There was time in the morning for showering, breakfasting and nattering.
I think this is the most last-minute plan-making I’ve managed thus far: I’d forgotten to make any arrangements for onwards travel other than telling my Host I’d be there on Saturday, but it wasn’t until I was eating a leisurely breakfast of butter pretzel and sticky bun that I committed to the 12:08 regional service from Ingolstadt Nord to Nürnberg. There I’d have sufficient time for a wander, before getting on the 14:00 ICE to Frankfurt Airport and then the onwards 16:42 ICE International to arrive in Amsterdam at 20:44.
I reserverd the seats on bahn.de and then remembered to pay the option on my seat reservation on the 17:16 TGV from Lille on Wednesday.
The day mostly went to plan, although the first part of the journey was slightly fraught when at Ingolstadt Nord I discovered the 12:08 service to Nürnberg cancelled and a confused Pole wondering how to get to Nürnberg. Rather than faff, I suggested we take a regional train to Ingolstadt Hbf, and then the first ICE we could find to Nürnberg. He seemed to like the idea of a shorter journey anyway as it meant he wouldn’t have to hide for too long in the toilets. When we arrived, we said our goodbyes near a bakery and then I dealt with some postcards and engaged in power-tourism. It was about one o’clock.
I visited Nürnberg many many years ago as part of a visiting tour from one of its twinned towns. It’s not far from the station to find things to see and in fact just over the road past the trams the old town, for want of a better term, starts proper and it’s a great place to get to somewhere within no time at all from the station. It was most strange to find myself in Loreznkirk (at most a ten minute walk?) again after all these years but in the time it took me to wander round looking at things listening to the organ being tuned, my allotted time for sight-seeing was up and I was back at the neobaroque main station before I knew it.
Nürnberg suffered badly in the war and little of what you see around the station is pre-1945. Of the pre-war station, which was bombed and closed that year, the lounge is one of the few areas of the station to survive the the war and now serves as a travel centre.
Whether to eat in the station or on the train was a choice taken out of my hands by the imminent arrival of the 14:00 ICE to Frankfurt airport on which I found my quiet comfy seat then settled down for vegan currywürst and a Bitburger in the dining car. Germany slid quietly past the window.
At first I had been dubious about changing trains in an airport as I was worried I’d find little to entertain myself, but there were no more sensible solutions without either going back to Munich or hoping to keep an eight-minute change in Hannover. I’ve had experience with DB missed connections before so reluctantly decided I’d go via an airport on the basis it would more easily accommodate a missed connection, but was pleasantly surprised by the half hour I had nosing around before the ICE to Amsterdam (delayed).
My attempt at getting into the DB Lounge was quickly foiled by a man who calculated from the noise of the QR-code scanner how long it should take him to deign to look up at me to pretend to care as he sighed his disapproval at my very existence. I protested my worth, innocently.
“You need a ticket, not a pass,” he mustered. “That is a pass.”
His demeanour hinted our transaction had concluded more quickly than I’d expected and I skulked back to the door and took some photographs of trains before trying to work out what was going on on my platform.
The station in Frankfurt airport is very pretty if you like form over function and is probably a great place to have fun with a proper camera, but it is not a transport hub that was designed with travellers listening for announcements in mind. Unless it absolutely was designed with the acoustics in mind and it’s some kind of twisted psychlogical experiment and/or expression of the German sense of humour; there are almost continual dystopian background-announcements through multiple speakers on multiple platforms in multiple languages at the same time in which nothing, absolutely nothing, is distinguishable. It is entirely possible that the person with the microphone is in fact not making announcements but trying to alert his fellow human-kind outside the booth to angry killer bees which swarm round the microphone to drown out his final, chilling, desperate screams through the Tannoy system.
At one point I thought I understood a platform change, and duly changed platform to find half of my train not there. ICE 152 from Frankfurt to Amsterdam also runs with ICE 12, which goes to Brussels. ICE 12 was on the platform, but ICE 152 was not. It – or a replacement – ICE eventually pulled up late at its original departure platform. Was this one train split across two platforms, two trains not on the same platform? The information displays poured forth scorn upon those who didn’t know, but the train was displaying the correct train number and pointing in the right direction, so I jumped through the doors at the pointy end and found my seat in the panorama compartment behind the driver’s cab.
