My 76-year-old mother, 17-year-old son, and I are traveling to my cousin's "destination" wedding in the Loire Valley this summer. After the wedding and a few days in Paris, we are traveling to Amsterdam for a few days, then to Kronach, Germany, to visit our German cousins (near Nurnberg). From there we plan to go to the Cote d'Azur and Provence, then back to Paris. I purchased a 5-day, 3-country Select Pass from this site, but I'm realizing now that the Amsterdam-Kronach and Kronach-Monaco legs of our trip might be better spent sleeping on a train.
Is there any way to "add on" a couchette reservation to our Select Pass? How does one go about doing so? Thanks for any information you can provide!
Posted by
Lakewood, Colorado
19274 posts
This will probably come as a great shock to you, but there is no night train direct from Amsterdam to Kronach! The most direct route has you on the night train to Stuttgart at 4:19, then using 4 regional trains to Kronach. I wouldn't want to get up to get off the night train at 4 AM. You could also book the night train, at no extra cost, to Munich (7:19), then take an ICE from Munich to Lichtenfels via Nürnberg and Bamberg, then a regional train to Kronach. All of this travel, of course, according to the 7 PM rule, is covered by one day of your railpass.
Book the Amsterdam-Munich train by itself on the German Rail website. Put in Amsterdam, Munich, and the date, and 20:30 as the time. The first connection will be the CNL train to Munich. Click "Check availability" under standard fares, enter your ages, then click "Check availability" again. You'll see a list of Europa-Spezial and Normal prices. At the bottom of the page it says, "Book only extra charge". Click that for the Passholder reservations.
Posted by
Lakewood, Colorado
19274 posts
The routing from Kronach to Monaco is a bit more problematic. It's almost a 24 hr trip with 7 hrs or less on a night train. One route uses a night train from Nürnberg (1:18) to Frankfurt (6:00) - less than 5 hours, hardly worth the effort. The other route uses a CNL train from Augsburg (23:20) to Metz (6:15). You can book the CNL train online the same way you did the Amsterdam-Munich one. However, the trains taking you to Augsburg will not be covered under the rail pass for the second day. You will either have to use another day of you pass or buy p-p tickets for that part.
Posted by
OP
Orange, CA, USA
2 posts
Wow, thanks for all the information! My memories of easily hopping on and off trains to bum around Europe with my 2-month Eurail pass led me to believe that it would be easy, 29 years later, to do the same thing... but things have changed! I can't believe what a pain it's been, or how much time I've spent on the DB Bahn site, trying to be my own travel agent.
So, here's my new plan: Take a "day" train from Amsterdam to Frankfurt, rent a car in Frankfurt, visit cousins in Kronach, return the car in Nurnberg, take a train to France.
Will we be able to do this without seat reservations? Any recommendations on which city to travel to, as an interim stop on the way to Nice? I'm thinking we could go to Strasbourg (about 5 hours on the train from Nurnberg), then rent a car to drive to Nice. Or we could go from Nurnberg to Dijon (about 10 hours, or much more, depending on the train). Or we could go from Nurnberg to Munich to Lyon, on a night train.
Or I could just give up on trying to use all five days of our Eurail passes, and keep the rental car from Frankfurt to drive out of Germany.
Many thanks for any advice you can provide!