Easter weekend was travel weekend for me and a few of my Indian friends. During every other trip I feel – “Oh man! It can’t get any better than this!”, and I am soon proved wrong. The ‘foreign’ trip to Netherlands and Belgium from Germany was no different. Travel through the beautiful cities, countryside, valleys and hills was made easy and comfortable by the excellent railway network in these countries. More importantly, the Interrail and Eurail Youth Passes and the group tickets of the Deutsche Bahn - DB (German Railways) made the trip expenses fit into the small sized pockets of us students! However the ‘cheap and best’ service world famous in India, is unheard of in Europe and economy travel here comes at a price. We pay in minutes and hours.
Lately I have been forced by the Deutsche Bahn to swallow my words in an earlier post about the punctuality of the German Transport system. ‘Delayed Bahn’ seems more appropriate a full form for 'DB' now!!! A few minutes delay is common place these days, half an hour happens once in a while, a couple of hours can’t be totally ruled out and on your ‘lucky’ day, the train might just not show up!!! So you see, a tightly packed connection is surely asking for trouble. Short of choice, our travel plan to and from the German border relied on DB to have their best days then!
I bought the 'Quer Durch Das Land' ticket, literally meaning 'cross through the country'. But the important question being – how long will it take to cross?! The group ticket of 5 avails a day long travel throughout Germany in the slower regional trains at a nominal price. In addition to the regional trains being slow, like their name suggests, are limited to certain regions of the country. Which means, a travel through the country taking them usually has many change overs.
This is what the return journey from the border looked like, with change over times in brackets.
Luxembourg -> Karthaus (10 mins) -> Homburg (56 mins) -> Mannheim (10 mins) -> Heilbronn (10 mins) -> Stuttgart (29 mins) -> Esslingen (21 mins) -> St. Bernardt Eugenboltz Straße (our dormitory)!!!
More crucial than the number of changes were the 3 with 10 minutes buffer.
Fingers crossed, we boarded the across border train at Luxembourg. The Karthaus and Homburg changes passed by eventless. Murphy's law states – 'If something can go wrong, it will'! So the luxury of 56 minutes at Homburg was to be of no advantage. But then drama began! Half way to Mannheim, the driver announced at Kaiserslautern, with 12 more stations to go, that we have to make way for a faster train and the all too familiar 'Wir bitten um Entschuldigung' (We beg your pardon). And of course, the delay was approximately 10 minutes!!! The problems with missing the next connection were – 1) our last connection to our dorm was the last bus for the night, 2) one of my friends had to catch an ICE (fast train) with a reservation to Freiburg, which also had 10 minutes stop over.
So we cheered every subsequent station nervously, like the boundaries scored by Dhoni and Yuvraj during the World Cup finals! I meanwhile took the opportunity to preach some philosophy about the lack of control of humans over the happenings! (Sab maya hain!!!) The ICE guy suddenly could predict the future and his crystal balls told him that his train would also be delayed! The girls just worried and kept saying 'I hope we make it' countless number of times, breaking their nuckles! (As if the rest of us were hoping something different!) As the number of stations to Mannheim counted down, so did the minutes. After the last stop - Ludwigshafen before Mannheim, the wheels seemed to have gotten more sluggish, but so had the seconds hand of our watches. Each second seemed to last forever and our gaze toggled between our watches and the approaching station, like the spectators in a tennis match! As the train approched the platform, we could see our next train on the other side. I badly missed the manual doors of our good old Indian trains, where you can jump off at will! When the train finally halted, it was exactly time and it was upto the driver of the other train either to leave with us or without. The electric doors once shut and disabled, leave no thrill of boarding a moving train, 'Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge' style! At blinding pace the 3 of us ran carrying our huge backpacks and pulled at the door handle. Thanks heavens, the door slid open!!! Panting and laughing at same time, we found some empty seats and crashed on them, just as the train rolled out of Mannheim. An SMS a little later told me that the ICE was in fact delayed by an hour! All iz well! My friend still boasts about his perfect prediction.
