Can I book two legs on the eurostar separately?

The general advice for passengers from AMS to BRU is to take the hourly Intercity train which is slightly slower but doesn’t require a reservation. Thalys are very expensive for the short distance.

How much time should I leave between arriving in Brussels to switch trains? And where do I find that timetable? #dumbAmerican

Thanks!

If you put Amsterdam to London into a site such as www.bahn.com - the best site for European timetables - it will only show connections that meet the official minimum connecting time.

Most of the connections seem to show 42 minutes between Thalys arrival and Eurostar departure. That’s enough time (although it’s not a huge amount). And if for some reason your train from Amsterdam is delayed, your reservation will be honoured on the next Eurostar.

I would happily book that connection, but if you want a slightly more comfortable connection, give yourself over an hour.

At Brussels, you need to walk down from the platforms to the Eurostar check-in area, then have your boarding pass checked, baggage screened, and passport checks from Belgian and UK border officers. There can be a bit of a queue building up, but they generally only open the queue to people on one train at a time.

Oh. And there’s no such thing as a dumb question. Better to ask, than find out the hard (expensive) way!

Eurail can be a bit of a minefield.

And we here in the States don’t have your lovely train system so it really is a mystery to us.