I’m very jealous of the offer on German rail that passengers can get unlimited regional travel by trains for around £60 a month. The German rail system is routinely dreadful, but this is a scheme that I would very much like in the UK. At the moment, £60 feels like it would get me a seat at 23:07 to get from London Liverpool Street to Norwich, there’s so much more that we can do.
It’s a rather lovely looking train, it’s operated as Deutsche Bahn Regio Schleswig-Holstein.
This is the same, or similar, to the regional trains in Italy and I was thinking that I would be making a rare very positive post about German rail. At this point a conductor came on and threw everyone off with some considerable rudeness, so he was having an altercation with another passenger. I wonder sometimes whether Deutsche Bahn has some sort of commitment to making passengers suffer to some degree, but perhaps that’s being unfair.
They decided to half the length of the train and although I’m sure that they didn’t do that to annoy me although it did show impressive dedication to that principle. It also made the service rather cramped, but here’s the confirmation that we were off to Hamburg though.
There was no seating available, other than in the empty First class section, so people made themselves comfortable on the steps. On a different matter, I found a seat and had access to a power point, so my nerves were calm.
This is the First section that remained empty during the journey, theoretical comfort in action…
Unfortunately, a large number of football fans from FC Hansa Rostock boarded and put hundreds of stickers up around the train. But, they also abused women who took refuge upstairs where I was. Other passengers consoled them, because there were no staff to be seen anywhere, which is always reassuring when the train has developed the atmosphere of a lightly mobile police incident. The fans’ game was also to try and shake the train so it was hardly the most comfortable of journeys for many passengers.
Anyway, this wasn’t a long journey and it was only just over an hour to get to Hamburg. I suspect that if I had selected the train before then the whole experience would have been very different, but this felt like a typical train journey on Deutsche Bahn. I’m pleased to say that the next leg of my journey on Flix Train was considerably better. I’ll just have to go back to Germany and take more rail journeys and I’m sleflessly very willing to do that for this blog.