Füssen: Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau Day Trips

Füssen is where the coach parks, not where the day begins. Of the 30 listings this site tracks for the two castles above the town, 26 declare Munich as their starting point, one more gives a Munich street address, and exactly one starts in Füssen. That is worth knowing before booking a room here, because it means most of this catalogue cannot be joined from the town it visits. What Füssen sells instead is the last hour of the journey: a fifteen minute bus from the station to the ticket office at Hohenschwangau, and then a hill. The train from Munich takes about two hours and is direct only at weekends.

The train is the RB 68, run by the Bayerische Regiobahn. On most departures it is not direct: the timetable for 7 April to 31 October 2026 sends passengers across the platform at Buchloe, and in some slots at Kaufbeuren instead. The exception has a name. The Neuschwansteinexpress runs on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays only, leaves München Hauptbahnhof at 08:03 and arrives in Füssen at 10:12, two hours and nine minutes with nothing to do in the middle. Departures are roughly hourly from half past four in the morning.

The other thing that shapes a day here is that the two castles keep different clocks. Hohenschwangau closes at 16:30 in summer and Neuschwanstein at 18:00, while the ticket office that serves both shuts at 16:00. Someone who reaches the valley at two in the afternoon holding a combined ticket has already lost one of the two, and it is always the same one. The order of a Füssen afternoon is not a preference, it is a timetable. In winter it gets shorter still: from 16 October both castles close at 16:00 and the ticket office at 15:30, so the last entry anyone can buy on a winter day is bought before half past three, and that is the number to plan a train around rather than the closing time.

What follows is the arithmetic of arriving and the arithmetic of the afternoon. Every leg with its fare and its clock, what the two castles and the museum by the lake ask of a day, why Linderhof is not a bus ride from here whatever the map suggests, and the decision that saves the most money in this valley, which is whether to go inside at all. The catalogue that goes with it is a Munich catalogue, and the prices reflect the road more than the doors.