European Rail Travel - Questions City Sleeper Line (New Member)

Hi,

I am a new poster here, but plan on participating over time as I ask questions and learn the processes.....

Long story short.....My wife and I are planning a trip to Europe for June/July next year.....It will more than likely be a 12-14 day trip...

We have no clue where we will be flying into (it will depend on price), but I would imagine it will be London, Paris, Belgium, Amsterdam or even Germany. Airfare will more than likely dictate this :cool:

We are extremely interested in Prague and maybe Vienna, but are open to other suggestions as well....

My thought process is that we will attemt to travel overnight (City Night Line Sleeper) that I discovered on the "man in seat 61 forum"....Does anybody have any feedback on the City Sleeper Line).....Ease of travel, ticket purchasing and overall experience....We like the idea of cutting out a hotel one or two nights and using the train instead...

Once again, thanks for any help and if I need to be more specific please let me know..

R

Welcome to Flyertalk!

Buying long-distance train tickets online is generally fairly straightforward - but it will all depend on where your journey starts and ends. As a general rule you can usually book with the rail operator of the country in which your journey starts; sometimes you may also be able to book with the rail operator of the country in which your journey ends (I've booked tickets TO Germany on the German site, for example).

So - your starting point would be to work out from where to where you may want to travel overnight, then use the Europe-wide train timetable tool at www.bahn.de to check out train times and connections, and take things from there.

If you can book a journey online at www.bahn.de it will tell you, and give you a link to the booking engine.

Do come back here and ask if you're not sure where to book a particular train!

The CityNightLine services are detailed here (http://www.citynightline.de/citynightline/view/mdb/citynightline/city_night_line_neu/info/MDB86742-sk_cnl_1011_en.pdf).

All of them - between any origin and destination - can be booked on the DB website (http://reiseauskunft.bahn.de/bin/query.exe/en?newrequest=yes&protocol=http:&).

I recommend highly the deluxe sleeper compartments (with private shower/WC), especially those on the double-decker sleeper services, which are on the upper level and really feel like a mini hotel room.

Thanks for putting me right about CityNightLine, railways. I guess I was probably thinking of sleeper trains generally rather than one particular brand.

For the OP - there are other sleeper services besides CNL. If you go to www.bahn.de and look up overnight connections you will find that some trains (such as Amsterdam to Prague) have numbers starting in CNL while others (such as Frankfurt to Vienna) have numbers starting in EN.

I have just found a (privately-run) site which lists all EN and CNL night trains, with brief details of facilities available on board:

http://www.benjaminradke.de/nachtzug/index.php

It's in German but has a link to a Google translation