So, my last question revolved around the opaque use of the term 'trip’ in Rail Planner app. Having started to try to add trips, I have found it impossible to find any; every option results in ‘timetable not available; add manually’. This for a trip starting end of March.
Does the trip planner have any functionality or do I ignore & plan via orher means ( I need to plan to make reservations in France/Spain.
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Rail Planner - no journeys available yet
Best answer by rvdborgt
Please do not use the rail planner app to plan. It is unreliable, can't be trusted and doesn't get updates frequently enough. Instead, use national planners or apps and for international planning, the Deutsche Bahn website or DB Navigator app is a good choice. For Spain, the RENFE website is quite unsatisfactory, but www.raileurope.com is a lot better.
The rail planner app can't book any reservations. Instead, check out this thread with lots of information about reservations:
If you still have questions, then please mention route, date and departure time of any trains you'd like to book.
Please do not use the rail planner app to plan. It is unreliable, can't be trusted and doesn't get updates frequently enough. Instead, use national planners or apps and for international planning, the Deutsche Bahn website or DB Navigator app is a good choice. For Spain, the RENFE website is quite unsatisfactory, but www.raileurope.com is a lot better.
The rail planner app can't book any reservations. Instead, check out this thread with lots of information about reservations:
If you still have questions, then please mention route, date and departure time of any trains you'd like to book.
In the Railplanner app you can only have one Trip connected to a pass. To the Trip you connect journeys, which are the different trains that you will travel with.
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 you choose the start day of the validity of the pass. Once the validity has started it can't be changed even if you haven't travelled. The advice is therefore to wait with activating the pass and starting the validity until the first day of your travel as you only can deactivate the pass no later than 23.59 CET on the day before the validity starts. If your travel plans change in the last moment you can't deactivate the pass and change the validity.
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 and create the ticket (QR code), 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.
This seems to be the regular question on terminology.
What we call a trip is better called a journey. By this I mean a day excursion from A to B with one or more individual trains involved. For a journey starting on trains scheduled to depart between 0000 and 2359 you create a travel day in your pass and transfer each train from the TRIP in the app.
What the app calls a TRIP is a single diary of all the trains you plan to take during the whole duration of the pass. These can be added from the planner in the App or manually if they are not showing in the planner. These individual trains combine to make your daily journeys.
Until you have a QR code and the individual train shows in the list below the QR code you do not have a valid ticket to travel, even if you have a separate reservation. The reverse is true of trains requiring a mandatory reservation - a valid pass/ticket must also have a separate valid reservation as well.
Until you board a train you can add or delete individual trains as you wish.
As is frequently advised do not activate your pass until you are sure you will be boarding your first train as you cannot deactivate it after 2359 the previous day.
Perhaps you have fallen foul of the defective app version. V28.0.0 has a bug that stops those with older android versions seeing any trains.
Updating to the newer version via the app store fixes this.
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