This Is What Happened When All Our German Trains Were 100+ Minutes Late
It’s something that I want to forget very soon
Usually, I love to travel by train. Just sitting and staring out the window getting some work done, listening to music, or reading a good book about politics or history.
It’s a state in which I seem to flourish. It’s inspirational.
When we were in Switzerland and Austria, I couldn’t take my eyes off the beautiful nature in the two countries. Especially the lakes of Switzerland in the center and the southwest of the country.
Let me tell you one thing about Swiss trains. They’re always on time and if you are too, you won’t miss a single one of them.
I’ve never witnessed such greatness in public transport.
But on the last day of our journey, in Germany, things were really different. It wasn't fun and I didn’t expect it to have such a big impact on our journey.
It started the day before we left the hotel in Bad Reichenhall.
We hadn’t planned anything for our trip back to the Netherlands and the night before we left I started figuring out a route in my rail planner app. It was a real mess.
Almost every single train was fully booked.
There was a highspeed train going from Munich to Düsseldorf. Duration: almost five hours. But just a couple of seats are available.
I decided to book them and see it all from there.
The next morning when we arrived at the German border it was chaos with German police everywhere and the train was set for departure 30 minutes late. We had 10 minutes to change trains in Munich so we were never going to make it, we thought.
But in the end, the train departed at the correct time and even though we had almost 10 minutes of delay, thanks to the trains in Munich we were able to make it to our seats.
That was pretty stressful on its own, and the worst things were yet to come.
Around 3 PM, the train arrived in Dusseldorf, one hour too late, and we missed our connection to Arnhem — so that sucked really bad. The alternative plan was set to travel to Leer, where our father would pick us up.
You can guess what happened, there was only one train that went directly to Leer. It was 100 minutes delayed because people were walking on the train tracks.
With a bit of creative route-planning, we ended up on a regional train to Münster where we could take the train to Leer as well. That train was 15 minutes late, so we could board it — lucky us.
It was planned to arrive in Münster at a time that we would have 30 minutes of change time. That bloody train stopped about every five minutes in the middle of the meadows which delayed it by another 35 minutes.
“Bye train that we had to board!”
Münster isn’t that far away from Düsseldorf, but it took about 3–4 hours to get there.
I hate Germany for that.
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