How long does the train journey take SM ?

I well remember DanAir flights Dan Dare I think we nicknamed them and along with British Caledonian they were the two companies that offered cheap flights from Germany to the Uk in the 7Os and 8os. OH would often use DanAir to pop over to London for the weekend to see his parents would lived in the South.

Hi Judith, it takes just over 10hrs all together - we will be getting the 10.57am Eurostar to Brussels where we change onto the DB ICE service to Cologne, where we change again to the ICE to Berlin. We arrive at 9.10pm after if all goes well. So yes, it would probably be quicker to fly but we thought that 10hrs city centre to city centre and no trekking to and from the airport and the depressing hanging around in departures etc wasn't that bad. And had to be better than 'Dan Dare' (I have to tell my friend that!) Also, both my friend and I are now more arthritic than we were in our student days (we were classed as mature students even then ) and we decided that however counter-intutive it was, that this was probably a more comfortable way of doing it because if you get stiff, it's easier to go for a walk on a train than on a plane and that there would be more room etc anyway compared to being crammed into your average economy plane seat. We did consider taking a late afternoon Eurostar to Paris and then getting the DB Sleeper servide to Berlin but in the end decided we fancied the thought of actually seeing the countryside we'd be travelling through. And once I'd discovered these special fares, it did become something of a 'How cheap can we get to Berlin for' sort of challenge too

So we decided to approach it with the attitude that the holiday starts as soon as we board the Eurostar and that a meal in the restaurant car and/or a picnic with special treats and a decent bottle of wine was always going to be better than the usual plane offerings or a Boots meal deal bought in departures. Though I think that we'll save the wine until we are safely on the train from Cologne

Booking the tickets on the DBahn website was really easy - apart from the minor hiccough when I realised once the booking confirmation arrived for our outward journey that we'd been allocated side by side window and aisle seats and that I could have asked for us to have two window seats facing each other. Due to lack of practice, my German isn't what it was - I'll need to dig out my old text books and do some revision - but because it's easiest to book these tickets as two singles rather than returns I'd cracked it for booking the return journey. Oh, and for some reason the website only gave me the option of having the tickets sent by post for the outbound leg but for the return journey it only gave me the option of an e-ticket! But again this could have been because of my less than perfect understanding of the website and/or of registering with DB coupled with the fact that I was nervous doing this for the first time. I'll know better for next time and in fact if all goes well, we are already actively considering going by train later in the year just as far as Cologne so that we catch the Christmas Markets.

This 'not flying' thing could become our newest eccentricity now that I've discovered that it's possible to get return ferry tickets to Bilboa from as little as £123! Guggenheim here we come with a bit of whale watching thrown in on the way!

SM

PS I don't think that I'd have had the confidence to negotiate all this on my own without the 'handholding' provided by the Man in Seat 61

http://www.seat61.com/Germany.htm

Thanks Sm

I did do the train trip from London a couple of times when I first came to live in Germany but it was pre Ice days and I think took almost 24hrs. In those far off days if you had booked a rail ticket you could take a luggage trunk with you free of charge (picked up by BR and delivered to our home in Germany by DB) . I had to take the overnight ferry from Harwich to the Hook then an endless train journey south. Still as you say you can at least stretch your legs and actually ten hours is not too bad especially when it's in comfort and there is something to see. I only seem to use the trains these days for journeys to and from airports or the occasional trip into Munich but DB are always offering special deals which I must check out.

Hope you have a good time. A trip to Berlin for me is long overdue, I haven't been since 1988 and would love to visit the old eastern part of the city to see the changes.

BTW I though the DB website was in English as well as German.

Hi Judith, yes, the site is available in English with regards to the 'field' names for when you are entering your information/request but some of the confirmation details and the info in the drop-down menus are then flagged up in German only. It was my own fault, having not double checked the details before hitting the 'confirm purchase' key it was only when I got the email confirming the reservation and read that carefully and saw 'fenster' and 'gang' that the penny dropped as to what I'd done. If I'd spotted that earlier when the details of the reservation came up on screen I could have gone back to the 'request page' and made the change. For the return journey I checked much more carefully at an earlier stage which 'radio buttons' I was clicking on in order to make sure that I did request facing seats.

