Interrail on IC /ICN trains - Italy

nltrainer
Traveller
1405 comments

Posted 13 years ago

There has been some discussion-mainly quiote theorietic-about the ''need'' to pay an extra 3€ for making a reservation to use these trains-effectively on most routes the only really long-distance trains.
The website says as I-holder you dfo not need to.
Fact: ANY seat on these trains can be reserved and train conductors bark at you if you do not have that reservation. Showing some booklet in German that you do not need to wont be understood by them.
On NIGHTtrains always all seats were taken/reserved and that would mean having to stand for hours in the night-that was last week, mid september.
In short: do it. You can easily now do that on ANY of the flatscreen ticket machienes (ONLY at stazione where treni from the IC sector stop-small stops only have local machines) with menus in english,german, french too. Select ''buy ticket'' (NOT special pass)-proceed, find train, after it shows prices select GLOBAL PASS-you then have to type in something, but any letter is enough (most IR tickets do not really have clear nrs), this will not be shown on the printed ticket. it cost 3€ for both 1st or 2nd cl. (only 1,50 for some short sectors on the old-style Espressi treni only). You still have to STAMP that ticket in the yellow validators too!
For the superfast red arrow=frecciarossi (used to be named Eurostar Italia) same procedure, but it cost 10€ and here they really want you to have that ticket.
A nasty thing is for cuccette: they now want you to reserve a whole coupe-even if you are with just 1. it seems that on board you can pay the conduttore (if you can find him/her-often here seems noone even to come around) and pay 14 or 15€/for 1 if any are still empty.