I'll be backpacking on a whirlwind trip with three others this July and one of our stops is in Munich, spending 3 days there and heading up to Berlin for a few days. We are looking for the best way to travel between Munich and Berlin. I'm assuming the rail is the easiest and most sensible, thoughts? I need all the advice possible since this is my first time in Europe.
So do you buy a ticket in advance or can you buy them at the Munich station? Are there tickets that allow you to get off the train in a random city and get back on later in the day? Thank you and I appreciate all and any suggestions :)
Posted by
Lakewood, Colorado
19092 posts
Use this Bahn webpage to plan. Any full fare ticket, whether purchased in advance or at the station (same price), will allow you to interrupt the trip as long as you stay on the designated route and complete it within some time period (I think the end of the next day for that distance). Online, advance purchase, discounted (SparPreis) tickets are train-specific for at least one express train (ICE/IC/EC), but you can use any regional trains for the regional legs listed on the ticket as long as you complete your travel by 10 AM the following day. You can build in stops when you purchase the ticket, but you are held to the specific express trains (date and time) that are shown on the ticket.
There are also regional passes, Länder-Tickets, that are good for hop-on/hop-off travel all day in a given state or states, but these are only valid on regional trains. Regional trains generally end at border towns for that state and make a lot of stops, so they are slower than the express trains.
I see an all regional connection leaving from Munich on an ALX train at 10:44, changing at Hof, Chemnitz, and Elsterwerda, getting to Berlin at 19:42. That could be done with a Quer-durchs-Land-Ticket (44€ for first person, 8€ for each of the others, 68€ for all four of you, per day). That's 9 hours of train travel, but you could stop anywhere along that route. If you did that, I would suggest stopping overnight somewhere (that, however, would require two QdL-Tickets at 68€ each); you wouldn't really have time to stopover anywhere in one day.