Lyon Travel Forum

Hi all,
I'd quite like to do a bit of euro-hopping by train during Easter - im thinking dates of 4th-11th april.

preferred itinerary would be roughly:
London > (stop in paris 1 night) > Lyon 1-2 nights > Lausanne/Bern 2 nights> rent a car through Swiss alps. Would probably then fly back from Bern to London!

Its quite confusing figuring out which websites to use to book such rail tickets - do you have any suggestions? Im worried about being ripped off by using sites such as rail europe or getting a pass needlessly!
Also, if i wanted to stop for a night in paris is there a ticket i can get which allows me to do so whilst still carrying on to Lyon?

if you also recommend any nice drive by locations around these areas i should check out, would love to hear about them.

appreciate any advice you guys can give!

I use the SNCF website but it is only in French and a bit awkward:

www.voyages-sncf.com

You might also try:

www.tgv.com

Purchase tickets 90 days before travel, looking for PREM fares - they are the cheapest. These fares are withdrawn from sale approximately one week before any given departure.

Alternatively, you could avoid booking online at all and simply buy tickets as and when you need them (perhaps buying your onward ticket when you arrive somewhere, if you are concerned about availability).

Only trains which are reservation-only ever get 'full-up', and these are the least common. If there is availability one can still buy tickets up to a few minutes before departure. If there are no seats on other 'ordinary' trains (unlikely) one simply stands until a seat becomes available.

Raileurope will charge commission, and Eurail passes are rarely the budget option they once were.

The one train you absolutely must book well in advance (to get the cheapest fare) is the Eurostar from London to Paris. Tickets are avalable 120 ays in advance of travel date, and the cheapest ones soon sell out. You will not get tickets any cheaper anywhere else, and fares do not fall the nearer one gets to departure. Book this ticket on www.eurostar.com as soon as possible.

For French trains/times/fares look at

http://www.voyages-sncf.com/leisure/fr/launch/home/

For Switzerland:

http://www.sbb.ch/en/

the train part you got already the best sites to look for information.
driving will take you time around Paris for just one night so figure that out, my opinion of course.

LYon, you can do some driving but its also congested traffic around the beltway roads and into the city. Besides take advantage of Lyon itself.
then on to Switzerland, you could go from Bern to the lake area of Neufchatel along road A1 link to A5 south. you can also drive to the lovely city of Fribourg along the A12 road. Either way from the A5 or the A12 you can reach Lausanne,with the most scenic being around Lac Leman on the A12 from Bern to Fribourg than on to Lausanne or vice versa along the lake passing Vevey, the resting place of Charles Chaplin.

this site can tell you about suisse roads, autoroutes and semi autoroutes
http://saratlassuisse.free.fr/voir/index.php
as well as viamichelin site.

hope it helps you

"Also, if i wanted to stop for a night in paris is there a ticket i can get which allows me to do so whilst still carrying on to Lyon?"
Eurostar is a separate company from SNCF (French Railways) anyway - it's a joint venture between several European train companies - so however you buy them you will have separate tickets for London-Paris and then Paris-Lyon, and if the second train is also TGV, then as with Eurostar you would have to make a reservation for a specific train at a specific time - so there is no problem with staying overnight in Paris! The same applies if you are just buying a ticket in advance for second train, you will have specified the date of travel (although you aren't tied to one if it isn't a premium train e.g. TGV).
In other cases when you want to go from A to B via C, on trains which do not require reservations, you can specify on purchase that you want to go VIA C, i.e. break your journey there. But it really isn't an issue for stopping between arriving on one reserved train and leaving on another (or even leaving on a ticket for a specific date but not a specific train).
A pass is only worth it if you are travelling extensively within any of the countries covered, not for what looks like 3 point-to-point journeys, at least one of which (Eurostar) would require a supplement even if you did have a pass. Personally I would not "book" rail tickets at all, except Eurostar where reservations are obligatory. I would probably buy the Paris-Lyon ticket at the SNCF shop in London (Piccadilly) and you could buy the Lyon-Lausanne ticket there too, otherwise I buy as I go.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by euro-hopping anyway: UK and Switzerland don't use the euro.