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With flight search engines, it is possible to search for routes excluding particular airports. Is there an equivalent way to search train routse excluding particular stations/cities? For example, one might search for connections between two French cities avoiding connections through Paris. Does any search engine with such a functionality exist?

I am particularly interested in Europe, i.e. the area covered by HAFAS when searching through Bahn.de, SBB, B-rail, NS Internationaal, etc. I noticed those search engines all use the same database, but are a bit different in their additional search options.

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    Loco2 offer "avoiding London" as a search option. Obviously that only works for their searches involving UK trains, and isn't a general case...
    – Gagravarr
    Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 8:52
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    Very good question. The best (non-)answer that I can give is to use a map to determine likely transfer points for your alternative connections, and then try use a search engine while asking explicitly for connections going through your selected cities. For example, for long-distance travel within Germany, maps can be obtained from bahn.de/p/view/buchung/karten/streckennetz.shtml. If you have multiple most likely transfer cities, you will need to make multiple searches, though.
    – DCTLib
    Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 10:18
  • @DCTLib That's what I've been doing so far, for example Caen to Barcelona via Le Mans or Tours. Sometimes this leads to Caen->Paris->Le Mans->Paris->Barcelona, though!
    – gerrit
    Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 10:45
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    Avoiding Paris itself or avoiding Paris area? e.g. you do not want to arrive in Gare du Nord and leave from Gare de Lyon or even stopping for half an hour in Massy is out of question? Anyway, given the structure of the French network, it will be hard to avoid, you might be better off doing it manually
    – Vince
    Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 12:46
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    @Vince Changing stations in Paris or London can be quite stressful, so it's worth checking if there are connections that avoid doing so, depending on how much slower those connections are. I have no problem with changing at the same station.
    – gerrit
    Commented Aug 6, 2015 at 12:54

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You can use the Czech Jizdnirady ('Transport Schedules') website to achieve this.

  1. Go to http://jizdnirady.idnes.cz/vlaky/spojeni/
  2. Enter your route (in this case Nantes to Nancy):

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  1. By default it would show you a route through Paris:

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  1. Using the Advanced search feature to limit the time you're willing to walk between two stops. This won't affect the maximum transfer time, just the time it takes to walk between the two stops.

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  1. Voilà! We now have a route avoiding Paris, which is almost as fast:

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    Does that mean it will reject any transfer that takes more than ten minutes?
    – gerrit
    Commented Aug 17, 2015 at 8:51
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    While this might work for this particular solution, I don't think this is general enough to be a good solution. It is well possible that the station one might want to avoid has not a longer time of walk than other stations.
    – drat
    Commented Aug 17, 2015 at 9:06
  • @gerrit it will reject transfers that take more than 10 minutes to walk. I think this solves the core of your problem.
    – JonathanReez ♦
    Commented Aug 17, 2015 at 9:45
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    @JonathanReez I know, I've changed in both cities before, and it is indeed annoying. However, I always feel that the trip on the crammed RER is the real problem, especially with luggage, rather than the walking time. There's railway stations (I can think of Zurich for instance), where in the worst case you will have to walk 10 minutes for a simple change of connection, without it being an issue, so I fear your solution will filter out some other potential stations.
    – drat
    Commented Aug 17, 2015 at 9:53
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    I tried this trick on the German (Bahn.de) site, also the one where you can select which transports you accept. It did still give routes changing in Paris with transit by metro, even though the metro option was not allowed.
    – Willeke ♦
    Commented Aug 17, 2015 at 16:23

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