Adventures with Deutsche Bahn

Two days after my arrival in Frankfurt, I encountered the first true challenge of my living-abroad experience: successfully navigating the German train system.

I’m not going to lie: there are certain elements of German life about which I have formed unrealistic and idealized expectations. Train travel is definitely one of these things. It’s not entirely my fault: as an American, I’m heir to the idea of the “romance of the rails,” since travel by train is for the most part something out of an earlier time, associated with the Wild West and soldiers being seen off at the station by their sweethearts and so on. Out of this backgroud, plus stories collected from friends who had been to Europe, I concocted this fairy-tale image of Deutche Bahn: a travel-by-magic public transportation system that enabled one to go anywhere, anytime, almost just by wishing. The reality of Deutsche Bahn is, needless to say, eine ganz andere Sache, as I have now found out from experience.

Frankfurt am Main Hauptbahnhof

On Saturday, S took me to the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof (main train station) to buy my ticket to Köln/Cologne. I bought my ticket from a Fahrkartenautomat, or ticket machine. While part of me feels guilty about this—as a visitor in Germany whose express goal is to improve her German, don’t I have some kind of responsibility to myself, if no one else, to speak with as many Germans in as many different situations as possible?— the opportunity to get my card from a machine, and shield my fragile ego where my language ability is concerned just this once, was too tempting to pass by. And I ended up having to talk to someone anyway, after the machine took my money and did not produce a ticket like it was supposed to.

The ticket I ended up choosing was for an IC (Innercity) train that was scheduled to leave the Frankfurt Hbf. at 11:42 and arrive at the Cologne Hbf at 2:10 (14:10, actually, since they rock military time here, at least for official things like train schedules). I needed to be in the Cologne Hauptbahnhof by 2:30 PM on Monday in order to meet up with the other American ETAs— from Cologne, we would be bussed to the orientation location in Altenberg. It was a snug fit, time-wise, but I chose the cheapest ticket possible, because, even though my travel costs would ultimately be reimbursed by Fulbright, it seemed like the fiscally responsible thing to do. Also I wanted a ticket with no Umstiege, or changes, because I was sure—for reasons that will shortly become clear— that the minute I got off the train at any station other than the Cologne Hbf all hope would be lost.

On Monday, I arrived at the Bahnhof at around 11 o’clock, fairly serene but not wanting to leave anything to chance, and promptly realized that I had no idea what Gleis, or platform, my train was supposed to leave from. Suddenly panicked, I looked up at the Departures board overhead and saw exactly ZERO trains that matched the information I had. This realization was followed by around ten minutes of pacing and panicking before, finally, I got up the nerve to go up to the Information desk and ask an attendant whether the train I thought I was taking did, in fact, exist. In precise but very fast-moving German, he told me that mine was the IC 2024 train (Cologne is only one among many stops, which is why I didn’t see it posted anywhere on the board, although the IC 2024 was there), that it was leaving from Gleis 6, and that it was currently running ten minutes late.

So I made my way to Gleis 6, where I promptly resumed panicking. If the train was running ten minutes late—as a computerized voice reminded me every couple of minutes via loudspeaker that it was—it would get me to Cologne with only ten minutes to spare. Unsure of whether I could find another train to Cologne that would get me there in time, not knowing how to go about exchanging my ticket even if I did, and lacking the time to figure it out, I decided to stick to Gleis 6 and hope there were no further delays.

The train did arrive, finally, at about 11:55. At 12:05 it had still not left the station. In the meantime, I boarded the train, hit several unsuspecting passengers with the baggage that I had thought was so admirably compact and travel-friendly, and sat in a seat that turned out to be someone else’s by reservation. And all the while the minutes ticked by and my chances of getting to Cologne in a timely fashion dwindled away to nothing. Then, at 12:05, a voice came over the PA system to announce that there had been further mechanical difficulties with the train, that it would be underway as soon as possible, and that, if we were going to directly to Cologne or needed to be there before a particular time, we could take a different train, which was departing from the Gleis next door in approximately five minutes. All of this information was delivered very quickly and very indistinctly, over a loudspeaker, and in German, and the combination of these factors caused me to wonder if I had understood correctly, or if the tiny voice in my head telling me to get off the train might just be a manifestation of panic, to obey which would be a catastrophic decision that would destroy any chances I had of even possibly getting to Cologne in time. So I hesitated for a few moments, got off the IC 2024, got back on the IC 2024, asked someone sitting nearby to repeat what the loudspeaker had said about going to Cologne, and then got off the train again—barely in time to jump on the train next door, which was set to arrive at Cologne Hbf. at 13:30, before the doors closed.

