Bahn Journey Nr 7 & 8: Hoping for Excellence in Train Service

This journey is a bit special. I’m off to visiting a friend near Hamburg, in the north of Germany. As I live in the south of Germany, this means an overall distance of around 700 km. The best train connection I could find with only one switchover has me sitting in an ICE for about 6.5 h, with a regional train to get to/from my final destination.

The special thing about this journey is that I broke with one of my principles: Never have fewer than 20 minutes for switching trains. In this trip, it’s only 8 minutes. Which is probably going to be fine on the return journey. But on the journey there, it might get rather tricky, considering that that 8 minute switchover happens after a 6.5 h journey over about 700 km.

Wow was I wrong when I typed the introduction above.

Getting there, 2026-07-04

As I’ve noted above, today I’m relying on making an 8 minute switchover after 6.5h and 700 km, basically through the entire country from south to north.

I’m very heavily relying on Deutsche Bahn demonstrating a level of operational excellence which sadly hasn’t been much in evidence in the past few years.

What’s more, today is not a pure travel day. I actually have to be somewhere about two hours after my planned arrival time. Let’s see how this goes.

It all went so well. And then, as always, Cologne happened. 😔

But the worst thing wasn’t the delay. It was rather that I was sitting in this train for over 6 hours. And the restaurant only offered drinks. No food.

I did, of course, miss my connection. Luckily, only by about half an hour, having me be 40 minutes late at my destination. That still nets the journey an inconvenience of 4. That’s due to the fact that I actually had to be somewhere for a change. And while the timing still worked out, it did cut into “Drinking beer with friends” time.

Getting back, 2026-07-05

This is where the story turned really frustrating for me, and probably slightly amusing for my readers.

Let’s set the scene. It is 11:40 somewhere in northern Germany. I’ve got a slight hangover and just arrived at the train station for my 11:47 train. That train was supposed to conduct me to my 8 minute switchover into the ICE which will bring me all the way home. So I fished my phone out of my pocket and had a look at the trusty DB Navigator app. Which happily, and I assume with an evil cackle, informed me that my switchover now was only four minutes.

But I remained cautiously optimistic. Trains generally have some buffer in the speed. Plus I didn’t have to change platforms. So there was still hope.

Of course that hope got dashed, by a temporary issue with one of the doors. I ended up arriving only a few minutes too late.

So, re-planning. I scrolled through the Navigator, and all the good, direct connections were completely booked out. No exceptions. So I went onto a complex, 4 switchover, two of them less than 10 minutes connection, with the first stop being Hannover.

While still standing at my previous stop, I saw this old train:

These carriages are from the Rheingold train. It was what I would call a “prestige” train, with 1st class carriages only, back in the 60s up to the 80s.

Sadly, it was driven by a modern electric engine, not the original ones. Probably just a hell of a lot cheaper to run modern engines, I would assume.

But let’s continue with my journey. My next stop was in the city of Hannover. During my rather long switchover there, I decided on a different connection than my original plan B. It had two major advantages: I would only have one more switchover, and that switchover would be 36 minutes long. Instead of three more, two of which would have been less than 10 minutes.

This next train came as quite a surprise, because it looked like this:

That’s not a Deutsche Bahn train. Instead, it’s an ECE (EuroCityExpress) of the Swiss national train company. It was headed to Basel through western Germany, which might explain why it was there.

Sadly, the only seat I was able to book was facing another seat without a table in the middle, so there are sadly no computering with SBB pictures. ☹️ The interior looks like this:

Note also the display in the background. It confused me multiple times during the journey, because it never updated and didn’t show updated arrival times. Overall, I found the SBB train alright. The lack of a table suitable for computering was hardly their fault, as this was the last seat remaining anyway. But I will say that I do prefer the seats in DB’s first class, but that might honestly just be familiarity speaking.

Conforming to the Swiss’ reputation for punctuality, the 35 minutes of my last switchover were not nearly enough. I was late by about half an hour. But I still almost got it, because my connecting train was also pretty late, but it sadly made up some time, so I ended up missing it by about 10 minutes or so. At this point, it was already 22:00. After missing this connection, I was already stranded, as there was now no possible train connection to make it to my ultimate destination. So I decided to at least try to get as close to it as possible.

Luckily, my next train was an ICE again, and I was able to partake in some food to steel myself for a night in a hotel or in the train station. I arrived at my last station at around 00:00. Large train station get eerily quiet at this time of day on a Sunday.

But here, the travel gods had mercy on me. For one, I was stranded in a major rail hub, so DB’s info point was still staffed. And when I went in there, there was another passenger wanting to get to my home town too. And when there are two people stranded, Deutsche Bahn pays for a taxi/cab. If it’s just one person, you just get a hotel paid for.

And so I spend the last part of my journey in a taxi hurtling over the Autobahn and finally arrived home at 01:24. Luckily, I had already taken Monday off.

Surprisingly, this was only my second-worst Deutsche Bahn experience. The worst one was back in my school days. We did a class trip to Prague in 12th grade, where a lot of us were already 18. It was a hell of a lot of fun. But on the way back, we only got as far as Leipzig. But back then, Germany was a different country. And so Deutsche Bahn, instead of telling us to find a hotel to spend the night, found us an ICE train which needed to be close to our ultimate destination for its regular route, and they put us on it and re-routed it through our home town. Pretty nice experience, to tell the truth.

Tally

Well, it is what it is. Over 6 hours late at my destination, and arriving by taxi, not by train. with that, I’m now at an average of over 1h of destination delay. I hope I still get to see the day where Deutsche Bahn actually gets better again.