Europe generally has agreat system for train travel, and by and large there are provisionsfor bringing your bike on board. There are still sometimes variouspitfalls lying around, like do you need to reserve bike space, canyou find the "bicycle" car, and can you lift the bike uppossibly steep steps, not to mention can you lift your massivelyheavy touring bike onto a silly hook mounted on the carriage wall.But there is one "gotcha" that so far appears like acomplete no go, so far as we have to date been able to figure it.

The gotcha is that it seems that you can not put your assembled bike on any sort of a fast train that will take you across a national border. We first ran into this in France, as we planned totake a TGV from Nantes to Amsterdam. For this one, they insisted that the bikes could come, but they had to be in a "housse". Ahousse, in Quebec anyway, is a duvet cover, but in this case it was a bike bag. That had us visiting the city dump in search of material from which to fashion a bag, and then creating a sort of garment factory in our friend Michel's front yard, to fabricate the bags.

That was then in France, but this is now in Germany.Our plan was to cycle from Leipzig, Germany to Valencia, Spain (and there will be a blog coming up for that trip, which will happen in a month). But a family emergency has meant that we will miss the first month of the trip. To keep up with the previous schedule, we now have to start in Brussels, though our bikes still live in Leipzig. Ergo,we need a train from Leipzig to Brussels!

To book a train in Germany, the natural way is to go to the Deutsche Bahn website (bahn.de), and I'll begin by noting that the alternatives – trainline.com, germanrails.com, raileurope.com,etc. are both more expensive and do not necessarily give access to all the features you may want, like seat reservation, change in time allowed for transferring to the next train from the last one, and yes, dealing with bicycles. But bahn.de itself is not very clear about bicycles in general, and certainly not bicycles across borders.After lots of searching, we found a page with a tick box for showing trains that accept bikes. Once you tick this, bahn.de assumes all passengers listed have a bike and need a spot. It will also show which departures have remaining bike space, and not.

If you find this tick box and then ask to leave the country, the algorithm may well find a way, but the trip will be triple the length and have 6 or more transfers. Also at one point the algorithm said “you had better call us” and it gave a number. But at that number, no one answered after 45 minutes, and all the messaging was in German. So hummph.

In the end, and we'll describe this in the blog when the time comes, we just booked ourselves and our bikes to the German border, and from there plotted our escape from the country under our own pedal power!

So after all that, our Forum topic is: did we panic?Could we have taken ourselves and bikes on the train with a reasonable route, to Belgium? We'd like to learn about it, for next time, even if we could be crying about any missed procedure now!

I don't have the answer for your specific route. A few years back I took a train from Salzburg to Munich on OBB and it was one train, no border issue.

Aha, so this is a topic close to my heart. I've taken the DB trains frequently to get to/from the ports on the North Sea, generally crossing Germany. I've crossed the border between the Netherlands/Germany many times, Germany/Austria and also Germany/Poland. 

So the long-and-the-short of it is: crossing the border itself is no problem at all - there will often not even be a stop. The issue that you've picked up on is that many of the high-speed trains, like EuroCity/ICE, either will not carry bikes or have very limited bike spaces that you need to book. 

However, many of the medium distance InterCity (IC) trains between NL/DE will have quite large bicycle cars with dozens of spaces. You need a ticket/reservation for these - they can be made on the day! But it's worth doing it in advance. In the past I've phoned the UK Deutsche Bahn service centre - they have been incredibly helpful, worked out a really detailed route (4 changes, all the way to Poland!) and even phoned me back when I got cut off.

That might not have helped you - but they speak good English, and might well send your tickets to an address outside the UK.

Otherwise taking regional trains, and changing - or cycling over the border as you're doing - is not a bad solution.

(worth noting I've never tried the exact route you want into Belgium - I have travelled Luxembourg/Belgium without reserving on the day though. Belgium is very friendly for bike travel on the trains, so I'd be surprised if there wasn't one viable route. You may have to play around with the routes/timetables a bit as the algorithm isn't very good at finding them - it might be obsessively putting you on the Cologne-Brussels high-speed mainline. One trick is to also force the DB website to only search "regional" trains)

It is one of the trickiest things to organize, getting a ticket for you and your bike on a train across the border.

As you've tried Bahn.de will show you the different trains you can take and, ticking the bike box, which you can take your bikes on. But their system automatically has a set transfer time of 'as little as possible' sometimes just giving you 2 minutes to go across a train station. You can alter the transfer time and often end up with more long-distance trains that way.

On the other hand, Bahn does not sell international train tickets for bikes online. If you were to only travel within Germany it's not an issue to get the ticket, but you want to go further.

In the Netherlands I use NS international, either their physical location the next city over or over the phone. They can book me all the tickets (except for the bike on my train ride in Italy) and send them as a pdf to my email or, when at the physical location, paper tickets.

In Germany I would expect to be able to arrange the same at the closest desk of Deutsche Bahn or call their service line. As long as you know beforehand where and when you want to go, tell them about the bike and transfer time wishes and they can tell you what's available.

Of course you've sorted it by now, as you do. But perhaps good to know for another time. 

Happy riding!

I think you have confirmed that from here in Canada we had not much chance online of arranging ourselves and bikes onto a train to Belgium! We did try phoning DB, but after waiting 45 minutes on a flaky Skype line, we gave up!