If you ride trains in Europe using a Rail Europe pass you are required by the terms of the pass agreement to show both your pass and your passport when you ride the trains. The controler will not always ask for a passport but my experience has been that more often than not they will.........then again maybe I just look treacherous. Now that I am old and gray and ride trains mostly in France I only need to show my Carte Senior photo ID. The French are not so suspicious.

Larry J

It took us the better part of a day to replace hubby's passport in Amsterdam (there is a US consulate there). We had to go wait in line, fill out the forms, meet with the officer, go find a photography studio, get photos, go back to the consulate and finish up. What it cost us was the price of the passport replacement (about $60, reimb. later by trip insur.) and a day of sight-seeing. This was on a Friday, by the way. The consulate office is closed on weekends and our flight home was Sunday. So if we hadn't noticed it Friday morning, we would have had more expenses and inconvenience because we would have had to wait until Monday and delay flight to Tuesday.

I now carry extra passport photos with us on our trips to save that effort should this ever happen again.