It's no big deal and when I emailed their customer service people to ask if it was possible to change the reservation I got a very polite reply explaining that the whole process was automated and that the tickets were already on their way to me. No doubt someone was back in the office shaking their head and thinking 'Should have read it properly the first time' but I was more impressed with the efficiency of the whole operation despite my cackhandedness

As neither of us have been back since the re-unification of Germany we too are looking forward to visiting the old eastern sector. The last time we were there Potsdamer Platz was a ploughed minefield if my memory serves me right. Of course my friend doesn't even remember going and looking over the Wall at it anyway! I'm assuming that Kreutzfeld has probably changed as well - at the time it was a fairly flaky neighbourhood with a lot of squats and where many of the Turkish guestworkers lived because accommodation was of a poor standard but realtively cheap compared to other districts.

SM

PS I fell in love with long distance train travel in the 60s on a 24 hr ferry and train school trip to Interlaken. Even UK trains have improved since those days

Well we did it and it was brilliant! It in fact only takes a little over 9hrs - I had completely forgotten that Berlin would be an hour ahead of BST when calculating the journey time.

I am now an out and out fan of DBahn. The journey out was easy and the connections all went like clockwork - all three trains ran absolutely to time - the only hiccough was that the escalators up on to the platform at Brussels weren't working and we couldn't find an ordinary staircase to use unstead which meant chaos around the lifts. But that was as much down to down to passenger incompetence as anything else - word went around the milling crowd that the lift wasn't working either until the penny dropped that everybody thought somebody else was pushing the 'up' button and the reason the lift wasn't going anywhere was that nobody was asking it to

This meant that boarding the train to Cologne was a bit chaotic and in the crush my purse was lifted from my 'crossbody' bag. It was a strange incident - long story but it was quite quickly retrieved from the suspected pickpocket with nothing missing from it. I came to the conclusion that it was actually a botched attempt to try and get hold of any credit/debit cards for cloning so to be on the safe side I immediately cancelled all my cards before there would ahve been any chance to use the info to make purchases etc knowing that I had plenty of Euros in a separate purse that never left my possession and a friend who knew me well enough to lend me the money if I wanted to buy something expensive that I just couldn't do without from KaDeWe!

Coming back, our train from Berlin to Cologne was late - not by much but just enough to mean that by the time we'd battled the Friday evening rush hour crowds up onto our platform, we were just in time to see the train to Brussels pulling out dead on time. Asking the first person I could find in DBahn uniform what we should now do, we duly went to the Information/Travel Centre where initially the verbally very polite clerk made it clear by his body language that he thought the only reason we could possibly have missed the train was through our own incompetence - the explanation that our train from Berlin had been late was regarded with suspicion! Everything about him suggested that as far as he was concerned DBahn trains are never late! However, in a matter of moments his whole attitude changed - it looked as if something had flashed up on his computer screen that confirmed we were telling the truth. He immediatley scanned the barcode on our eTicket, stamped it 'Hop on the next train' (literally - he clearly had a choice of stamps in a number of languages), and printed out a new itinerary with all the details of the time of the Eurostar train from Brussels that we would now need to get as we would miss our connection there.

There was a bit of a kerfuffle on the Cologne/Brussels train with the train guards and other passengers that we recognised as having been on the same train from Berlin as us and this made my friend anxious when she heard them arguing about it. However, when it was our turn he just scanned the bar code on our ticket and moved on to the next person! Turned out that this was because we had done as we'd been told and gone to the Information Centre and hence our ticket had the magic 'Hop on the next train' stamp on it whereas many of the German passengers had done what I would do at home - just take check the destination board for the time of the next train and then get on it. Also, they knew that it would leave from the same platform that the train from Berlin had arrived at and just stayed put. Things fell into place then - and I was able to make sense of the argument in German that had been going on behind me and that I had only partially understood, The guard was making a fuss about tickets that were specifically for the ICE train but this was a Thalys train and the irate woman behind me insisting what difference did it make, they were all part of DBahn and this was only happening because the ICE from Berlin had been late. I also wondered whether the car code and scanner system meant that we appeared on his passenger manifest (because of something the clerk had done after scanning our ticket?) and she didn't? Either way, it made me decide that the DBahn system works best when you follow the system, do exactly as you are told - and if in doubt ask

By the time we got to the Eurostar terminal in Brussels everything was back on track (excuse the pun!) - they'd been informed by DBahn that we'd missed our connection Cologne and we'd already been booked on to the next train with new seat reservations etc. We were simply handed new boarding passes and ushered through security and on to our train. No fuss, no guards trying to tell us we were booked an a cheapo, non-transferable ticket and hence on the wrong train etc.

