This is the first part of a series that’s going to go on for quite a bit – I’m just back from what I’m calling the Eras Train Tour and I have so much to write about! In short, I went to see Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in Warsaw and decided to go by train rather than fly and make an adventure out of it. So most of this series is going to be my eight-day train journey from London to Warsaw via stopovers in four very different cities and if you’re not into Taylor Swift, you can skip that one. It’ll be near the end, obviously.
So today is part one, London to Berlin by train in one day!
I was on the Eurostar at 7am. That required spending the night in London and because I didn’t want to spend a lot of money or stay in a noisy hostel dorm and I did want to be within very easy reach of St Pancras, preferably on foot, I ended up in a tiny room over a pub opposite Euston. I can’t really complain, it did everything I needed it to but it was very hot and very noisy and I basically didn’t sleep at all. My alarm went off at about 4.30, I packed up and because the pub is closed at that hour, I left via the fire escape. That was the plan – when I’d been shown to my room the night before and mentioned that I’d be long gone before time to walk into the pub and hand the key back, I’d been told “here’s the door, there’s the beer garden, it’s the fire escape, put the key through the letterbox” so I wasn’t just sneaking out!
From there, it was a short walk to St Pancras. London is quiet at 4.45am but because it was July, it was fully daylight but with just a hint of a chill in the air. Not enough to put anything on over my t-shirt, especially not when I was carrying a 45l backpack and my personal item zipped tote back (I made it, to the exact specifications of Icelandair’s personal item size limits and it’s done really well in the last 18 months!). However, when Eurostar advises you to arrive 90 minutes before your train, it does mean it. There are signs up and if you’re there at 5am, you’re not allowed to go through. Now, this gave me time to buy a lovely crispy holey baguette from Le Pain Quotidienne opposite and start to gnaw on it dry but if I’d realised they meant it, I could have had an extra half-hour in bed.
It took a little time to get through all the procedures – number one, queue around the ratlines until you get to a gate, scan your ticket, get the gate to open and go through. Find security, put all your stuff in a box, collect your stuff up again, find a passport gate, queue there, get your passport stamped (in the wrong place! Stamp it on the next available page, not in the gap on the first page opposite my Russian visa!) and then finally you’re in a large waiting room that was clearly never designed for so many people.
The trouble is that Eurostar won’t tell you which platform you’re on until ten or fifteen minutes before your train departs, so you can have two or three or even four trains’-worth of people milling around. In our case, there were two trains three minutes apart, the 7:01 to Paris and the 7:04 to Brussels and they left from platforms 10 and 9 respectively. These are different sides of the same physical platform, accessed by two escalators side-by-side, one of which wasn’t working. Non-working escalators were a bit of a motif on this trip – I’d already nearly died hiking up them from Euston the night before. But anyway, two trains’-worth of passengers going up the same escalators at the same time was chaos. I guarantee at least one person ended up on the wrong train in all that.
I was supposed to be in an aisle seat. I’d checked and rechecked. Normally you can change your seat at will but I’d booked via Deutsche Bahn instead of direct with Eurostar and you can’t change seats on third party bookings. But I was right next to the buffet car, even when the train got changed (there are two types of Eurostar train and at the last minutes, the one we were supposed to be using got changed to the other one) so I figured I’d go and sit in there to take photos out of the window. But when I got to my seat, my neighbour was already sitting in my aisle seat. I made the slightly wide eyes but I put my luggage in the rack and slid into the window seat without a word. Then my neighbour gestured at the little pictogram above, showing which seat is which and said “I was confused about which is the outside so I guess you can choose which you prefer”. Was she confused or did she actually want the aisle seat? I preferred the window seat, obviously, and she seemed quite content to have the aisle one, since she’d already taken it, so I think we both went away happy.
