Amsterdam to Dresden by train

I went on an interrail trip together with my boyfriend for almost the entire month of September. During this interrail we traveled through Europe by train. We had 6 travel days in total during that interrail. I want to write about all those 6 different routes in different posts on this blog. Today I’ll start with our first travel day. On day 1 of our interrail, we went from Amsterdam to Dresden by train. I’ll tell you about the different route options, the costs, the journey itself and more.

Route options

As far as I could find, there are three different routes when traveling from Amsterdam to Dresden by train. The italics version is the route we took:

Option 1: crossover in Berlin

This is the route: Amsterdam Central – Berlin – Dresden. The travel time is 9 hours and 27 minutes. Fares start at 37,90 euros if you travel on a specific time.

Option 2: crossover in Hannover

This is the route: Amsterdam Central – Hannover – Dresden. The travel time is 9 hours and 37 minutes. Fares start at 37,90 euros if you travel on a specific time. We left Amsterdam Central at 9:10 and arrived in Hannover at 13:18. We were supposed to arrived in Dresden at 18:37, but we had a delay (you can read more about that below). But I think 9:10 – 18:37 is a decent time to travel.

Option 3: crossover in Frankfurt

This is the route: Amsterdam Central – Frankfurt – Dresden. The travel is 10 hours. Fares start at 37,90 euros if you travel on a specific time.

All journeys can be booked via Deutsche Bahn. Times may vary a bit, because on all routes there are multiple trains a day. But as you can tell, the prices, time and route is mostly the same. There are even more route options available, but I only included the routes with just one transit, as that is most relaxed. And if I didn’t, the list of routes is endless. My recommendation would be to pick a journey with a decent transit time (read: more than one hour) at your crossover. Some fares have only 9 min transit time and that’s just very little. It’s easy to miss and that just messes up your journey.

What we paid

As you can see, fares start at 37,90 euros for a single journey. I would say that is a great price for a city trip to Dresden. My boyfriend and I paid 40 euros per person because we included this trip in our interrail. We had 5 travel days for a price of 200 euros, so 40 euros per day. There’s a way to do it cheaper: with a longer interrail. If you do an interrail for two months, you pay about 31,60 euros per travel day. But you know, that’s only for when you travel longer. Not for this individual trip, then 37,90 euros is the cheapest option.

Our experience

We traveled from Amsterdam to Hannover to transit to Dresden there. We had 1 hour and 18 minutes of transit time. We missed out transit. Our train had a huge delay due to construction work. I did not fully understand that, because construction work is usually planned. And this was not, because our train was supposed to be on time. As we missed our train, we had to wait 2 hours in Hannover for the next train to Dresden. That was okay for us, as we traveled with an interrail card which was valid all day. If you have a single ticket this would be awful. I hope our experience is an exception.

Other that that delay, our travel was amazing. During our journey we took two German trains. And German trains are very comfortable. In second class you have a really comfy seat, there’s also a socket to charge your phone and there’s free wi-fi. You can do anything in the meantime (which you can’t do in a car), I mostly played a game on my Nintendo Switch and read a book.