Train Info

Any rail pass gets you unlimited transportation on regional trains as well as on the lowest tier of express trains (eg, Intercity trains) in most countries. You still have to pay an optional fee (~€3 - €4) for a seat reservation if you want one on most rail lines. In addition, some national rail lines designate some of their trains as premium trains, which are not completely covered by rail passes. For these trains you must pay a surcharge. It's about €10 for Italian Eurostar trains, more for Thalys. All seats on these trains are reserved, so a seat reservation comes with the surcharge. In Germany, a rail pass covers almost all trains, even ICEs. The few exceptions are the ICE sprinter which run twice a day on a few routes (Frankfurt-Berlin, Köln-Hamburg). They make few stops and are faster than non-Sprinter ICEs. The surcharge, including a reservation is €11,50 in 2nd class, €16,50 in 1st.

Seat reservations on TGVs cost around 4-5 euro if you buy them in France. However, SNCF (French National Rail) limits the number of seats it allocates to passholders. People have reported that in order to take the train of their choice, they had to buy full fare tickets because the allotted number of passholder seats were gone.

Can you you make seat reservations at the train station before you get on the trains or do you need to make them well before hand, if you have a rail pass.

Take your rail pass to the ticket counter at whatever train station you are and tell the person there you want to reserve a seat. The person will look at your pass, take your money, give you a reserved seat ticket and you are on your way to the platform. Your reservation ticket will have the train car number and seat number on it as well as the train number. On the platform there are yellow readerboards that list train incoming and outgoing. There is also a representative train on the top that lists the car numbers so you can tell about where you should be standing when the train arrives. Don't spend a lot of time trying to figure things out for yourself if you are puzzled. Ask someone, any one. Help is all around you, take advantage of it.

In Germany, at least, you can make your seat reservations long in advance online at no extra cost using the Bahn website. Maybe others know how you can do that on other national rail lines, I don't. However, I do know that if making them in advance means using RailEurope, you'll pay more in advance than from a ticket counter.

This could be a stupid question but could you just travel throughout using the high speed rail system instead of regional trains? Or would that be way too expensive.

Jason, you'll soon find that there are many, many runs in most of the countries that have only local Regionale trains. The high-speeds simply don't run on all track segments.

Hi, Asuming you're traveling day and in Germany and Austria, you can travel on the high speed trains without a reservation, recommended sometimes but not mandatory using your Global Pass. If you want to go from Berlin to Budapest day (I assume Hungary is covered on the Pass), while bypassing CZ, you can do the entire trip without reserving in advance, Berlin-Munich direct on the ICE, then Munich-Budapest on the Railjet, a secondary speed train between Munich-Budapest and the cities in between. If it's not mandatory in Germany, I don't reserve, my Pass gets me on. If you're traveling at night, ie., after 1900, on a CNL you'll need a seat reservation for your 6 person compartment. In France on the TGV (speed train) you always need a seat reservation, mandatory, from Paris-Munich, ca 10 Euro 2nd class, Paris-Strasbourg 3 Euro 2nd class.