The rest of the connections fell in place pretty smoothly and gave no chance for heroics (thankfully!). Although the windmills of Nederlands and the historical towns of Belgium are still fresh in my mind, the tension, the anxiety, the nervousness, the final dash and the sense of accomplishment and joy on making it into the train will remain one of the main highlights of this awesome trip.
Lately I have been forced by the Deutsche Bahn to swallow my words in an earlier post about the punctuality of the German Transport system. ‘Delayed Bahn’ seems more appropriate a full form for 'DB' now!!! A few minutes delay is common place these days, half an hour happens once in a while, a couple of hours can’t be totally ruled out and on your ‘lucky’ day, the train might just not show up!!! So you see, a tightly packed connection is surely asking for trouble. Short of choice, our travel plan to and from the German border relied on DB to have their best days then!
I bought the 'Quer Durch Das Land' ticket, literally meaning 'cross through the country'. But the important question being – how long will it take to cross?! The group ticket of 5 avails a day long travel throughout Germany in the slower regional trains at a nominal price. In addition to the regional trains being slow, like their name suggests, are limited to certain regions of the country. Which means, a travel through the country taking them usually has many change overs.
This is what the return journey from the border looked like, with change over times in brackets.
Luxembourg -> Karthaus (10 mins) -> Homburg (56 mins) -> Mannheim (10 mins) -> Heilbronn (10 mins) -> Stuttgart (29 mins) -> Esslingen (21 mins) -> St. Bernardt Eugenboltz Straße (our dormitory)!!!
More crucial than the number of changes were the 3 with 10 minutes buffer.
Fingers crossed, we boarded the across border train at Luxembourg. The Karthaus and Homburg changes passed by eventless. Murphy's law states – 'If something can go wrong, it will'! So the luxury of 56 minutes at Homburg was to be of no advantage. But then drama began! Half way to Mannheim, the driver announced at Kaiserslautern, with 12 more stations to go, that we have to make way for a faster train and the all too familiar 'Wir bitten um Entschuldigung' (We beg your pardon). And of course, the delay was approximately 10 minutes!!! The problems with missing the next connection were – 1) our last connection to our dorm was the last bus for the night, 2) one of my friends had to catch an ICE (fast train) with a reservation to Freiburg, which also had 10 minutes stop over.
So we cheered every subsequent station nervously, like the boundaries scored by Dhoni and Yuvraj during the World Cup finals! I meanwhile took the opportunity to preach some philosophy about the lack of control of humans over the happenings! (Sab maya hain!!!) The ICE guy suddenly could predict the future and his crystal balls told him that his train would also be delayed! The girls just worried and kept saying 'I hope we make it' countless number of times, breaking their nuckles! (As if the rest of us were hoping something different!) As the number of stations to Mannheim counted down, so did the minutes. After the last stop - Ludwigshafen before Mannheim, the wheels seemed to have gotten more sluggish, but so had the seconds hand of our watches. Each second seemed to last forever and our gaze toggled between our watches and the approaching station, like the spectators in a tennis match! As the train approched the platform, we could see our next train on the other side. I badly missed the manual doors of our good old Indian trains, where you can jump off at will! When the train finally halted, it was exactly time and it was upto the driver of the other train either to leave with us or without. The electric doors once shut and disabled, leave no thrill of boarding a moving train, 'Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge' style! At blinding pace the 3 of us ran carrying our huge backpacks and pulled at the door handle. Thanks heavens, the door slid open!!! Panting and laughing at same time, we found some empty seats and crashed on them, just as the train rolled out of Mannheim. An SMS a little later told me that the ICE was in fact delayed by an hour! All iz well! My friend still boasts about his perfect prediction.
The rest of the connections fell in place pretty smoothly and gave no chance for heroics (thankfully!). Although the windmills of Nederlands and the historical towns of Belgium are still fresh in my mind, the tension, the anxiety, the nervousness, the final dash and the sense of accomplishment and joy on making it into the train will remain one of the main highlights of this awesome trip.
haha..now i'm the 'ICE' guy! i thought there will be further drama in ur journey
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