Many Fodorites, myself included, recommend using the timetables at www.bahn.de for virtually anywhere in Europe. They truly are excellent.

However, when doing some research recently to answer a question on another travel board, I discovered that at least one route is missing from the DB timetables. While DB lists many times for trains between Venice and Naples, the direct night train is not among them.

I wrote to DB and got this reply: "We do not have access to this train, it is not listed in our timetables." No explanation was given as to why this particular Trenitalia train, as opposed to any other Trenitalia train, is blocked from the DB site.

That led me to wonder if the same thing might be true for other Trenitalia routes, or for routes within any other countries whose national rail systems would deny access to DB for some particular route.

Has anyone else found a route on a country's national rail site that was NOT shown on DB?

I wouldn't rely on DB for UK trains as the information it holds can be somewhat out of date

I asked this same question on Lonely Planet's Thorntree. A person who lives in Germany and is very knowledgeable about trains said that DB can only list what another country gives it. That makes sense. So apparently the fault lies with Trenitalia for leaving the route in question off of the database it sent DB.

Tim,

I posted a question on the forum. Would you mind to help me?
here is the link: http://www.fodors.com/community/euro...est-doubts.cfm

I have some doubts about the fares at DB site.
I appreciate any help.
Thanks
Alice

Trenitalia/Bahn or Italy/Germany had some kind of issue/disagreement about the night trains a couple of years ago and for a time, you couldn't book night trains between the two countries on their websites. Perhaps that's why Bahn isn't showing it.

Well, we know that bahn.de doesn't hold data for some small private railways, such as Euskotren and FEVE in Spain and the Circumvesuviana in Italy.

It also depends how good the owning railway is at inputing its data into the central MERITS database. That's why Bahn.de can be skethcy at times for Greece and Spain.

In this case, I was looking for the Naples-Venice sleeper train on www.fsitaliane.it and it isn't there either. So in this case i suspect it's not DB's fault, indeed I'm not sure the train's absence is a mistake at all. I suspect this Naples-Venice train has been discontinued in the round of night train cuts last December.

So by all means correct me if I'm wrong, but I certainly couldn't find any Naples-Venice sleeper train even on Tenitalia's own site, only a Rome-Venice-Udine train with couchettes only and no sleeper.