I was connecting at Brussels Midi with the ICE train to Cologne and DB had only given me twenty minutes to do it. Now, that’s a bit tighter than I would have liked but the DB website seemed to suggest they were on the same platform and Karl Watson, in his London to Istanbul (Midnight Train to Georgia) film had managed to get from Paris Gare du Nord to Gare de l’Est in fifteen minutes so I figured I could do this in twenty minutes. Hah. No. We were eleven or twelve minutes later and I spent at least five of those standing by the door watching the platform glide by, mashing the open button, muttering out loud “Come on, stop, just stop, we’re here already, I can walk faster that this, why aren’t we stopping?” etc.
It was not the same platform. It wasn’t even the same part of the station. By the time I’d got off the Eurostar, off the platform, down the stairs and into the station concourse, my watch said I’d already missed the train and I hadn’t even figured out where it was. But there was hope! When I found a departure board, it seemed to say that the Cologne train might be delayed and they weren’t sure whether it was on the platform or not. I rushed up there. Because it’s an international train, there was security but it mostly consisted of a couple of uniformed men who nodded you past if you weren’t carrying a suitcase as big as you. Up the escalator, onto the platform, no train. The train was delayed by an hour and a half and would be there around 11am. An hour and a half! That gave me time to go downstairs and find some food. I would bring it back to the platform to sit and eat, though. So I did. I got a drink, I got some cheese to go with my dry baguette and because I’m an idiot, I got some thick chocolate yoghurt/pudding things that I used to have on holiday when I was a child. How did I think I was going to carry those in an already-full backpack across two countries to Berlin?
I went back to my platform, sat on the floor and looked at my watch to see how much time I still had. It was 10.45. How could it be 10.45? The train was due in about fifteen minutes and yet I’d had an hour and a half before I’d gone shopping, which couldn’t have taken more than ten minutes. And finally it dawned on me.
I was supposed to be on the 10.25 train from Brussels to Cologne and all this time I’d been staring at the 9:25 train. Would I have made the 10:25, if I’d been looking at the right platform? Probably not but maybe. No, we’d been delayed too much, I’d known I’d missed it before I’d even found the platform.
My ticket was very specifically for that train. I’d have to get another and that would be expensive. Where were the ticket machines? Idiot, it’s 2024, the ticket machine is in your hand. Buy one on your phone. Of course, I couldn’t buy a ticket for the 9:25. As far as the app was concerned, the train had left over an hour ago. So I went downstairs and found a ticket machine.
As far as the ticket machine was concerned, Berlin didn’t exist. I went to the desks. They sent me to international tickets – I hadn’t realised Brussels has domestic tickets and international tickets in two separate offices. They in turn asked why I’d missed my train (making me feel like a naughty schoolgirl) and I explained that the Eurostar had been late. So they sent me to the Eurostar desk to get a voucher which confirmed that it was their fault I’d been delayed and that I could use my ticket on the next available train. Well, that saved me €200. I was surprised at how little Eurostar argued. Technically we’d been in time, if I’d been The Flash and able to run between platforms quick enough. But they didn’t ask any questions, just for my Eurostar train number and then gave me the voucher. It was about two minutes to eleven by now. I sprinted back to that platform, got caught by security and had to go through the x-ray machine with the world’s slowest passenger in front of me and by the time I got up the escalator, the train was at the platform. I was sweaty and disgusting and I had my hands full of watch and bracelet and drink and ticket and phone but I was on the train! I took a moment to make sure I still had everything and then went to find a seat.
The train was busy and delayed by 100 minutes now but I found a seat. Not just a seat – a forward-facing window seat at a table with no one in the aisle seat. I had no room for my feet thanks to my neighbour but I was on the train. Now I could do some investigation. I was supposed to be on the 10:25 ICE from Brussels to Cologne but in fact, I was on the 9:25 Eurostar from Paris to Cologne via Brussels. First, did “next available train” count when I was technically on the previous train? And was I allowed to be on a train by a completely different operator? Yes, it felt weird that this was a Eurostar. My investigation led me to the discovery that this used to be Thalys but it’s now owned by Eurostar. They’ve kept the old livery but it seems they’ve peeled off the name and stuck a Eurostar logo on instead.
