Training within Germany

I think there will always be regional trains on any route. Regional trains are IRE, RE, and RB. Find schedules on the Bahn schedule website. They do not require (or have) reservations. For travel within those three states (Länder) there is one regional ticket for 26€ for two people (22€ single). It will be named for whatever state you purchase it in, but will be valid for regional trains (and most buses) in all three states.

I agree with Lee to check Bahn's website. If the towns you want to visit look to not have train stations, too many connections or take longer than you'd like you may want to rent a car. Driving is fairly easy in Germany since the roads and driving styles are very similar to American systems. You can look up driving routes with http://www.viamichelin.com.

If you want to plan a holiday with a lot of train travel it may be easier to use a paper collection of timetables than the DB journey planner. I would recommend getting the European Rail Timetable (http://www.europeanrailtimetable.co.uk/)

The "European Rail Timetable" only list major European routes. It doesn't even list all Intercity routes If you are planning on using local (i.e. regional) trains they are not listed. You have to fall back on national websites (www.bahn.de for Germany), or free timetable leaflets which you can pick up at stations. But of course you can't get leaflets until you reach Germany.

DB does a series of maps showing all rail routes in each Land, which show the regional trains routes:
http://www.bahn.de/p/view/angebot/regio/laender_tickets.shtml
Then click on which "Land" you want on the map, and look for a link to "Streckenkarte" at the bottom of each page
Or go directly to the common map for Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia

There is an English version of the page:
www.bahn.de/p_en/view/offers/national/regional/laender-tickets/laender-tickets-overview.shtml
But it doesn't appear to have links to the maps (which are only in German)

P.S. Philip's link for the European Rail Timetable was wrong. It is no longer published by Thomas Cook. The correct link is: http://www.europeanrailtimetable.eu/

My experience is that it covers most rural routes in Germany I've ever been interested in. Do you know any specific ones that it doesn't cover?

I found the DB site really helpful and easy to use. Husband and I spent three weeks training around Germany. We stayed south of Munich on a regional train route. Used the RE to get to the ICE trains. The funniest thing that happened was on our first discussion with a DB agent. We were trying to go from A to B and did not specify how, just that we wanted to leave now. Well we were booked on a milk run instead of an ICE!! It was scenic but took much longer. Love the DB!!

Thanks Lee it is great to read your excellent information.

That region of Germany isn't nearly as well served by the modern high-speed ICE lines as the more densely populated areas to the west and south, so regional rail is a good option. With the exception of Berlin, even where ICE lines do exist, they tend to run much slower than in the west and south.

Hi,

Even if you took the ICE, say from Leipzig to Lutherstadt Wittenberg, or Jena to Berlin Hbf, you still are not required to have a reservation. You'll find the cities/towns in these Länder very interesting, Meißen, Magdeburg, Weimar, Wittenberg are some of the ones I visited, a different feel to them than cities/towns in western Germany.

In 1988 I took the Thomas Cook European Timetables with me to Germany. It was a pretty big book then; I imagine it's bigger today. Today I just use my 2# netbook to find trains. Anytime I have a Wifi (WLAN) connection, I use Bahn.de, but I just now downloaded the complete timetable (Germany and the rest of Europe) from this page on the Bahn website (click on "Hier Herunterladen"). I downloaded it in German, but I think you can also do it in English.