Hello:
My friend and I are travelling around Europe next month. And are going to a couple of smaller cities/towns including Montreux, Switzerland, Genoa, Italy, and Cinque Terre, and La Spezia. Does Eurail have trains that go to these places? Is there a map I can see of all train stations that Eurail is included on?
David
Yeah, trains are going there. You can see on eurail website which train companies are included and then go to their websites and check the timetables...
There is no map that is correct-on this site. As the larger countries have such enormous railwaynetworks-here in DE/Germany with 1000s of stations, this is impossible. You can safely assume, this is not USA-that about any major and 99% of minor towns have station and trainservice-and often ev hour or more.
5 erath (=cinque terre) is NOT a town, but a collection of in season much overvisited kind of ´scenic´ area. Genova is larger as many a US city.
Most European railways have superb online timetables. The SBB site for Switzerland is probably the best. Trenitalia have one for their services in Italy. Use these resources rather than the Eurail planner as they are updated everyday and show every train.
Here is some useful information from the experienced travellers in the Community regarding both planning, reservations and activation of pass and travel days.
Planning
The rail planner is normally not up to date, as it only is updated once a month, so to be sure of the time table you better check the timetable and availability on the websites of the national railways. The bigger national railways, like DB (Germany) SBB (Switzerland) and ÖBB (Austria) cover several countries.
Reservations
The advice from the experienced travellers in the community is to use other ways to make reservations than the Interrail/Eurail website. You can look at the guide in the link:
https://community.eurail.com/train-connections-reservations-47/how-to-get-reservations-105
If you, after having looked at the guide, have questions about how to make specific reservation, please give your travel details (departure date, time and route) preferably in a new topic, and you will get advice.
Please note that Interrail/Eurail charges an extra fee of 2 EUR per person and train in addition to the fee for the seat reservation.
Activation of pass
During the activation process, when you choose the start day of the validity of the pass, the first day of the validity period is automatically made a travel day, even if you don't enter a journey, the advice is therefore not to activate the pass before the first travel day as you only can deactivate the pass before 00.00 on the day the validity starts. If your travel plans change in the last moment you will loose travel days if you have activated the pass in advance.
It can be wise to make a test and activate the pass with a start date well in the future and then deactivate the pass immediately, just to see that everything works.
Activation of travel day
The advice from the experienced travellers in the community is also never to activate a travel day, that is connect a journey to your pass, until just before boarding the train, otherwise you might loose a travel day if your travel plans change in a late stage You can't delete a travel day in the past. A travel day can only be deleted until 23.59 CET the day before the travel day.
Hello:
My friend and I are travelling around Europe next month. And are going to a couple of smaller cities/towns including Montreux, Switzerland, Genoa, Italy, and Cinque Terre, and La Spezia. Does Eurail have trains that go to these places? Is there a map I can see of all train stations that Eurail is included on?
David
In keeping with other replies, I have spent many a happy hour trying to identify the best routes for my forthcoming first Interrail experience.
Like you finding route maps has been a challenge and I have found some form of iterative searching of maps and timetables has been needed - but for whether a town has a station the only real source is a mix of regional rail maps and the national operator website.
To give you some idea of the complexity of finding little known stations try this link for the Black Forest in Germany :
KONUS Flyer_PDF Download.jpg (1201×1712) (schwarzwald-tourismus.info)
OOI this is a free local travel card for all the stations on the map for each day you are in a participating local hotel.
It might be useful to note that Eurail/Interrail is not actually responsible for operating trains, we simply offer a pass that includes most major railway operators in the EU and UK. You can find out which railway carriers are included in our pass over here. We also have information available about traveling in Switzerland and Italy by train. You should keep in mind that additional reservations are needed for most trips in Italy, and definitely between Italy and Switzerland. You can read more about reservations on this page. We do have a planning tool on our website and our app. As other travelers have pointed out, these are not updated frequently enough to display delays, cancellations and changes. For the most accurate information we recommend that you plan your trip using the carrier's website, for example the Swiss SBB or Italian Trenitalia.
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