But there were lots of other things that impressed me about the whole experience compared to train travel in the UK - especially when you think how little it was costing us.

1) In most instances it takes me 7hrs to travel the approx 360 miles (as the crow flies) from home up here on the east coast of Scotland to central London (that's right, an average speed of barely over 50mph!) on the reasonably direct east coast rail line but it only took 9 hrs to travel the approx 600 miles (as the crow flies) from London to Berlin (an average of just over 65mph despite 2 connections). The trains weren't just faster, they were much smoother and more comfortable with roomier, reclining seats (that slide forward into your own legroom not backwards into the face of the passenger behind!). They were also absolutely spotless - even the Thalys train which was clearly made up of older rolling stock

2) There's more than enough luggage space on both the Eurostar and DBahn trains (both ICE and Thalys) so no cases blocking aisles and carriage vestibules etc.

3) The ICE trains have an excellent proper restaurant car open to all passengers (and not just 1st class ticket holders as on East Coast trains) with proper linen tables and cutlery etc and decent hot meals. We thought that around 28 Euros for a proper cooked main course, dessert, a couple of glasses of wine each and coffee was much better value than what a sandwich, a packet of crisps and a paper cup of instant coffee can cost on trains in the UK. A leisurely dinner on the Cologne/Berlin train on the way out and lunch on the way back was a really pleasant way of passing a couple of hours. And overall a far more pleasant dining experience than your average in-flight meal!

4) The legend on our seat reservation of 'Grosse Raum' only made sense once we on the ICE trains and realised that there are 'Kleine Raum' as well, ie separate, smaller glass walled compartments where you could see business people holding meetings on route as well as families with children and room for baby buggies etc where they could spread out a bit and not worry about the kids playing noisily or watching a DVD etc disturbing other passengers. And all right next to 2 spotless toilet cubicles and a separate baby change room. Having watched too many fraught Mums and Dads travelling with fretful children they were continually trying to 'shush' on trains up here in Scotland this summer I could only think 'Brilliant - how much easier must that make travelling as family?' I have no idea whether reserving one of these costs extra or how much if it does but I bet that it's worth every penny for a group of business colleagues travelling together or a family with young chidlren.

5) Every member of staff we had contact with immediately switched to speaking to us in English the moment they realised we were English. And as their English was much better than my German I was delighted to have this option. All the train announcements (from both the guards and and buffet/restaurant car staff) were in German, English and French. As were the leaflets on each seat setting out the trains full itinerary - including information on which platform any connecting trains would be leaving from. It made me realise on the train home from London back up to Scotland how difficult and uncomfortable train travel here in the UK probably is for non-English speaking tourists and especially so if they are used to the sort of service that DBahn provide.

So I would thoroughly recommend taking the train!

Berlin was amazing too but my lunch hour is up and I need to get back to doing some work! So a report on our time in Berlin itself to follow later but it probably makes more sense to post that in the 'City Breaks' forum.

SM

Many thanks SM for your brilliant report. I really enjoyed reading it, but was upset by your purse being 'lifted'

Looking forward to reading about Berlin.

I too loved reading about your trip. We are huge Germany fans and regularly holiday in Germany. Never been to Berlin but it it on my list so maybe next year.

You are quite right re Deutsche Bahn, it is amazing. Oh what this Country could learn.

I live in Aberdeenshire and last year Lufthansa started an Aberdeen to Frankfurt flight. Lufthansa also do a fly rail ticket where you can purchase a first class ticket for 49 Euros or second class for 29 Euros and travel anywhere on the German rail network. So you could fly to Munich in the South and then for 49 Euros travel first class to Hamburg We always used to have to fly Aberdeen to Amsterdam or London then on to Munich or sometimes Basel depending on where we are going. Now we will just take the one flight and purchase the rail ticket, first class of course

These tickets can only be used on the day of your arrival or the day after and likewise for your return journey. You are also not restricted to local trains and can use ICE and IC.

In a couple of weeks we are off to the Black Forest, (Bad Krozingen) flying to FRA and using this fly rail. This will be our first time of using it so hopefully all will go well. Just a pity we don't really have that long on the train as I would love to be on a long journey and do what you did and enjoy a nice meal whilst travelling. Oh well maybe Berlin, fly to FRA and then take the train.

Sounds really good Sugarbabe, be sure to tell us all about your journey on your return