In the last four posts, I’ve talked about the four spas I visited on my train adventure around Germany’s UNESCO Great European Spa Towns and now it’s time to talk about the journeys between them – because visiting those four spas required thirteen trains, four buses and three trips to Frankfurt.
A few years ago, Germany’s rail network would have come firmly under the heading of “Examples of Great German Efficiency”. Unfortunately, Deutsche Bahn’s reputation has plummeted since then and now it’s barely any better-regarded than our own network in the UK. Oh, I didn’t see many trains cancelled but most of my trains were at least a couple of minutes late, either departing or arriving or both.
Taking a Valentine’s trip is quite romantic but my Valentine’s Day flight was at 6.30 in the morning, the first out of Terminal 3 if not out of all of Heathrow, and delivered me to Stuttgart. I daresay Stuttgart is a nice enough place but it’s hardly up there with Paris or Venice, is it? A breakfast of bread & butter on the airport S-Bahn platform was less romantic still and then, after the S-Bahn running five minutes late, there was the half-run through the half-mile of temporary building that connects Stuttgart Central’s U-Bahn platforms to its main line platforms. Outside, it was snowing. Inside, we missed the fun of the snow but got all the joy of bitterly freezing cold air, which is not fun to half-run in. I think that train was ok, actually. It was a double-decker, which will never cease to be a wonderful novelty, and it was warm. However much I might slander DB over its timekeeping, I will say that its trains tend to be lovely and warm, which is just what you want in snowy February.
That train took me to Karlsruhe where my connecting train, coming down from Hamburg to Basel was running late and not helped by the train from two hours earlier still sitting at the platform. Seeing that it was an ICE whose next stop was Baden-Baden, I leapt on it. It was very busy, at least a third of the train was first class and everyone seemed to have gone to the restaurant carriage in the last few minutes. It was chaos! At last I found a seat, sat down, looked at the display over the door that said “Departing in one minute” and when it still hadn’t moved three or four minutes later, it dawned on me that this was not actually my train, getting on it was going to be no quicker than getting the train I was supposed to be going on and this train might not have any intention of going anywhere, hence everyone going to get food.
By the time the correct train turned up, moved over to the the next platform, it was running about 25 minutes late. On the one hand, that meant I’d miss my scheduled bus at Baden-Baden, which would take me from the station up to the actual town centre some three miles away. I wasn’t too bothered – city buses surely don’t care too much which one you get on. And in fact, German bus drivers want as little as possible to do with the question of tickets and would far rather you didn’t try to show them your e-ticket all the way from Stuttgart.
I had a full day in Baden-Baden with no travel before moving on – had a nice evening in Caracalla Therme and a lovely morning in Friedrichsbad and my next post will tell you all about Baden-Baden. My next destination was Bad Kissingen on Sunday morning. A bus back down to the station at quarter to eight in the morning, a nice warm ICE all the way through to Frankfurt and plenty of time to change onto the ICE to Würzburg (thank you, DB, for listing the platforms on these tickets!) which was then five minutes late. Würzburg is a relatively small place but I still hurried to get from platform 5 to platform 11 (thank you again DB, for saving me the time to hunt down a departure screen!) and then stumbled across an extra complication in that the train waiting there was actually two trains to two destinations travelling together as one as far as Schweinfurt. Yes, I got in the wrong part of the train the first time but I was supposed to have more than twenty minutes there, so even with the delay in arrival there was time to jump out and try again – and to get comfortable and find my chocolate before we even started moving.
This felt like a much more old-fashioned train. For a start, it was a rattly diesel which was a huge surprise after five smooth electric trains. For another, it had thinner, harder seats instead of ICE’s big deep fabric armchair-like ones. It chugged across the countryside, giving plenty of time to look at the scenery and, after separating at Schweinfurt, came into Bad Kissingen just about on time – not that it mattered, because I was on foot for the bit between station and hotel. The whole journey had taken around five hours, which is a fair amount of time to spend travelling between two smallish towns well under two hundred miles apart. You could drive it in three hours but the high-speed trains require multiple changes and trips to transport hubs so despite their far greater speed, it takes a lot longer.
The same went for the next day. Bad Kissingen to Bad Ems is 150 miles and done in under three hours by car but took me seven and a half hours. Now, two of those hours are my own fault. I left Bad Kissingen two hours early, since regional trains don’t have any restrictions, ie I didn’t have to travel on the ones I’d booked. So I got on the single-car shuttle down to Schweinfurt at 12:12 instead of 14:12, waited for what felt like months but was probably only about 15 minutes albeit in the freezing cold for a shiny red double-decker to Würzburg and then invested in a local transport ticket for an hour and a half of trams, cathedrals and more trams.
