Train schedules and bookings

The most reliable information is from the sites of each railway that runs each service. The least reliable are printed schedule books - forget them and trash them ,they are useless.

And the second most reliable will be the bahn.de website. Forget the rest.

As stated, dbahn is the best site for train schedule information. Don't know about ipad app. If you still have time, you may want to do some point to point pricing to make sure the global pass is cost effective. It is rare these days for a rail pass to be cheaper given the additional fees for reservations and, sometimes, availability.

The best site for trains originating in Switzerland will the the Swiss Rail site: rail.ch

I find it a little difficult to believe that you got a schedule from the "Eurail website" since all Eurail does is point you to the national rail websites, including the German Rail (Bahn) website. You probably got the schedules from RailEurope (which it not Eurail!), which is about as unreliable as you can get. RailEurope only show schedule for trains for which they sell tickets online, usually only the fastest and most expensive trains, a very small subset of the trains in Europe.

I just returned from the places you are going to a couple weeks ago. I went there with my first rail pass and had the same frustrations you had prior to going. Here is how I go through it. The DB app is priceless. Download it and have it at your finger tips. That saved me many times. I found it to be 100% accurate to what the monitors on the train stations showed, even how many minutes late my trains were going to be and any platform changes for arrivals and departures I almost did not even need to see the monitors in the train station because of the app but did just to double check. I never looked at a paper schedule once I got there. I went to the CT from Gimmewald which is the reverse of what you want to do but it should work the same way. No reservations were needed for the Switzerland portion but the Italy portion did need one. From the CT you would go through Genoa and Milan, then on to Switzerland. I just got my reservation for that when I got there, a couple of days before my train departed. This was no problem. However, I would advise you to get it at a smaller station. Large ones like Milan have HUGE lines. Also, we decided to break up this 5-6 hour train ride by taking a quick 3 hour layover in Milan to see the Duomo and Galleria. It was easy to store the bags and easy to get there via the metro. Something to consider. Now back to your trains. From Gimmewald, you will need to get to Interlaken and get on a train to Zurich. No reservations needed for this. In Zurich you will get a train to Munich. From what I can tell on the DB site, no reservations are needed for this either. Feel free to PM me if you have any other questions. I would be glad to help. I can tell you it turned out to be easier than I thought it would be.

I got your PM and for some reason was not able to reply so I am going to try and cut/paste here.... If you don't need to get a reservation, then you just hop on and for sure there are no reservations from Interlaken to Zurich (we did that route) and based on the DB site, there are no reservations required for Zurich to Munich. To be safe you could ask at the Interlaken train station about reservations. That is a small station and the lines are not long there. That is where I bought my reservation for Interlaken to the Cinque Terre via Milan. Regarding the DB app, there were lots of times when we did not have a wifi connection and I had to tap into my data plan, which I set up before I left. However, like I said, I was becoming more dependent on the app as time went along instead of the monitors at the train station. If you had access to your app at your hotel and got your schedules figured out, then you could use the monitors at the train station when you did not have wifi. Another trick I did was to take a "Screen Shot" on my I-phone of the schedule off of the DB app site that I could refer to when I was on a train or out of cell and wifi range. That helped me a lot. The only thing is it won't show train delays or platform changes so be sure to check the monitors. Trust me, it is so much simpler to than most of the guys on this site and the guys in the RS office make it out to be. There is lots of chatter about all of the possible scenerios that there are. What I had to do was filter out all of that and just focus on the places I was going to and deal with those rules and not the rules for places I wasn't traveling to. I hope this helps. Let me know if you have other questions. Have a great trip!!