We plan to buy tickets from Frankfort Flughaven regional station to travel to Bacharach. The ticket machine instructions on the RMV site seem pretty clear. Anyone out there had any problems navigating these machines. We do not understand German. I have two other concerns.
- you can use a CC with a pin. My debit card has a pin but not my CC, does a Bank of America debit card work in the ticket machine?
- will Bacharach appear on the list of destinations I can enter?
Posted by
Lakewood, Colorado
19092 posts
That's Frankfurt Flughafen.
I used one of the RMV machines last November to purchase a ticket to Mainz. It was only €3,60, at the time, so I paid cash. I don't remember if it had a slot for a credit card, or not. Sometimes it is only the DB, touch-screen automats that take CCs. I did use the adjacent DB machine to buy a Rheinland-Pfalz-Ticket. It took my "swipe-strip" CC without a pin.
Bacharach should be listed on the destination shield, but if not, the destination code for Bacharach is 6990. Bacharach is not in the actual RMV; it's in the Rhein-Nahe-Nahverkehrsverbund (RNN), but is in an Übergangstarifgebiet (transition tariff region), for which RMV can sell tickets.
The ticket from FRA Regbf to Bacharach Bhf should be €10 per person. If you have Euro it might be simpler just to pay cash.
Posted by
Vernon, Canada
32209 posts
Bob,
There's a DB office in the Frankfurt station (attached to the airport) which has both machines as well as ticket windows. On a previous trip through there, the queue was quite long for the ticket windows but a very helpful DB employee (in uniform) helped me buy a ticket (which included reservations) from Frankfurt to Rothenburg. On that occasion, I used a normal magnetic strip credit card. At that time, I wasn't too sure how to operate the machines so the help was appreciated!
I just returned from Europe a few days ago and noticed that ticket machines are now starting to transition to the "chip cards". That's certainly the case with the SNCF ticket machines at CDG (these will NOT accept magnetic strip cards). I wasn't in Germany this time, but assume this is occurring there as well.
One point to note - If you do have occasion to use a "chip card" to purchase tickets from a machine, I found at CDG that not all of the ticket machines seemed to be working for North American cards. The first machine I tried wouldn't work at all (it was working normally for those with Euro credit cards though). I waited a few minutes and tried a second machine and it worked just fine.
Cheers!