Train three, the ICE back to Frankfurt at 15:35, the one train of the day that I couldn’t mess with, promised to be early. I watched our ETA creep up from two minutes early to seven minutes early. As I had eleven minutes to get from platform 9 to platform 1, this felt like a luxury – until we essentially came to a grinding halt two minutes out, leaving us six minutes late in the end. And platform 1 turned out to be platform 1a which is right up at the far end of the platform. I made it, red-faced, stressed and leaping on the first door before walking halfway up rather than risk it pulling away while I walked along beside it. Having booked my tickets online, DB emailed me regularly to tell me when my trains were late and the next day I found emails telling me that this connection was no longer possible. Well, it was!
By now, the sun was setting over the ugly industrial part of Frankfurt, turning it pink and orange. I’d deliberately planned this run for the afternoon, reasoning that if my four trains the day before had been badly delayed, I wanted half a day in Bad Kissingen to go to KissSalis if I couldn’t make it on Sunday afternoon. But the result was that it was sunset and I still had two trains and a bus and my hotel in Bad Ems closed its reception at 6pm, meaning between letting myself in at the key box and arriving in the dark at 8pm, it felt like arriving in the middle of the night.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. We were a few minutes late into Limburg so I scurried again but I had more than twenty minutes to change, at a station that only has six platforms (although 6 and 7 are missing and the sixth one is platform 8…). By the time I was on the train, comfortable, taken my obligatory photos and updated my Instagram Stories, we still weren’t due to depart for another twelve minutes. Quite the novelty, having time to spare at a station and for once not because the next train was late in.
We were a few minutes late into Nassau where I was due on a bus with the same number as the train, which turned out – as suspected – to be a rail replacement bus. Here I had ten minutes with the very minor complication that a bus stop is marginally harder to locate than a numbered platform. On the train, had the line been open, I’d probably have reached Bad Ems around the same time that I was getting on the bus. I enjoyed understanding a conversation in German opposite me about where we were and where we were going next and reached Bad Ems a couple of minutes late – because bus on narrow winding roads – but with a pedestrian bridge connecting the station to the hotel in under three minutes, instead of the six minute trip up and down river that Google Maps promised me.
A day in Bad Ems and then it was going-home day. I was flying back from Frankfurt but rather than retrace my steps via Nassau and Limburg, I was taking the – over-full and over-heated – rush-hour rail replacement bus to Koblenz, via winding semi-mountainous roads. Another 10 minutes by train, probably, but the bus was scheduled to take fifty minutes, at least 15 of which were meandering up Bad Ems, into the next small town and back into the other end of Bad Ems. DB emailed me while we were in the Koblenz suburbs, a good half an hour after we departed, to tell me the bus was cancelled. It very much was not. In fact, it got us in at least seven minutes early. I then had nearly forty minutes to wait for the ICE to Frankfurt anyway, which was then sixteen minutes late and had a platform change, because it eventually arrived at pretty much the same time as the regional train due in after it. It meant a full hour freezing at Koblenz. I should have gone adventuring but I didn’t know how late the train was going to end up being when I first arrived – it just kept going back and back by another few minutes.
But it didn’t matter. I was due in to Frankfurt at 12pm and my flight was at 6pm. I had no special plan for my few hours in Frankfurt other than to get lunch and finish up my disposal film camera. In the end, I took the U-Bahn to the National Library, marvelling that an underground train was trundling through the streets like a tram and then got my thirteenth train, the S-Bahn out to the airport.
Pretty much every one on those thirteen trains was late somewhere. I had one very close shave and a few connections that were tighter than I’d have liked and arrived pretty much everywhere at least a little later than planned but some miracle got me on every single booked train. Despite starting on Valentine’s Day and featuring four spas, this was never either a Valentine’s nor a romantic trip but if it had been, modern rail travel would have knocked that notion right out of anyone’s head. A long-distance steam train trip, with no connections and your own staff attending to you – like the Orient Express – might have some romance but a 45-litre backpack, freezing and yet not actually snowy weather, modern electric trains running late, and thirteen of them at that, turn a trip like this into something of a chore. And I like the long, white, warm, comfortable ICE trains! But I needed a holiday after this because thirteen trains and four buses in six days is too many, even broken up by spas. I so needed Emser Therme by the time I got to day five!
I Am A Polar Bear 