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I am non EU citizen and will be travelling to the Netherlands next week as a tourist. I will be catching train from Amsterdam to Zurich. I will be travelling to Zurich for 2 days and will be back in Netherlands. I had two questions.

  1. Can I leave my passport at my friends house in Netherlands so I do not worry about carrying my passport while travelling to Zurich?

  2. I do have the digital copy of my passport + visa, is it okay to carry digital copy instead of physical copy of my passport while travelling from Amsterdam to Zurich via train. I do have my USA driving license if that be taken as proof?

Has someone had similar experience or tried it before?

Relaxed
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arpit joshi
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  • not exactly but somewhat . – arpit joshi Aug 25 '22 at 09:07
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    Some hotels ask for your passport or other IDs (and they do a copy). I think it is as insurance that you will not cancel payment of credit card. Also to get some check tourist tickets (public transport) you must have some foreign IDs. As a Swiss I use often the driving license as proof of identity and this should work well for most other situations, but as a Swiss I lack experience with foreign documents. – Giacomo Catenazzi Aug 25 '22 at 13:50
  • When entering or leaving Germany, everyone is required to have a valid Travel Document (in your case: Passport and visa) with them. Inside Germany you must in possession of your Travel Documents, which means you must he able to present them within a reasonable amount of time (hour or so). A drivers license is not a Travel Document, nor is any copy of the passport and visa and therefore cannot be used when entering or leaving Germany. Any copy may be accepted for any simple check inside Germany, depending on the situation. – Mark Johnson Aug 28 '22 at 07:12
  • @GiacomoCatenazzi, passport details are asked for by governments, for tax reasons and sometimes to check on visa holders. – Willeke Aug 28 '22 at 07:48

2 Answers2

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Short answer: I would recommend taking it. It's mandatory for you to carry it in the Netherlands, mostly mandatory in Germany and Switzerland. Depending on your tickets, train guards in Germany may also want to see some ID (technically, it might be required with an online ticket all over Europe but I never saw anyone care outside of Germany).

Police checks are not unheard of and I wouldn't expect much flexibility from the police, especially in those three countries. If there is a check, I would expect the most likely outcome to be a lecture or a fine but I would not rule out being forced to get off the train and back to your point of origin in the next one or some detention while they figure out what to do with you. Of course, it's also entirely possible that you won't have to show your passport to anyone at all but is it worth the risk of a ruined holiday?

Your US driving license legally doesn't prove anything. It doesn't establish your citizenship, it doesn't prove you have a visa and therefore your status in the Schengen area, and it does not meet the standard requirements for police checks (Germany and the Netherlands in particular have laws that specify exactly what documentation is expected). It might still be useful as it does provide some evidence of who you are and also that you are genuinely a tourist coming from a rich country (for only US residents get US driving licenses) so a police officer might decide that further proceedings are pointless.

Relaxed
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  • I see ..I will carry my passport ,don't want to get locked up in a country with 10 dudes giving me deadly looks . Was Just checking if there is option to carry digital copy of passport instead while travelling from NL to Swiss . – arpit joshi Aug 25 '22 at 09:10
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    @arpitjoshi Just like the driving license, it's legally worthless but might weight in the balance. Note that it's not unheard of for people to “share“ a passport that way (one person enters legally, the other one uses their passport to get a job, etc.), counting on physical resemblance and low quality copies to avoid detection so presenting digital copies might look suspicious to a police officer. – Relaxed Aug 25 '22 at 09:14

  • It doesn't establish your citizenship Enhanced DLs and Passport Cards are a authoritative proof of US citizenship, but aren't recognized anywhere else than NA anyways

