didds wrote:basically scott because I am totally confused by it all!
ive so many questions over all of this sort of thing but seemingly no where to find answers...
first cab off the rank...
If I book a ticket Chippenham-London (in reality paddington) and a ticket St Pancras -> baden-Baden, does tyhat cover underground Paddington-St Pancras? Because if I booked Chipp-Edinburgh (for example) it would - biut of course I can book Chip-Edin on a single website. Its not a biggy - just5 trying to work that out.
Then If my Chip-Padd serrvice gets delayed for whatever raison and I miss StP->BB ... is my StP->BB ticket valid on another service or is it just tough and I either buy a whole extra ticket, or give up and go home ? Let alone BB->StP is delayed or the tube is delayed or whatever and I miss the scheduled Pad-Chipp train am I now stuffed to have to buy another Padd-Chipp ticket?
I perceive (but may be wrong) once I begin the end-to-end bookable StP->BB bits any delays are automagically covered ... but presumably that isn't the case if I have to book Chip-Padd totally separately?
I know that it was a while back, but in 2010 I went from Witham, Essex to Schliersee, Bavaria and back, by train.
After quite some messing about and help from a nice young man at the Deutsche Bahn number in the UK I ended up with the following tickets
Witham to London,
including Zone 1, period returnSt Pancras to Munich period return
Munich to Schliersee
Schliersee to Munich
It would have been possible to get a ticket from St Pancras to Schliersee, but this would have cost about £250 extra, each
The reason for that was if the last leg, on a different company, was included we couldn't get the DB discounted ticket from Brussels to Munich. And the period return on the local train actually cost more than 2 singles.
A quick look shows that the local trains are now part of DB, so 2 tickets may be possible.
So for the bit confusing you, you need to book Chippenham-London including zone 1.
I suspect that StP->BB will be a simple ticket.
I broke things up a bit, travelling up to London and staying in the Kings Cross Premier Inn the day before we were getting the Eurostar. That way we got an earlier train in the morning and were able to have a relaxed connection in Brussels.
We also stopped for 2 nights in Koln an the way down, because we wanted to have a look at it. On the way back we spent the night in the Accore(sp?) hotel across the road from the Eurostar station in Brussels, just to brake what would have been a massively long day.
HTH
Slarti