Thank your for Trävelling with Deutsche Bahn

I’m traveling with Deutsche Bahn again, and it’s frustrating again.

I decided: Enough is enough. Yesterday’s journey went off the rails before it even began. Instead of just quietly fuming, I decided to write about it. And not just this one. Instead, I decided to write one post about every train trip I take. And not just the bad ones! The good ones as well. It’s just that the bad ones generally motivate me to write more readily.

If you’d like to follow just this series, instead of all the other rather nerdy stuff going on in this blog, head to the trävelling tag’s page.

There are three reasons for starting this series:

1. Katharsis for me. Writing down my frustration helps
2. Hopefully some interesting insights for people who don’t live in a country with a comprehensive rail system but still like to read about train journeys
3. Also providing some entertainment for people who live in a country with a working rail system

Let’s start with a bit of an introduction. I don’t own a car, and I’m not a big fan of avoidable physical exertions. So I’m also not a big fan of bikes. My main mode of transportation is public transport. I’ve been lucky over the past two decades, in that I’ve studied and am now working in cities with good public transport. My current home city in the south of Germany is rather wealthy, and has invested a lot of that wealth into a good, city-owned public transport company running a frequent, well-spread bus network and two tram lines. I’m absolutely loving it there.

I grew up very rural. I got my first drivers license at 16, for a 50 ccm scooter (the small brother of the motorcycle, not the electric ones you stand on. Think “Vespa”.), which at least up to now was the only motorized individual mode of transport I’ve ever owned. And it was great. It allowed me to do things I couldn’t do before, unless I wanted to ask my parents to drive me around.

There was some public transport back in my home village, but it left a lot to be desired, especially after school time was over. And in Germany at that time, that was 14:00 latest.

Right after finishing school in 2006, I did my required nine months of military service. For three of those months encompassing basic training, I was stationed in Gera, a city in eastern Germany, pretty far away from my home town in Ostwestfalen (Eastern Westphalia). That’s where my regular use of Deutsche Bahn’s trains really started, going home every Friday afternoon and back every Sunday evening. Back then, the Bundeswehr paid for a 2nd class ticket. If I remember correctly, it was some sort of special ticket, not for every individual journey, but allowed use only between certain locations - your home town and your garrison town. It was genuinely an interesting time for train travel. We already had cell phones, but not smartphones. So when a train was late and I knew I wouldn’t be able to catch my connection, I couldn’t look up an alternative like I could today - but I could call my dad to ask him to go on Deutsche Bahn’s website and check some alternate connections.

One really weird thing back then: There were still smoking carriages. Our running joke was that about an hour into the journey, there was no need to light another cigarette - just take a deep breath. 😬 We liked it back then, but in hindsight, I’m feeling really sorry for the conductors who had to go in there as part of their work.

After that weekly experience with long-distance trains, I moved out of my home for good, to a nearby University town about 1.5h away by regional train. Those experiences were actually worse than the previous long-distance, because the university town was not that well-connected when it comes to trains, so accidents or other issues on a single line could already lead to massive problems. Plus, the switchover time of the standard connection was pretty short. Lot’s of time spend in small regional train stations waiting for another connection.

Then came my move to southern Germany, and the current connection I’ve been doing for the past nine years, going from the city I’m living in now back home to visit family or friends. Generally, the trip takes around 6 - 7 hours, depending on the connection. I could have it a bit faster, but all of the faster connections would also mean more and shorter switchovers. Which, in Deutsche Bahn’s current state, is just too risky. Most of the time, I’ve only got a single switchover, either in Cologne, which is still rather far from my destination, or in Dortmund, which is close enough to provide me with multiple options to get home without having to switch trains again.

I like train rides

Before we get into the negative part about yesterday’s journey, let me say the following: I mostly like train rides. Especially longer, long-distance ones. Checking on Google Maps, the journey from my current home city to my home town is something around 550km and is supposed to take about 5h45m by car. But it’s also Wednesday. I can only assume that the same trip takes a lot longer on Friday evenings, during rush hour.

Either way, let’s assume for the sake of this section that using a car and driving is about 30 minutes faster than my train journey. I still don’t consider driving an alternative. I’d be sitting in a car for almost six hours. I would have to actually concentrate, especially in the dark season, driving at night. Instead, on the train, I can actually do things like writing this blog post.

