www.seat61.com detailed info for you

regional trains like a local always cheaper than pass

for me just hop on works best everywhere.

Pass cost too high per day u always lose unless u train

great than 6 hours per day every day you do not train u lose.

Then there are surcharges which can easily double cost

Theses days for me second biggest tourist scam

after money change... I did make money one time over

a decade ago when they were 60% less getting a

4 day multi-country pass buy 3 get 1 free then training

10-12 hours relentless on slow trains on EVERY pass day.

It was a long slog I saved a bit still was not worth it.

Happy Travels!

From Fussen go to Innsbruck. Much information to download on many of the cities you will be visiting on this site. www.inyourpocket.com

I assume you have already read this rail info page from Rick Steves': http://www.ricksteves.com/rail/easterneurope.cfm

5-day-in-a-month means any 5 days of your choice within a month period. The month starts when you first use it, and must end within a month. If you buy a 5-day-in-a-month pass, the pass will arrive with 5 blank date slots on it. Just write a date into one of these slots on the pass AFTER you first get onto the train on that day and decide to use a pass-day for that day's ride. For any date you choose to use the pass, you have unlimited ride on that day. (Just show the conductor your pass that has already have that day's date filled on one of the slots.) If you need more than 5 days, then according to Rick's page, the cost for 1st class is $37 for each extra day.

Say if you purchase an 8-day-in-a-month pass, then your pass will arrive with 8 blank date slots. Once you have filled a date into one of the slots, it means you have used a day on he pass, therefore don't fill in a slot until you are already on the train and is sure that you are going to use a pass-day for that day. You may purchase individual point-to-point tickets for days when the ride will be short and inexpensive, and save pass days for longer ride.

Some trains require mandatory reservation, then you'll need to pay a small amount of money to make seat reservations at a train station in Europe once you have determined which date and train number you want to take. That is a whole other area that I am not covering here.

Happy traveling.

Could you add a day to the Czech Republic so that you can definitely go to Cesky Krumlov? We spent 2 nights there & loved it!! Either you could take a day trip by bus (which makes for a long day), or you could rent a car & stay overnight, which is what I would recommend. Or perhaps take a bus there if you don't want to rent a car but definitely stay overnight. Perhaps you could delete a day from Bratislava?
When we drove to CK, we stopped to visit the castle Hluboka, which is beautiful & worth the stop, so we arrived in CK in early evening. Good thing we had 2 nights there.

You can click on my name to read my trip report of Czech Republic from Aug 2009 if that will help.

I agree that you should not miss Ceske Krumlov. We took a bus there from Prague and returned by train from Ceske Budovice.
We took a taxi from Ceske k to the train station in Ceske B.
I don't remember the cost.

I advise you to get your hote; or B&B reservations in advance for Ceske K as we had a difficult time finding a vacancy over the Internet a few years ago. We ended up at Pension Anna,
a very simple B&B where we had to supply our own soap. No English was spoken. It was such a lovely town, with many small artist showrooms and studios.

Pat

We just recently visited Bratislava on a day trip from Vienna and I didn't find it very interesting - maybe because we visited on a Sunday and shops were closed. I wouldn't make a special trip for it.

Lavandula