High Speed Train Reservations

I hope you have not bought your Eurorail Pass yet. It will certainly be cheaper if you can commit to certain trains. 1. Paris to Verasilles and back is on the RER. The Paris regional commuter lines. Tickets are (I believe) about 6.50 euro pp each way. The trains leave every 15-30 minutes from certain Paris underground stations. A pass is a complete waste. Just buy a ticket at the station and wait for the next train. 2. Paris to Florence night train is operated by Thello, and you will want to reserve some type of compartment. www.thello.com. Buy the ickets on-line. And I do not believe Eurorail pass can be used on this line. 3. Florence to Pisa and back is an Italian Regional train. No reservation possible. Just buy a ticket at the station and be sure to validate the ticket before boarding. Its in the 5-8 euro range, pp each way. Trains are every half hour or so. Again a waste of a railpass.
4.The rest of your trains are Italian trains can be purchased on-line to get Super Economy and Economy tickets. advance purchase nonrefundable, I'd estimate about 150 euro total pp for those if you commit and buy early enough. http://www.trenitalia.com

Raymond, first, I would challenge your statement that the Eurail pass is cheaper. For point-to-point, I'm betting that you are looking at RailEurope as well. RailEurope is a broker and does not show the heavily-discounted tickets that you can get on the individual train websites such as www.tgv-europe.com and www.trenitalia.com. But we'll leave that for another message. You can ride the Regionale trains in both France and Italy at no cost. This includes the Regionale trains between Florence and Pisa in Italy. Your pass will work on all of them. Your pass will not cover you in Paris for any metro or any RER trains to Versailles. If your night train is the Thello train, they won't accept your pass either unless they have changed recently. In France, you will pay a supplemental fee of 9Euro for each TGV that you will be on. In Italy, it's 10Euro for each Frecci fast train that you will be on. 3Euro for each Intercity train. The supplemental fees include the seat reservations.

Sam's reply has lots of good details. To add to his reply, here's a general summary of why you should think again about getting a pass, from The Man In Seat 61: http://tinyurl.com/bkw4u6c When looking for train routes, it's often easiest to use the Bahn (German rail) site, following Rick's tutorial: http://www.ricksteves.com/plan/tips/db_tips.htm. And when looking for prices and buying tickets, be sure you are looking at the actual operator of the train in question (Trenitalia, SNCF, etc). A list is here: http://tinyurl.com/bo8x6o6 Do not use Eurail for either of these purposes. Eurail is a reseller; they don't list all trains, and they mark up the trains they do sell, sometimes substantially.

Actually, the 4 trains can be had for: Florence-Venice 19 euro Venice-Rome 29 euro Rome-Naples 38 euro Naples-Rome 19 euro That's based on trains available first week of December.
Oh, Florence-Pisa is 7.90 euro each way.

It seems like you are doing some backtracking. Why not take the night train from Paris to Venice (or fly), then the fast train from Venice to Florence? Is Pisa a daytrip or an overnight? The train from Florence to Rome is less than 2 hours, from Rome to Naples about 1.25-1.5 hours (both high speed).

Hello, I just want to thank everyone for the very helpful information. Sam and Harold, I looked up the sites that you gave me and they were very helpful. No thank goodness, I have not bought my tickets yet since my trip is still a ways off. The fact that many of the trains I am planning on taking do not take eurail passes was very informative. After looking at the sites you guys gave me, the price for my tickets drop considerably. Also, I wanted to know but I didn't post it here but we will be traveling from London to Paris as well and I read that the only trains are Eurostar, which you have to go through their site for tickets. If I buy ahead, it's 66dollars a ticket which I think is not bad but I'm definitely not an expert. Are there cheaper tickets on that route or do I have to stick with Eurostar? Zoe, yeah I realize I am backtracking a bit. Originally our plan was to go to Venice first and then Florence, but the days that we are going to be in those cities, a few of the sites we want to see would be closed. So a changed it a bit so that the days we are in those cities the places we want to go and see are open, other wise I would have kept it with Venice first after Paris.

66 euro for the Eurostar is an excellent price. I've never seen it cheaper, but I've seen it a whole lot more. Like 250 euro last minute. You've been to the site so you know check-in procedures.

Hi Raymond, Yes for the next year or so the only passenger trains under the Channel are the Eurostar ones. They are very comfortable, fast, and quiet, with good legroom and spaces for large luggage near the doors and small shelves overhead for smaller luggage. They are well lit, prompt and reliable. The prices at Eurostar never go down after they have been released for sale, but they do go steadily up towards the departure date. As soon as you can lock in your date and time you should buy the tickets. I've never seen resellers who charge less than Eurostar. When you go for your trip you must be checked in an absolute minimum of 30 minutes prior to departure or they won't let you travel. Being in the queue waiting to check in doesn't count. You will have an airline type security check after check in and both UK and French border controls before you board. There is no checked luggage - you tote what you brung. I hope that you enjoy your Eurostar journey.

"Eurail is a reseller; they don't list all trains, and they mark up the trains they do sell, sometimes substantially." My apologies if I missed a previous answer to this. In the above quote, substitute "RailEurope" for Eurail. Eurail is a cooperative effort of the European national rail companies to package and market railpasses; Eurail does not sell tickets. RailEurope only resells passes from Eurail. They also sell point-point tickets, for only a small subset of the trains, usually the fastest and most expensive, at a considerable markup. There are far, far more trains in Europe than just the ones shown by RailEurope.