Hi rpninfinite,

Your ticket is good for 30 days. You can make as many stopovers as you like, for as long as you like, as long as you arrive at your destination within 30 days of the first day of validity. What you *can't* do is take a longer routing then one of the "approved" routes as listed on your ticket. Now, for the specific case you described - a stopover in Mannheim - this is absolutely no problem, because Mannheim is right on the most intelligent possible routing from Zurich to Berlin. So, in your specific case, this will work just fine.

For the general case: this policy is valid in most of Europe, but there are special rules for France, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands. If you don't mind, I'll skip that special case, as it gets a bit complicated...

Please also note: this very liberal policy of having the ticket valid for 30 days is due to the fact that it is an *international* ticket. If you had a German internal ticket - say, from Basel Bad to Berlin - then the ticket itself would be valid for 30 days from the date of purchase, but the actual travel has to take place on *2 consecutive days*. Not nearly so good!

I got this data from the official tariff on the Deutsche Bahn website. If you're interested, it's entitled "Besondere Internationale Beförderungsbedingungen der Deutschen Bahn AG für Reisen mit Fahrkarten ohne (integrierte) Reservierung (SCIC-NRT)" Aren't you glad you asked...