When we planned our bike vacation along France’s Loire River, part of Eurovelo 6, I hadn’t expected that the train would be the hardest part.
I can understand the need for bike reservations during the summer and especially during the crush of July and August. That’s even though the Loire a Velo trains have as many as 83 spots per train(!) between mid-July and mid-September. (Are you listening, Amtrak?)
Outside peak season, a train could have as many as 33 spots. In both cases, no guarantees that your train will. When we looked at last-minute reservations in late September 2025, there were some trains with only one spot remaining.
And I loved the range of bike facilities on various local trains. So much better than Amtrak or New Jersey Transit.
But a few things made the train surprisingly cumbersome. And I’m not even talking about getting on one of those fast TGV trains.
1. You can’t reserve your bike spot at the same time that you buy your train ticket. It’s a separate transaction, on a separate website.
Think you can bypass that by going to the train station? Nope. They can’t sell you a bike reservation. You have to do it online. Really?? Even the Italians have figured this out.
In 2025, you needed a reservation from May 1 through Sunday, Sept. 28.
And OMG the level of detail they want if you try buying a ticket from a real person rather than a machine that speaks English. Name of each passenger. Date of birth of each passenger. Why do they need it? What happens to that data? And if it’s that important, why do you not need it for tickets sold from a machine.
Just a warning: buying a ticket from a person will not be quick.
2. The number of trains that take bikes (or at least bikes with reservations) is shockingly limited. When I looked online, I saw just two or three a day in each direction. I expected it to be every train, running perhaps every two hours. That would be Germany.
Did I miss something?
3. What about other trains?
We know, for example, that trains run between Tours and the wine-and-castle town Chinon, but that pair wasn’t listed on the reservations site. Could we have just gotten on the train with our bikes?
We opted not to find out. (Does anyone know?) Instead we waited for the first day you didn’t need reservations. The morning train turned out to be 2 carriages with 4 bike spots, or about the size of New Jersey Transit’s RiverLine light-rail system or the archaic “Dinky” train between Princeton and Princeton Junction.
It took about 50 minutes from Tours and mostly ran on one track.
The train we took to get back, shortly after 2 pm, was longer but still had just 4 bike spaces. At least no one objected when people leaned bikes against the flip-up seats in the aisle.
For all these headaches, at least reservations are only 1 euro. (Again, Amtrak could learn from the French.)
More about our bicycling trip:
Why staying in one town was the perfect choice for us
Exploring by bicycle 
That’s crazy that getting a bike reservation was so difficult!
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I know! How was it just not added as an option to the ticket-buying page? But also great to see that the number of cyclists along the route, whether day riders or on multi-day trips, must be crazy high. (I would not want to be biking there during July and August!)
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