Then I made a second discovery. The reason this train from Paris was delayed an hour and a half and the reason Eurostar hadn’t questioned my delay. This was Friday July 26th, the first day of the Paris Olympics and I don’t know if you remember this after everything that’s happened since, but that was the day that someone sabotaged three major rail lines in France by setting fire to them. My planned route hadn’t had any problems there – we cut across Northern France for maybe 30km from Calais to Lille and into Belgium but the sabotage hadn’t affected that little bit. My direct German train from Belgium to Germany wouldn’t have been affected and neither would my onward journey. If the Eurostar hadn’t been 11 minutes late, I wouldn’t have known anything had happened. It does begin to occur to me that maybe being 11 minutes wasn’t unrelated but you don’t think much of a train being 11 minutes late. That’s just being a train. But the reason this train was an hour and a half late was because of the chaos in France.
The more I read, the more I realised I’d been really lucky. There was chaos at St Pancras, with Eurostars being delayed for hours or cancelled altogether, and the advice was to not travel if you could possibly avoid it. I’d known nothing about it until I was well out of its reach.
We reached Cologne without incident. I hadn’t had my ticket checked, which I was glad about because I really wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to be on this one but once we got to Cologne, I’d be on an ICE train exactly as planned and since I was, by some miracle, only an hour behind schedule, I’d probably literally be on the “next available train”. I had five minutes to run out of the station and take a couple of photos of the cathedral, which is literally next to the station, and then I went back to the platform. I think I was supposed to be on the 12:45 and I ended up on the 13:48. It was exactly the train I’d expected, a long sleek white German ICE. I had no reserved seat for this leg so I went to the back of the train – partly because I wanted to stand on the platform outside in the open air and talk to my camera unobserved rather than wait with a crowd in the middle of the station – and found a pretty empty carriage, where I could have a double seat to myself.
I did get my ticket checked here and it was no problem that it wasn’t the train I was booked on. I don’t think I even got to the end of “I’m not supposed to be on this train but-” before the guard was telling me “it’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok!” and stamping my ticket. Then I had four hours to sit and wait for Berlin.
Did I mention it had been a hot and noisy night where I’d got no sleep and then got up at 4.30am to have some dramas on three trains in three countries? Well, the ICE was just half a degree too hot, exactly the temperature where under the circumstances, I’m going to fall asleep. I’m pretty sure I missed one station entirely. But I was awake at Hagen. I checked my timetable. Next stop, Bielefeld. I wanted to see Bielefeld because I’ve never seen a city that doesn’t exist and I wanted to see what it looked like. Can you stay awake for 22 minutes to see Bielefeld? You can fall asleep again after that. So I stayed awake and actually, once I was awake, I managed to remain so all the way to Berlin. Even in your own quiet seat with no neighbour, four hours is a long time. But I got to Berlin little over an hour later than planned despite everything that had happened.
Berlin Hauptbahnhof is big. My dad had talked about coming in upstairs and I couldn’t quite fathom how that worked – still can’t, actually. There are u-bahns and s-bahns and regional trains that run on an underground platform but the ground-level platform is mostly shopping and then the long-distance trains do indeed seem to be upstairs. Leaving the platform and coming onto the concourse to get my bearings, I made the mistake of looking over the edge. It’s a long way down and you shouldn’t be able to see all the way down.
On the map, my hotel looked quite close. I hadn’t done my daily walk, obviously, so I decided rather than figuring out the public transport system first thing, I’d just walk. It’s further than it looks! I was to learn in the morning that it’s only two stops by tram but at this point, I had no idea how or where to get a ticket, which tram or train I wanted, where to get on and where to get off and I just walked. It’s about a kilometre, which isn’t far generally but it’s further than I usually want to walk with luggage. I dropped off my luggage and then I looked up nearby supermarkets, managed to miss the one literally across the road, and instead walked halfway back to the station to get some bits and pieces to keep me going until the morning.
And that’ll do for my London to Berlin in one day by train story. Next time, Berlin. The original plan was a blog post per day but I think there were a couple of things in Berlin that deserved their own post. I’m reasonably sure “blog post per day” will resume once I leave Berlin, though.