Originally Posted by
strawbearlyjamms
Excellent advise all around. Thank you.
Oddly enough, upon further inspection, it seems as if our "train" is actually a "bus"... at least from Grenoble to Lyon. It does not say this on the ticket that I can see.... Only online at the Bahn.de site
Shouldn't change anything though... right?
Purchasing the legs separately, did not even occur to me. Good to know for next time. I had been informed of the raileurope "scam" from an earlier post and was informed about the seat61 site which was very helpful. I was able to purchase through the SNCF site at a discount of about $200.
From what I can see
here, looks like the bus station is on the river side of the train station. Makes sense that it's a bus; I was looking over the schedule and that's the only thing that made sense for the timeframe, but thought otherwise since you hadn't mentioned a bus leg.
It's a bit overboard to call RailEurope a "scam"- it's an easy/familiar way for people to order tickets abroad, and I think the only way to purchase a railpass. But once you learn how things work, it's easy to "go native."
Ah, remember that stuff I was saying about looking at the big board for the train? That's going to be a big deal in Lyon. Big station, tons of trains moving in & out. How much time between legs? OK, looked it up, probably 20 minutes. Not much time. Find that board fast; it will likely already have the track number on it. For the TGV, no need to have anything punched by the yellow machines before boarding.