One common problem that you will encounter when traveling around Europe is how to figure out when the trains come and go. It seems easy enough, but, each country may have its own train system and website as well as a different language, poor website design, no human working at the train station, etc. Every traveler has encountered this problem and, here, I will tell you where to go to find almost all the information you will ever need to travel by train around most of Europe.
Now, each country will most likely have its own transportation website, though there are exceptions for some of the smaller countries, and you can use these systems if you want. But, that usually takes a lot of time and energy if you travel a lot.
The easiest solution is to use one of two main websites, one from Germany and one from Austria. These countries have expensive train systems and have a sense of order and punctuality that can only be rivaled by the Swiss.
https://www.bahn.de/i/view/USA/en/index.shtml
https://www.oebb.at/en/index.jsp
The first link is to the German train (Bahn) website and the second is to the Austrian train website. Both links take you to the English versions of the websites so that you don’t have to look around for the translations.
Though these sites are for Germany and Austria, they contain train information for much of Europe. You may not be able to buy tickets to and from all locations, but you will be able to at least view when the train is supposed to depart and arrive and how many connections there are and where those connections take place.
The schedule information for the trains is the most important information, next to the price, and you may not be able to get it in the train station. I remember being in Zagreb, Croatia and, even though I had just purchased a train ticket, they could not or would not tell me where I needed to change trains or even if I needed to change trains. In fact, the only way I knew where to go was because I printed out a time-table from the German Bahn website that detailed where to change trains.
Save yourself time and many headaches and always print a time-table from one of the above sites before you arrive at a train station to buy a ticket.
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