Your expert rail advice needed for travel in France

First of all, Rail Europe's timetables are incomplete, particularly when a route requires several connections. The best train timetable site for virtually all of Europe is www.bahn.de. Click on the drop-down menu in the upper right-hand corner for English. After you get summary timetables for a particular route, click on "Details for all" to see the connecting points, if any.

According to www.voyages-sncf.com, Paris-Rouen is the only one of your routes for which you could save a few euros if you book well in advance (up to three months allowed). The standard fare is €19.80. The cheapest Prem's fare is €10.00. Note, however, that Prem's tickets are non-exchangeable and non-refundable. If your plane is late, causing you to miss the train for which you have Prem's tickets, the tickets will be worthless and you'll have to buy standard fare tickets on a later train. Rouen-Bayeux, with a change in Bernay, is €24.70. Bayeux-Angers St Laud, with changes in Caen and Le Mans, is €35.00. Angers St Laud-Chartres, with a change in Le Mans, is €27.90. Chartres-Paris is €13.30.

Thanks for the detailed response Tim!

Sorry if this is stupid question, but when I look at the www.voyages-sncf.com, cities have more than one station. So, for example, I want to go from Paris to Rouen, and there a 4 stations to choose from, how do I know the right one? Thanks again.

Trains for Normandy always leave from Paris St. Lazare. If you input Paris into the SNCF site, with Rouen as your destination, you will find all trains leave from St. Lazare. It's rare that trains into or out of Paris run thru more than one station (except for the RER regional commuter trains.

Thanks Norm. It's helpful to know that the Normandy trains leave Paris from St. Lazare. The other confusion I have is that there are 4 different stations in Rouen, for example. I don't know which one to choose. I just want to be close to the sights and city center in each city.

You only have the choice of the Rouen Rive-droit station, the only train station in the city. The "Gare Routiere" is the bus station, Morgny (Rouen) is a suburb about 20 kilometers northwest of Rouen itself, while Rouesse Vasse is actually about 200 kilometers west of Paris, near Le Mans....nowhere near Rouen. The SNCF website won't steer you wrong.

Okay, thanks again for your help, Norm.

Also, just FYI if get on a train that says its final stop is Rouen you will be stopping at all the little stations in between Paris and Rouen, while if you get on a train that goes to Le Harve, it will go directly to Rouen, shaving about a half hour off your train time.

Thanks, Vanessa, good to know!

I appreciate all the help I've received on this topic. I've been trying to nail down specific times and prices for my iterary, and I am coming up with differnt times and prices than have been suggested previously in the thread. (And I have the Thomas Cook Rail timetable for reference, in addition to the snfc rail website).

For example, Rouen to Bayeux is coming up almost 50 euro, not 35 euro as another poster found. And it the trip time is coming up almost 4 hours!

Any wisdom as to why this is so?
I am getting scared that I'll need to dump my interary and start over...

Here's an update to my previous post in which I quoted you the fare of €24.70 for Rouen-Bayeux via Bernay. For reasons unknown to me, that's the only route that appears on the SNCF site and it's a fairly slow one.

However, according to the timetables at www.bahn.de, there are faster routes via Caen (as little as two hours). Go to www.bahn.de and click on the drop-down menu in the upper right-hand corner for English. After you get summary timetables for Rouen-Bayeux, click on "Details for all" to see the connecting points.

I returned to the SNCF site and priced Rouen-Caen at €22.30 and Caen-Bayeux at €5.70.

Matti....not sure what booking system you're using, but the maximum time on SCNF that I see is 3:38....mostly because there's a long wait where you change trains. The fastest journey I see is about 2:10 because there's only a 15 minute wait to change trains. You're in the boonies here, so these are not terribly fast trains....more like commuter rail, and you're running against the grain, so to speak. As for fares, the maximum fare I've seen is about 28 Euro. You won't get a reservation or special deal by booking this particular run in advance anyway, so don't worry about getting tickets until you get to France.

Thank you Tim and Norm--you are both a wonderful resources. I kept looking after I posted, and realized the problem also may be that I was looking on a holiday, and a weekend (Nov 1).

I thought that I was not to look at the bahn website, because it could be inaccurate?

Yes, I do appear to be running agains the grain here. I'm about to throw in the towel and go East towards Strausbourg/Colmar.

Thanks again!

The German rail network at bahn.de is probably the best resource available on the internet for checking European train schedules. However, you cannot buy tickets on its site unless part of the trip is in Germany. In any case, it's always best to re-check schedules when you arrive.

Schedules can be different on Saturdays and/or Sundays from what they are on weekdays. Here's what I found on both the SNCF site and the Bahn site for 1 November.

Leave Rouen at 09:04 and arrive in Lisieux at 10:06. Change trains and leave Lisieux at 10:37 and arrive in Bayeux at 11:14.

Leave Rouen at 10:49 and arrive in Caen at 12:24. Change trains and leave Caen at 13:15 and arrive in Bayeux at 13:30.

Matti

A friend and I will be traveling from Rouen to Caen in May. How did your trip go? Was the train easy? how long did it take?

We are also from Chicago...small world!
appreciate the benefit of your experience!
Vicki