Brussels - Paris without Thalys?

Yes, you could take a TGV from Brussels to Charles de Gaulle airport and the RER from CDG to Paris. For timetables go to www.bahn.de. Enter Bruxelles-Midi as your departure point and Aeroport Paris-Charles de Gaulle TGV as your arrival point. You would pay 3-4 euro for your TGV seat reservation and €8.40 for a ticket on the RER B to central Paris. That fare includes unlimited transfers to the Metro and/or other RER lines until you exit the system.

Go to Thalys.com directly and see what the fares are without using your rail pass. We traveled the same route for 29 euros. To book on Thalys from Brussels you need to go pick Belgium as your country and english as your language. You will have to enter info for an user ID and password but once you have booked and paid for the tickets you can print them out at home. I used my hotel address in Belgium and had no problems. I made lots of copies of the printed tickets, one for each suitcase and one for my travel packet and the copies scanned just fine.

In a PM a poster named William reminded me that your railpass will cover your ride on the RER from CDG to Gare du Nord. (RER trains are operated by SNCF on that stretch.) To go beyond Gare du Nord on the RER B or to take Metro trains you will need a regular ticket (€1.60) which will get you to any Metro or RER station in Paris.

There are other trains (InterCity), that you can use with the railpass (no supplement), that go between Brussels and Paris, maybe not on as a direct a route and with connections, but they will get you there. However, they will take over 5 hours versus 1h20m with Thalys.

Use the German Rail website to find them. To keep the Thalys trains from being the trains shown, select "without ICE".

Thank you--the TGV solution is perfect! Its schedule fits perfectly with where we need to be, it's still very fast, and 3-4 Euros definitely beats Thalys' crazy charges.

I don't know what I'd do without you resourceful people!