I’m not really sure what it looks like when it comes to cost, mostly because I don’t really know what owning a car costs these days. Concerning the train rides, I’m paying a yearly fee of 125,- € for a BahnCard 25 1. class. That card deducts 25% of the price from the ticket cost for first class tickets for any Deutsche Bahn trains. With that reduction, most of the time I’m still using the cheapest price category for first class, which is the “Super-Sparpreis”. There is only a certain amount of seats available for it, and the price depends on when you’re booking. I’m normally paying somewhere between 150 and 200 Euros for a trip home, meaning including the ticket there and back again as well as seat reservations. You can skip the seat reservations, but then there’s a chance you will be standing, including with a 1. class ticket.

To me, train rides are a really nice couple of hours, where there’s really nothing I have to do. It just sit there, with nothing I really have to concentrate on, besides perhaps checking the train’s progress from time to time to see whether my itinerary still works. That’s very much different to travel by car, where you have to constantly concentrate on the road and everybody else on the road.

Here’s also one the few times where I actively recognized marketing working on me. Back in 2019 or so, Deutsche Bahn send me a gift card upgrading any journey to first class from my normal second class travel. Shortly thereafter, I was planning another trip home and decided to use the upgrade. I never looked back. Much more room. Plus I love the single-seat rows they have. Power sockets on every seat (now standard in second class as well, I believe), food delivery to your seat, including digital ordering. So I’m now one of those snobbish first class travelers. 😅

Over the years, I got a lot more experienced with train travel. I know what I like, I know which connections are prone to delays. In short, I’ve learned to work around Deutsche Bahn’s quirks. I go for the connection which has the fewest switchovers, even if it takes longer. I go for connections with longer switchover times. 20 minutes has shown to be a good value. Any delay above that, and there’s a decent chance something more general is broken in Deutsche Bahn’s network, and all is lost anyway. I’ve also observed (although I won’t make any general claims) that it’s not just individual trains which gather delays, but seemingly the entire system. Dangers for lateness, and especially the longer delays, seem to grow throughout the day. So earlier connections seem to work better than later ones.

But the main thing I’ve learned, and the one I’m genuinely sad about? I no longer plan anything on the day of a train journey. 😔 I always try to arrive at my destination a day early, if at all feasible. This means a few things. First, being able to do this requires a significant level of privilege. I can take a day off without any discussion whenever I like, for the majority of the year. If I fail to get back to my home in time to get to work the next morning, my boss won’t be happy - but he also won’t put a mark into my file. But it also means that certain things are just problematic. E.g. occasions where I’m supposed to arrive and leave on the same day, and do something important in-between? I can’t take Deutsche Bahn. Not with barely 50% reliability.

I would like to live in a Germany where I can actually take the train when I have an appointment on the same day.

Yesterday’s Journey

Alright, let’s finally get to the trigger for the creation of this new series: Yesterday’s journey. I’m on my way to my hometown to give a talk at the career day of my old high school.

I booked this one very early, right after I got the date at the end of November. I got a somewhat surprising itinerary via Cologne, instead of the typical routing with a switchover in Dortmund. I didn’t really like it, because Dortmund is already close to my hometown, and there are a lot of trains I could take directly from there. But I still took the connection, as it fulfilled my two rules. It had only the one switchover in Cologne, and the switchover time was exactly twenty minutes. So far so good. At some point in the middle of January, I happened to look at the DB Navigator and saw the feared exclamation mark with the red background on the travel plan for this journey. Looking at it, it showed something along the lines of:

We’re currently changing the time table. Please check back 1-2 days before your journey begins.

WTF? That was a new one. I’d never seen something like this before. But I also normally only book at most a month in advance, not three, as I had in this case. So I waited a couple more weeks to see what happens. I was now getting perilously close to travel day, and the message still hadn’t changed, either to tell me that everything would be alright or to tell me that I needed to change my schedule.

So I decided to do it myself. I assumed that whatever happened, the train binding would be lifted. The train binding for tickets in Germany means that for the cheaper tickets, you can only take the exact train noted on your ticket. One of the perks with the more expensive classes of tickets is that you can take any train which fits your general itinerary. But when Deutsche Bahn screws up, they lift the train binding on the cheaper tickets as well, so you can find your own way home.

