The average DB experience
The DB or Deutsche Bahn, which is basically the single entity controlling the traffic of passenger trains across the country is incredibly bad at it's job. So here's my little “adventure” with them.
I took a sightseeing trip to a city this week and it was a nice time, sadly getting there and coming back home wasn't. At 7am I took a train to another city, because I had to catch a connection with another train which would then have taken me to my destination. The ride to the connection takes about half an hour with of course at least five minutes of delay. The train was a bit packed, but I get that everybody needs to go to work so I wasn't that bothered, the AC however was off, which meant that it got real hot in the train real fast and everybody started sweating like hell for the next 30 minutes. After arriving at the connection I took the train to my destination, which was also packed, but because it had two floored wagons I could find a place on the top. This train was very nice, it had AC and I could finally sit down. The seats were a bit tightly built so it wasn't very comfortable to sit there for two hours, but I managed and it wasn't that bad. After arriving I wanted to visit a nearby palace, because I heard that it had a nice garden. Luckily for me there was an information booth right in front of me as I got down from the peron, the guy there told me to to just take a certain train which will get me to my there faster than a bus.
After getting on the train I already had a bad feeling. The display, which showed the trains route didn't have my destination on it, but I thought nothing of it until we drove by said destination. Apparently I wasn't the only one going there, because there were people also confused as to why the train didn't stop there. Now we where driving to a totally different city and all we could do was wait. But it gets worse. On the train ahead of us somebody pulled the emergency break and opened the door on one of the wagons which meant that people out of panic started wondering onto the tracks. This wasn't a small issue either, in total we had to wait for an hour to get going again in a train with no AC on and a lot of people. Arriving at an unknown city I had to find a train back to where I came from, which I did and even better it went straight to my original destination! With one hour of wasted time, I noodled around the city and decided to head back home at around 6pm. There was a train coming at 6:36pm which was the only one going to my connection from my current location so I had plenty of time to kill. I browsed a bit of reddit until over the intercom, some girl who I can barely understand, announces that my train was cancelled and that they're sorry for the inconvenience. Yeah, it's a bit of an inconvenience when you can't get back home I would say.
Whatever, surely there must be a train that goes to my connection as well right? Nope. My next move was to consult google maps on how to get back home and it actually found a way, with only one more connection somewhere in the middle of nowhere. It was a relief and with an hour delay the train arrived. It was also a two floored wagon train, but it was made by DB and not a third party company so of course the upper floor was the entire first class, which meant that hundreds of people had to squeeze together while half the train was empty. Cool. When I arrived I got on the train to my connection which was not that full and I could even find a seat. Now comes an even better part, halfway to my connection the train conductor announces that because of delays in their traffic they're going to separate the train and only the front half of it will continue to my connection. I was in the last wagon relative to the driver so I thought that I was in the back of the train. Everyone thought this as well and they began pouring out at the next station and trying to enter the front through the doors. I was doing the same until some dude, a real legend, told me that, in fact, we were in the front of the train. I got confused, but ended up trusting him and stayed in my seat. A little while later everybody started flooding back in, which meant that the he was right and I still had my seat so I didn't have to stand. Nice save. After arriving at my connection I could finally take the train to my home town, which was literally empty. With AC on and everything being quiet it was very therapeutic and got me to calm down after everything. Originally I would have arrived at 8pm, which turned into 10:30pm. Incompetence and mismanagement. I never thought that I would be writing this soon again, but it seems like these things just keep coming.