is it at the main train station or somewhere else?

Right across the street from the main station.

The bus stop may have changed but when we did it last year the bus stops on the street in front of the old train station. Go into the old station, nothing there, down the stairs into the new train station that is in front of the old station and out the front door. The taxi cabs in this area are notorious for overcharging so we walked across the plaza and a street to a hotel and got a cab at the hotel.

The bus from Nürnberg is not an old city bus; it is a modern intercity coach with a bathroom, snack bar, and attendant. With advance purchase, you can get prices as low as 19€ in 2nd class; that ticket would be valid on only the specified (date and time) bus. The bus takes a little over 3½ hours.

There are several one-change (Schwandorf) trains from Nürnberg to Prague daily. The train takes 5 hours. There are no reservations available for those trains. Your railpass will get you from Rothenburg to Nürnberg to Furth im Wald, close to the Czech border. You can purchase a ticket online from Czech Rail (www.cd.cz) for Furth to Prague for 391 Kc (about 14,37€). Or you could purchase a ticket from Domazlice to Prague for 169 Kc (6,21€) and a Bahn ticket in Rothenburg or Nürnberg for Furth to Domazlice for 6,10€. Those tickets would be "flexible" ( (ie, valid on any train).

I don't understand Lee's suggestion that you use a day of your pass to reach the Czech border and then pay for the German border to Prague. You have a global flexi pass, right? I thought the Czech Republic was covered already.

Not that the rail pass is really appropriate here...

The 10-day global flexi costs close to $80 per trip per person. But this is a bus trip that can often be bought for less than $35. Sadly, you wouldn't know that unless you use a very jaundiced eye as you approach railpass-seller information about the cost of individual trips. If you look just at the Rick Steves time/cost maps for example, the ones used to help buyers decide whether a railpass is worthwhile, you would add the following costs for Rothenburg - Prague:

Border - Prague = $20
Nuremberg - Prague = $40
Würzburg (R'burg isn't on the map) - Nuremberg = $35

And any rail shopper would of course think that the global rail pass in question at $80/day would pay off since the trip costs nearly $100. Only problem is, IT DOESN'T COST $1OO. You can use one of several bargain strategies to pay a third that much, or you can show up on the day of travel and buy an IC bus ticket for €69 if a seat is available, including reservation!

And that's how people like Ron often end up overspending their hard-earned travel money on rail passes - and on additional reservation fees - and how they sometimes end up in buses (nice as they might be) instead of the 1st-class train compartments they paid for. There's no question that railpasses provide a certain pay-one-price peace of mind. But the whole decision-making process is made much more fuzzy than it has to be by rail pass merchants themselves. The absence of consumer alerts in this industry shocks me.

Sorry, I was going by the original posting, where he did not indicate the type of rail pass. What I wrote would have applied if he had a one-country (Germany) pass or a select pass not including the Czech Republic. I didn't notice that he subsequently said it was a global pass. So, his pass would be valid for either the IC bus or the trains to Prague. However, he also said that he didn't have another day of travel to use the pass, so he might as well use it Rothenburg to Prague. Since the global flexi-passes are only available in 5 day increments, you can't just buy one for one day less if your travel that day will cost less than the prorated cost of one day with the pass.

I'd be a little hesitant to wait until the day before to get a reservation for that bus. They are not very big and could sell out. But looking at the tickets for tomorrow, there are seats available on almost every bus, so he should be able to find at least one bus that day with seats available. And even if he cannot get a seat on the bus, there are always the trains.