So now I wanted to change only my seat reservation, assuming that I could use my ticket without train binding. But it was already pretty close to my travel day, so a lot of the earlier trains were already booked solid. I ended up booking a considerably later train, but with the same routing through Cologne. A few days later, the warning in the DB Navigator finally changed and informed me that my original journey was no longer possible, and that train binding was lifted. Excellent, I thought.

Well, queue me religiously checking DB Navigator all morning today. And there it was. About two hours before I had to leave, the terrible red exclamation mark appeared on the second leg of my journey, from Cologne to my hometown. The train was originally planned as what’s called “Doppeltraktion” in German. It’s basically two ICE trains mounted together, to make for an overall longer train. They’re used on routes with high capacity requirements, and sometimes on routes where the trains are split into their individual units at some point in the journey. I think one of those double traction trains has around 1000 passengers worth of capacity.

But in this case, there was an issue: My train from Cologne onward would only have one ICE train. Not two connected together. Which meant it only had half its planned capacity. And my reservation was in the part of the train which somehow got lost this morning. So not only didn’t I have a seat reservation anymore, but the train would also be filled to the brim with all the passengers from the two original trains.

After pulling out a few of my remaining hairs and going to the Fediverse to rant a little bit, I had a look at my first train, from my city to Cologne. And I realized that that’s a train which goes straight through to Dortmund. No idea why DB Navigator didn’t show that connection at all. So I extended my reservation to Dortmund instead of just to Cologne and boarded. That train was where most of this post was written. When I arrived in Dortmund, I had a number of options. and one of them was my original ICE from Cologne to my hometown, which also stopped in Dortmund. Because all my other options would leave a bit later, I decided to take a peek into that train’s windows to see how full it still was.

Turns out it wasn’t full at all anymore, at least not in first class. And it was perfectly on time. So I boarded. And now I’m writing these lines in the train I was originally supposed to join in Cologne, but ended up joining in Dortmund.

One interesting thing to note: I got a mail from Deutsche Bahn, about an hour before I was set to arrive in Cologne for the originally planned train switch. It informed me that my reservation was actually transferred to the replacement train. This was very nice to read, but I only read it very shortly before we were set to arrive in Cologne, and I ended up deciding not to act on it. I had already booked my replacement reservation and was safely sitting in that train. And the other train was still shown as being overloaded. But it was nice to see that Deutsche Bahn actually moved over my reservation after the coaches with my original reservation were canceled. Two things I’d like to see improved:

1. Those kinds of re-booking should be shown before the journey starts, not in the middle of it
2. The re-booking ought to have been shown in the DB Navigator app as well, not just as an email

Moral of this story: Deutsche Bahn works in mysterious ways.

Tally

Let’s keep a running tally of my train journeys. This one is a bit difficult to score. I’m arriving about four hours later than originally planned. But that original plan was from November, three months ago. I feel it would be bad statistics to log it under the same “lateness” time as instances where everything started going wrong only on the day of the journey itself. Because as I write these lines, it looks like I’m going to arrive exactly on time, as per my plans when I woke up this morning.

I think we will ignore instances like this one completely. If I had booked only last month, there would not have been any lateness at all. Plus, they announced it reasonably early, not just a day before the journey.

So let’s come up with some metrics to judge a train voyage:

• Inconvenience Scale of 1 to 10, very subjective measure of how annoyed I was with the journey. This is not at all intended to reflect lateness. But rather, stuff like “I had to run across four platforms to catch my connection”, or “I missed my connection and was stranded in Hannover for an hour” or “I had to re-book my journey four times on the day”. It will be highly subjective. E.g. my final train being late by an hour? Might very well be 0 inconveniece, because I didn’t need to catch any more connections
• Dest Lateness An ongoing tally of minutes I arrived late at the destination. This is only lateness at the ultimate destination, not delayed trains in-between
• Overall Lateness This is all lateness accumulated at any switchover or final stop
• Duration Overall time from starting station to ending station, just for info

So let’s begin:

And that’s it. Next trip on Sunday. Let’s see how that one goes.