My new train was an ICE (Intercity Express) train—a faster model making fewer stops and costing around one-and-a-half times what the CE cost. This last nugget of information convinced me that, having gotten on this train with nothing but my original CE ticket, I was now a stowaway or a joyrider. Consequently I spent the first twenty-five minutes in a cold sweat, sure that, when the conductor came by and asked to see my ticket, my cover would be blown and I would be flung unceremoniously from the train or, at best, deposited at the next stop, which would definitely not be the Cologne Hbf. I started rehearsing my explanation in my head: “Ich war auf einem früheren Zug, aber es gab mechanische Probleme damit und wir wurden davon informiert, dass wir mit diesem Zug fahren durften, wenn wir direct nach Köln gehen wollten…” (“I was on an earlier train, but there were mechanical problems with it, and we were informed that, if we wanted to go directly to Cologne, we could take this train…”) All of which turned out to be unnecessary: the conductor was (to me) astonishingly uninterested in how I came to be on his train. I presented my ticket, he gave it a cursory glance, punched it, and handed it back to me. The whole interaction lasted a total of five seconds, tops. I spent the majority of the remaining train ride asleep, exhausted from a combination of residual jet-lag and the sudden relaxation of extreme stress. As a result, I missed out on most of the scenery between Frankfurt and Cologne, which, according to G, is very nice.

Thus, after much Ärger and Angst, I arrived at the Cologne Hbf in (approximately) one piece. Identifying the Fulbright meeting spot, which had caused me some anxiety the night before, turned out to be a matter of walking into the lobby, looking around, and noticing a clump of people with large suitcases who, upon closer inspection, were all speaking English with American accents. After the exertions of the morning, it was a relief to be able to attach myself to this blob and know that, for the next few days, people who knew what they were doing would be telling me exactly where I needed to 

go and when. And in English, no less.

The return journey from Cologne on Thursday morning was much less eventful. Again, I bought the ticket with a Bahnkartenutomat, and learned from a fellow Fulbrighter that I could in fact print my travel information—Gleis number and all— through the same machine. I had planned to spend a few hours seeing the city before I returned to Frankfurt, but the it was overcast and rainy—far from sight-seeing weather. Also, due to circumstances that I had not foreseen, I found myself bringing a suitcase back to Frankfurt for another Fulbrighter who suddenly had to return to America due to a death in the family. So I ended up taking a 9:50 train that, as it happens, several other Fulbrighters were taking as far as Mainz. We sat together on the train and chatted (in English, of course) about the coming year and our various experiences in Germany before now, and I even got a glimpse of the lauded scenery, including the Lorely, a beautiful rock outcropping on the Rhine with a suitably romantic legend attached; and the picturesque city of Koblenz, which is now definitely on my list of cities to be visited.

After the Mainz stop, it was only half an hour or so before I arrived back in Frankfurt. Between the Frankfurt Airport stop and the Hauptbahnhof, light-headed with the relief of having made it there and back again without any major catastrophes, I found myself in conversation with a couple of Germans, sharing my (unsolicited) impressions of the German train system. “It’s so much less complicated than plane travel,” I pronounced blithely—by which I meant only that there are much fewer formalities and nary a security checkpoint to be seen. The older of the two, a woman with glasses and a sensible German haircut, smiled indulgently. But the younger, an Asian guy about my own age traveling with a guitar case, laughed at me outright. I don’t remember exactly what he said to me, but the gist was, “You really must be new here,” and, “You’ll find out otherwise soon enough.”

I have found out otherwise, of course. One trip and it’s already clear to me that trains run late and break down, stations are fast-paced and hectic, fellow passengers are preoccupied and sometimes impatient. I’ve written in a previous post that airplane travel, when it runs smoothly, is a meditative process. At it’s best, train travel appears to be anything but. Still, it can’t be denied that train travel is incredibly valuable to someone like me, who would like to travel a lot— within Germany as well as outside of it—but doesn’t have access to a car. (Another possibility is mitfahrgelegenheit.de, which is in essence organized hitch-hiking. I don’t know yet if I’ll be brave enough to give that one a try.)

Convenient, but not necessarily efficient—that’s Deutsche Bahn in reality, from what I can tell. Hopefully, the system will become more intuitive for me the more I use it. Perhaps, in the end, I will be one of those seasoned train-travelers who laughs at the naïve newcomer, or maybe tells the story of her first train ride: “I was new to Germany and had to get from Frankfurt to Cologne...”