Locomore is running trains between Stuttgart and Berlin again

The private train operator Locomore has started up again and is operating in cooperation with Flixbus. You can book your tickets on the Flixbus website: www.flixbus.com. Prices are less than the Deutsche Bahn but the journey is slightly slower than with DB.

Cheaper by train from Stuttgart to Berlin

Deutsche Bahn - DB (German Railways) face little competition in the field of long distance passenger transport. There have been attempts by companies other than Deutsche Bahn to run long distance trains across Germany, but only one has remained and this offers a reduced service in comparison to the start of service: HKX between Köln and Hamburg.

A new service from Stuttgart to Berlin via

• Berlin
• Wolfsburg
• Hannover
• Göttingen
• Kassel
• Fulda
• Hanau
• Frankfurt
• Darmstadt
• Heidelberg
• Vaihingen (Enz)
• Stuttgart

has just started on 15 December 2016: Locomore. This is cheaper than Deutsche Bahn, German Railways. Fares are planned to be under the cost of a standard DB fare with a half price BahnCard 50. Heidelberg - Berlin costs between 20 and 65€. The standard DB fare is 136€ (68€ with a BahnCard 50), though with luck and early planning one can buy a DB ticket for 29€. Locomore tickets can be bought online, per telephone or directly in the train. Tickets bought in the train are the most expensive. The long distance bus fare Heidelberg - Berlin (Flixbus) costs from 19€ but at popular times like Christmas customers are looking at prices above 50€.

The trains are comfortable and reasonably fast: the Heidelberg - Berlin journey with Locomore takes 5h 48m whereas DB ICEs take 5h 15m, The bus takes at least eight hours. The Locomore trains take bikes. Bikes must be reserved in advance.

More information under https://locomore.com/en/. Will it be a success? Who knows? The company has some teething problems at the moment and is only offering a service four days a week until 6 April 2017, but passenger levels appear to be as expected.

New Deutsche Bahn High Speed Trains

Amazing! Deutsche Bahn German Railways has fought against putting bicycles on ICEs, their high speed flagship trains since they were first introduced more than 20 years ago.  The fat controllers have changed their minds in a big way. The latest class, the ICE4, will take at least 8 bikes, probably in summer. It is a miracle. I hope that we can use them when the trains come into service in late 2017.

Changing trains with a bike in Austria or the tri-international incident on Schwarzach-St Veit station

We took the EC train from Mannheim to Klagenfurt on our way to Zell am See. I had booked the tickets three months before to obtain two of the contingent of the cheap Eurospezial tickets. My pleasure at obtaining these blinded me to the fact that we had but three minutes to change trains in Schwarzach-St Veit. We arrived in Schwarzach, left the train, looked up the platform and saw the IC that we should take to Zell am See. We pushed the bikes along the platform, looked for a bike storage slot and saw a bike logo on the window. Unfortunately ÖBB (Austrian Railways) model their trains on the Eiger North Wall and there were three or maybe four steps into the train. I staggered up the stairs with each bike. We discovered there was only one hanging space for one bike. At this point a guard appeared and explained to me in what I felt was a rude tone that I should have gone farther along the train to hang up the bike(s). It was not clear whether there was one or a pair of hooks farther along the train. I was not gruntled and so expressed my displeasure with the design of Austrian railway carriages, his tone of voice and the lack of  signposting on the station to allow bewildered foreign cyclists find somewhere to pop their bikes. I have lived in the Fatherland for forty or so years and so can on occasion rattle off an acid phrase or four in German. The guard fell back somewhat surprised and left us. Judith squeezed her bike into a corner and my bike blocked the entrance to an out of order WC. The train climbed through territory that resembled the Canadian Pacific routes through the Rockies. We cycled it a few days later and it is well worth visiting. The guard was very helpful in Zell and helped us dismount. Probably he wanted to see the back of us.

Epilogue
When we arrived at our hotel, our friends were surprised to see us so soon. They had travelled down the day before from Germany on an Intercity train, but had changed along the way to a local train which had very easy access. It left Schwarzach 20 minutes later and stopped at more stations, but was a delight to load the bikes. If only we'd waited.

