Dear all: Please note that staff won't normally revisit topics on this forum once they have been answered.
For Ben's trip, my reply above favored point-to-point tickets, not rail passes.
If you read our advice about rail passes, you will see that it includes most points that people have made here. Advance-discount tickets are described wherever we have found them to be easy to buy, and that especially includes the France rail page. However, you might be surprised how many people start researching their train travel one month or even one week in advance of departing home, when they have fewer options (perhaps no advance discounts and no passholder reservations on a TGV in France).
In answer to some other questions, the Time & Cost map was pretty exhaustively updated in January, 2013, using an exchange rate of 1 euro = $1.25, and rounded to the nearest $5. Given today's exchange rate of $1.38 (contrary to predictions that the big banks made earlier this year), that may result in an under-estimate. A few updates were made this year to cover recent France-Spain TGV changes. Travel times are rounded to the hour, and often up instead of down. (For instance, most London-Paris Eurostar departures take 2hr.20 - 2hr.30, and that is rounded up to 3 hours.) No one page can accommodate all the permutations of price or travel time on a route, nor predict the affect of exchange rates on your actual date of purchase. However, this map provides an excellent overview of train travel times and costs on the faster trains, and can save readers hours of looking up multiple fares through individual countries' web sites.
In most cases, we recommend choosing rail passes only if they save money. But in countries without many reservation requirements, rail passes can still add a valuable level of convenience, allowing you to hop on any train. Any of these comparisons are predicated on being pretty sure of your route, if not necessarily your dates and times.
