Well, I don't know about you, but I spent Hallowe'en at home cuddling my dog.

I wasn't meant to. I was meant to be on a train barrelling back to Switzerland in order to be at work tomorrow. The German Railway site mentioned half-hour delays on the first leg of the route due to repair work on the line, but they promised Ersatzverkehr, a ( Read more... )

Somewhere in southern Germany, a Deutsche Bahn train has fallen off some Deutsche Bahn rails. I kinda thought they weren't supposed to do that ( Read more... )

So, I'm sitting in this long-distance train which is currently running about an hour late. Fair enough; the weather's bad for trains. I chose this train specifically because it gets me from Cologne to Basel, into the reasonably-safe hands of the Swiss rail system, without the need to make train connections which the Deutsche Bahn is pretty much ( Read more... )

Dear designers of train toilets, regardless of your nation,

How, after all these years, can it still escape your notice that trains moveIn two dimensions, true -- back and forth, side to side, but rarely up and down. Even so, they accelerate, brake, sway and jolt, sometimes fairly forcefully. This fact can barely have escaped you ( Read more... )

It's cold in Germany-a bit below zero, cold enough that you don't really want to be standing around on a platform in the wrong town in the wrong state in, arguably, the wrong federation. But here I am, having fallen asleep on the train, slept through my connection in Mannheim, ended up in Stuttgart, waited there for the next train in the right ( Read more... )

Zugausfall. Train cancelled ( Read more... )

Dear despairing persons of the world ( Read more... )