In a joyous turn of events, and perhaps as a reward for having successfully escaped, the driver had not set the smart glass to opaque. There was much infantile enjoyment to be had as we sallied forth out of the station and we, the three occupants of the quiet carriage, occasionally took photos through the glass panel behind him. Eventually, once he’d set it to automatic, he span his chair round and opened the door into the beeping cab and beckoned us so we could “have a proper look”, leaving me with a dilemma: take him up on the offer or chastise him for not having put his alerts to silent before he opened the door into the quiet compartment. Like an excitable child I ventured forth gingerly, puppeting my finger. There was a little place to sit, if necessary, but I stood somewhere I thought was safe enough and far away enough from any urges to suddenly fall over onto something important and plunge us into certain doom or fixate on any red “do not press this button” buttons. It was a truly joyous moment.
At Köln, our cheerful driver left the train and was replaced by a most surly individual who almost immediately set the glass to opaque and got more and more annoyed as his departure window slipped. Over the intercom, an equally exasperated guard made infuriated announcements in three languages that increasingly sounded like a very tired adult trying to explain to the world’s densest children that was most definitely not the train to Brussels and that people who wanted to go to Brussels should get off the train now if they wanted to go to Brussels because this was not the train to Brussels. “I repeat: thiiis is I-C-E 1-5-2 to Am-ster-dam Cen-traal, not I-C-E 1-2 to Bru-ssels. If you want to go to Bru-ssels, this train is not the train for Bru-ssels. Get off the train. This is the train to Am-ster-dam.” Some ladies joined our compartment, redefining the “quiet” clearly marked on the door. They were upset they couldn’t see through the smartglass.
We, The Chosen Three, remained quiet and nodded. Trainslippers were adorned. I was joined by a delightful lady who’d arrived to seek respite from the rest of the train which she declared too noisy, an observation made in the most well-executed whisper that impelled me to like her immediately. I instantly forgot the reservation of the man who’d previously come looking for a seat and who told me he’d take it if he “couldn’t find anywhere else” (the audacity), and moved my light belongings from her seat. We spent a lot of time whispering our shared indignation at the at noisy ladies, while casually still looking forwards to avoid detection. She was getting a connecting train from Amsterdam and was having last-minute route recalculations to determine how best to mitigate things.
Somewhere between Velno and Eindhoven, the owner of some pink luggage blocking the doors in another carriage was asked to present themselves to their pink luggage immediately on pains that the pink luggage would be removed and destroyed. Quickly, please. This announcement too was made with increasing undertones of anguish and then stopped. It was announced that we were making an unscheduled bonus stop in Eindhoven. Given the stop was short, I suspect it was to allow someone who was not supposed to be on I-C-E 1-5-2 to Am-ster-dam to get off and take their chances alone, rather than have their suspect pink luggage destroyed.
Dinner in the dining car was served to me by a very lovely Dutch (I think) lady who had all the time in the world. As this was to be my last opportunity for a proper dining car meal, I thought I’d push the boat out and have the chili sin carne and, calm yourselves, a dinky bottle of sparkle-fizz. There was, I was told, no sparkling wine left, but in a spectacular display of nous she suggested a bottle of sparkling water and white wine could be combined to make an acceptable compromise of sparkling and wine. I liked this bold display of initiative tremendously and indeed allowed myself to have two glasses on the table for the duration of my meal. The lovely lady, now quite enamoured with the puppet, distributed free stuff to the people she liked. I got chocolates and a biscuit. We talked about my route and she enthused briefly about travelling by herself, before having to go back to work.
Back in the panorama coach, I offered my new-found companion some DB swag but she produced a stash of baby packets of Haribo gummy bears she’d “found” in her hotel room. We had a pack each making sure to limit the amount of wrapper-noise to the best of our abilities. One of the Original Three had fallen asleep and not finished his wine, the other was knitting. My kindly neighbour also produced her own tools and participated in the ritual.
Utrecht Centraal looks massive.
After many hours we pulled into Am-ster-dam Centraal, I hopped on a tram number two and made my way to Host’s. He was regailed until it was time for me to go to bed.
