In the good old days I bought my France railway point-to-point tickets by calling SNCF, giving my Visa on the phone and thus getting the best possible rates, senior discounts, etc.

Now it has to be done through the Internet. In theory it should not be done from the USA because they have an agreement with raileurope not to sell tickets in North America. This way we lose all the way, they charge a fee, and then there is no access to the discounted tickets. May be it was ok in old good days now with the dollar down and the euro by the moon it hurts more.

I believe that we can anyway buy the tickets through the internet by just saying that the country of residence is France. Crossing fingers. I believe the ticket will be printed and that will be it.

My question is has anybody done this? Has anybody actually bought a Prem ticket. What is a Prem? These tickets are the lowest possible. It works in a way as discounted airline tickets. As an example Paris-Geneve, 2nd class one way could be obtained for 25 euros.

If anyone has done it I would like to know if there was any problem and also what size of paper must be used for printing the ticket the sncf site says format A4...I do not know what they mean. I imagine they are talking of letter size paper. Thank you.

Graziella, Miami Beach

Mod's note from Linda: A4 = 210 x 297mm (8.3 x 11.7 inches).