Hello, I'm going to be traveling with two young daughters from Paris to Eastern Europe on a tight budget, and every leg of the journey looks like a nightmare. Especially the overnight train journeys with two connections at 3 am and 6 am for a total of 14 hours. Has anyone done this kind of trip before? Do you have any ideas or recommendations? We were thinking of Paris/Prague/Budapest/Bled/Paris.
Planning our first budget trip to Eastern Europe
When are you planning to travel, i get journeys without those connections in the night/morning.
Travelling from Paris to Prague you basicly have 3 options:
Paris → Offenburg or Mannheim and then the night train to Prague (ca. 14 hours) (The EC part with just seating is reservation free, The EN part has couchettes which require a reservation)
The other routes would be via Berlin or via Stuttgart and munich. (ca. 12 hours)
Prag to Budapest has plenty of direct connections (ca. 7hours, no mandatory reservation on most of them)
Budapest and Prag are both great cities to visit. (I have not visited Bled yet)
You route involves quite long distances between all of your destinations.. How long do you plan to travel in total?
If you can't find the trains you're looking for, then please mention the dates you want to travel for each journey and whether you want to travel overnight or during the day. There are multiple possible reasons why trains don't show up (yet) and without any further information, we can only guess.
Oh, thank you so much for your replies! We'll be traveling between August 8th and 23rd, 2026. We can adjust the dates if some trains are more convenient than others; we're flexible. For now, we're flying Paris to Prague on August 9th, Prague to Budapest on August 13th, Lake Bled on August 17th, and returning to Paris on August 21st. But if we find a better route a day before or a day after, that would be perfect! I'm sorry, I thought the train schedules were fixed.
+8Best use www.bahn.com to plan your journey. It has information from almost all railway companies. For long journeys, sometimes it’s better to split your search up (don’t check Paris-Budapest in one go, but split it up in seperate legs: Paris-Berlin-Prague-Budapest).
From Paris, the easiest way to get to Prague by train is via Brussels. I’lld go to Brussels and take the night train to Prague from there (Departures every monday, wednesday, friday from Brussels - directly at European Sleeper).
By the end of march, there should be a direct night train from Paris to Berlin. From Berlin there are convenient connections to Prague every two hours, so also a very good option too to get to Prague via Berlin.
Budapest-(Slovenia/Bled) has a few direct connections, but should be fairly doable with connections in Vienna and Villach. But it might be a bit too early to find exact departures for August. There might be extra seasonal departures.
Slovenia-Paris is potentially a very long travel day + 12h. Doable, but partly through Germany where you can probably expect delays, which might lead to tight connections. To avoid stress I’lld split the journey up in the middle.
But, again, August is quite far away in the railway term, so not all schedules might be available. To get an indication of travel times and changes, use a date closer (a random day next week).
if budget is tight then you can stay at cheap hostels, maybe they will be cheaper than booking a night train cabin
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