It's a bit presumptuous to call this page 'Train Tips', because that seems as if we really know something about trains in Europe.  In fact, information from the real European travel tipsters, like Rick Steeves, covering details of things like Eurail Passes have usually perplexed us.  No, this page is just about what happened when we looked into our planned train trip from Paris to Apeldoorn.  Our plan is to land in Paris and train over to Apeldoorn where we are buying two bikes and beginning our tour.  We were just curious about how much that might cost.

We actually started with Google Maps and searched Paris to Apeldoorn, specifying train.  What came back was both indecipherable and erroneous. This lack of clarity was glaringly obvious, even with just a quick glance. 

So we went to Google Search, looking for  "Train Paris to Apeldoorn" and we came across a site we have often seen, RailEurope.com.  RailEurope turns out to be a North American distributor of European train tickets, that offers service in English, French, and Spanish.  It represents over 50 railway companies, but is somehow affiliated with SNCF, the French national railway. It is to train tickets what booking.com is to hotel rooms.

The RailEurope site was easy to navigate and we had soon teed up two tickets on the Thalys high speed train, for a total price of 230 euros.  But never having really heard of RailEurope, we decided to check around a bit. What about SNCF itself?  Surely they would sell us some tickets.

So we found en.oui.sncf which is a more direct affiliate of SNCF.  The site was slightly harder to navigate, but it did offer us one ticket on the same train for 65 euros, which is exactly half price!  We had just been exploring and so had been talking about one ticket, but when we got serious and asked for two, the price for each jumped to 90 euros each!  In time we realized that the 65 euro ticket was the last one at that price.  So we went in and bought it, and came back and bought a second one at 90 euros.  The crazy thing was that the site allowed us to choose the seats, and we were able to select the 90 euro one right beside the 65 euro one.  We came out at 155 euros total, or 50% cheaper than RailEurope.  We think maybe it was that SNCF allowed us to tick that we are over 60, which seems to often mean something in France.

For what it's worth, that's our train tip for today.