Train ticket help for June 16 Bruges to Trier

Since your trip originates in Belgium, you would want the Belgian rail site: http://www.b-rail.be/main/E/ I'm not sure if you get any discount for advance purchase on that route. Try pricing it for tomorrow as opposed for your travel date, and see if there's any difference. If not, you can wait to buy it in Belgium. Take home points for others: 1. Rail Europe does not list all trains, by a long shot. Do NOT try to use it for planning. 2. Bahn.de does list all European trains, but does not list prices for most trains that are not completely within Germany. 3. While Bahn.de is often the easiest site to use for checking schedules, when actually buying tickets, you want to buy from the site of the country your train originates in (with, of course, a few exceptions). One main reason for this is that many tickets will have to be picked up in the country of the website used. If you buy a ticket from Italy to France from the French SNCF website, you won't be able to pick it up in Italy. This isn't an issue if you are able to print your ticket at home, but not all tickets allow this. Another reason is that the country of origin of the train is the most likely to have the best prices and the most varied discounts (again, there are exceptions).
4. If your trip involves multiple countries and requires changing trains, you can often get the best prices by splitting up the tickets. For instance, from Italy to Switzerland, you may do best buying the first part on Trenitalia, then the second part on Swiss Rail. This is where bahn.de comes in handy; you can see the train segments involved, and then go to the appropriate websites to check deals.

Harold - thank you so much for the very clear and detailed tips! I'm definitely going to save this for planning future train travel!

Harold,
I tried the Belgian website, but it will not let me enter a city outside of Belgium for the destination. Am I missing something? Or is piecing together 3 tickets (Bruges to Lux border, across Luxembourg, and then Lux to Trier) the only way to do it online? What are the chances the train will be booked if I wait until I get there?

There are no discounts for advanced purchase in Belgium, and they do not offer seat reservations. So, the trains will never "sell out", and there will likely be more than enough empty seating on a train that early in the morning. Checking on Deutsche Bahn, it looks your route does not involve any segments on a German ICE train. So, there's no financial incentive to purchase in advanced. Just by the tickets the day of travel.

Tom,
Thanks for clarifying. I figured it might be something like that, but didn't want to end up cutting off my options due to lack of planning. Great to have such experts online!

Perhaps a slight clarification. If memory serves me correctly, you can not buy an international ticket from the automats in Belgium, you must buy it from the counter. I don't know how early the ticket counter opens at the main Brugge station, so to be safe, perhaps plan on buying them a day or two before.

The Belgian Rail link that Harold provided is only for domestic routes. BR uses a different site for international trains: http://www.b-europe.com/ The ticket office at Bruges Station opens at 5:45am: http://tinyurl.com/7d75lts