     – Nicolas Formichella Aug 25 '22 at 09:37
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    @NicolasFormichella Driver Licenses in general do not, non-US citizens can get them (and the OP is not a US citizen, for otherwise he wouldn't need a visa for this trip). Even EDLs do not really clearly do that, it's implied because they are not issued to non-US citizens and bear a little flag but they do not even state the nationality explicitly (passport do). – Relaxed Aug 25 '22 at 16:53
  • Regarding train managers checked ID for some types of tickets, that’s quite frequent in France as well. – jcaron Aug 25 '22 at 20:53
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    Also it’s worth noting that being non-white probably increases your “chances” of having your ID checked quite considerably. – jcaron Aug 25 '22 at 20:55
  • @jcaron Honeslty never seen or experienced it in France. Discount cards yes, ID, no. – Relaxed Aug 25 '22 at 21:54
  • @Relaxed I hear them asking nearby passengers for it quite regularly. – jcaron Aug 25 '22 at 22:18
  • @jcaron Funny, I genuinely cannot recall a single instance, typically they sweep a whole carriage pretty quickly. What kind of trains are you taking? Ouigo? TER? I regularly take long distance TGV (“inOui“) and Intercités and I haven't seen it. – Relaxed Aug 25 '22 at 22:34
  • @Relaxed TGV. There’s the mix of people with dematerialised cards like me, physical cards or ID presented spontaneously, and those they have to request either card or ID from, depending on the fare. Still pretty quick, but with the odd sigh-I-have-to-stand-up-my-ID-is-in-my-bag-up-there. – jcaron Aug 25 '22 at 22:53
  • ID checks are kinda common on TGV, but this is usually, like @jcaron says, for discount card checks and if you're fined – Nicolas Formichella Aug 26 '22 at 09:09
  • @NicolasFormichella Is that what he is saying? Most discount cards have pictures now, no? In my experience, the train guard will indeed check the discount card (mine is “dematerialized“ but I see them check) but emphatically not ask for another document. That's what I meant all along and I thought jcaron was contradicting this. It's also not relevant to the OP, unlike the German practice of asking for some other official document to match it with the name on print-at-home tickets to people with no rail card or discount. Being fined is a completely different scenario too, obviously. – Relaxed Aug 26 '22 at 09:20
  • @Relaxed Only some does, the ones you buy online/at a machine will not have such picture unless you dematerialise it, if you buy them from a counter, you will have ticket with the space to put a picture. I have seen them check those picture-less cards some of the time, for card with pictures, except if there is major issue or at random, they will never check ID. I got that only once personally (mine is dematerialized), that train was near empty, on a fuller train, I won't expect them to do any further check (if they even come, when the train is full, they will usually not pass at all). – Nicolas Formichella Aug 26 '22 at 09:30
  • @NicolasFormichella That makes sense, I did experience and witness many checks for discount cards too. What I meant is something completely different, specifically for tickets purchased online (as mentioned in the answer) and most often for people who do not have a discount card that could serve as ID. That's what I have never seen in France. If you are a tourist with a full price print-at-home ticket, the train guards are satisfied with that (which is incidentally easier in France because of the nearly universal mandatory seat reservation). – Relaxed Aug 26 '22 at 09:32
  • @Relaxed In France they will usually ask either for the discount card (if the fare is linked to a discount card, and the card is not dematerialised, in which case it pops up automatically on their own terminal) or for ID (not sure what the conditions are here, I suppose either for some discounted fares which are nominative and non-transferrable, or possibly for fares linked to the age of the passenger, in which case they only care about the birth date). They may ask for both if the discount card is ticket-style and a picture hasn't been added yet. – jcaron Aug 26 '22 at 10:25
  • @jcaron I am familiar with all that, as I just explained, what I am talking about in this answer is checking ID for non-discounted print-at-home tickets, LCC-style. I haven't seen that (and frankly rarely seen any ID checks beyond looking at the discount card itself). – Relaxed Aug 26 '22 at 14:39
  • @Relaxed Ah, no, there's certainly no systematic check, if that's what you mean. Only for specific types of tickets, though I don't know how specific that is. But is that different in Germany? – jcaron Aug 26 '22 at 15:19
  • @jcaron I have no idea if they do it systematically nowadays but what's different is that they would do it for regular print-at-home tickets, not to check whether you were entitled to any discount but to ensure you couldn't reuse or resell the ticket. That could easily impact the OP as a tourist, whereas everything we have been discussing really wouldn't. – Relaxed Aug 26 '22 at 19:46
  • Early on (not anymore), you could also simply show a credit card, even without a picture (the notion being that's it's a unique token that only one person could have whereas a ticket could easily be printed several time). When you booked a ticket online, you had to specify which form of ID you wanted to associate with it. – Relaxed Aug 26 '22 at 19:48
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I believe there are three completely distinct issues here.

  • Various European railways (certainly Deutsche Bahn) offer online-purchased tickets which can be printed out or shown on a smartphone. Obviously, if you can print it once, you can print it twice, and so these will be personalized tickets. The conductor might ask for proof that you are the person the ticket has been personalized for.
    Not an issue if you got a physical ticket at the station.

  • Various Schengen nations require foreigners to carry identity documents and proof of their immigration status at most/all times. Details may vary, but Germany requires foreigners to be able to present their passports to various authorities upon demand. Not having the original in your pocket is OK, not having it in the same country is pushing it.
    Within Schengen, this is not routinely checked, but one might always run into a random check. The likelihood might depend on how "European" one looks (racial profiling).

  • The benefit of a digital copy or photocopy is that one has all the details available. I certainly don't have my passport and ID card numbers memorized, and I might get the issuing authority wrong. This helps when one has to apply for a replacement document after a loss. It doesn't prove anything regarding identity or immigration status. A visa in the original passport might have been cancelled after the copy was made, or someone might have photoshopped the picture. Physical passports have safety features built in to complicate manipulation.

o.m.
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  • There are other issues too, like hotels, and you could add nuances on the police side of things (crossing a border vs. being in country, identity vs. immigration status check). Obviously, a digital copy is evidence, just like the physical booklet. Conversely, a visa could also be cancelled without any sign of it in the passport. So neither definitely “prove” anything even if one is clearly weaker than the other. The real issue are contexts where it's explicitly mandatory to present specific documents. – Relaxed Aug 28 '22 at 10:05