Draisine/Pedal Trolley

We invited a friend along to today on a Draisine trip in the Pfalz. It was our and her first draisine trip. A draisine is small open pedal-powered railcar that runs on former branch or industrial lines. It would appear it is known as pedal trolley in US English.  In this case the line ran from Bornheim near Landau to Westheim about 12km. It crosses a number of minor roads on in part traffic light controlled crossings. Unlike normal railway lines we did not have right of way over the majority of roads and so had to switch on the red light for road users, lift a barrier and push the draisine across the road. We pedalled to Westheim, ate an excellent lunch in a local Italian restaurant and pedalled back. What we did notice was that the seating position was fixed unlike on a bike where you shift the bottom about. If we do this again I think we will wear padded underpants. The 24km there and back were quite hard on the bottom. It was good fun with lots of wildlife - birds of prey, storks and worth trying.

Common sense triumphs, amazing!

It appears to be believed in the upper floors of some railway administrations that as soon as bicycles need to be loaded on and off high speed trains there will be delays and the loss of five or six seats that are replaced by a bicycle compartment will ruin the economics of the trains. On Dutch, German, Italian and Spanish high speed trains bicycles except folders and bagged bikes are verboten. Common sense says that this belief is rubbish. Nobody bans mothers with prams or three children because they find it difficult to get on and off trains or they need room to put their Kinderwagen somewhere. Some of the French TGVs on the newer routes from Paris Gare de l'Est, for example take 8 bikes per train and seem to run profitably and punctually.
Not very often, but occasionally I am amazed that a common sense approach to demands from the travelling public has been taken by the Fat Controllers of railway organisations. Recently the ÖBB, Austrian railways announced that all 51 of their premium railjet trains will modified to include a compartment to take 6 bicycles with plugs allowing e-bike charging while underway. This work will be finished in 2013. More information can be found on http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=b0c3ff3f53e4c6a8be5677245&id=def475c28e.
On the other hand, the new generation of German IC/EC trains, the ICx will offer 8 bike places, less than the dozen or so on offer at the moment. This model will also form the basis of the replacement ICE1 and ICE2 stock by the end of the decade. It could be possible to offer high speed transport for bicycles, but don't hold your breath. I have the feeling that the Fat Controllers believe that only "suits" with brief cases are the proper class of people to travel on ICEs.

Bicycle space on an IC at present.

Transport Show in Cologne Part 1

On July 28 we visited the RDA Workshop in Cologne, Germany. We travelled by train and had the first interest of the day as we waited in Mannheim for our Intercity northwards. A long train en route for Basel drew in across the platform and the last two carriages had strikingly different liveries. They turned out to be the Minsk-Basel and Moscow-Basel sleepers. Although in summer we would not have expected bits of snow encrusted here and there, we later heard reports of searing temperatures and forest fires among Russia’s forests so perhaps there had been a few whiffs of singed paint work. From one of the carriages a party clearly wearing Eastern European fashions, stepped out, then shook hands with a large jolly blonde woman, as we tried in vain to catch a glimpse of a samovar within. Mannheim railway station, a prosaic workaday place disappeared as Anna Karenina, steppe and taiga seeped from films and books into our mind’s eye. Then the doors slammed, Minsk and Mocba disappeared down the track towards Basel and Switzerland.
Our journey to Cologne was protracted by technical problems, the wrong sort of rain or a landslide or two so after a cup of dreadful DB coffee we returned to thinking of Russian trains. It had always been possible to get to Russia by train from hereabouts, even with the Iron Curtain still in place. Commuting daily from Weinheim to Frankfurt in the early nineteen nineties Neil had occasionally observed dark green, very old-fashioned rolling stock three times a week, which linked Berne with Moscow. It was an interesting, though not a particularly enticing, thought at the time, with the hostile wastelands of East Germany and Poland to cross. To us island born Cold War children it also hinted at romance and impossible distances. Imagine an Edinburgh to Istanbul Express stopping at Wigan North West!
You could easily get a couple of Bromptons in those wagons we thought, even if carriage of bicycles is officially forbidden. One of our minor forms of what some cyclists call ‘soft anarchy’ is to quietly travel with a bike in a bag on some of Europe’s more exclusive trains. Does one still need a visa for Moscow or Minsk, and where on earth exactly IS Minsk? (Capital of Belarus, some distance west of Moscow itself.) Research has revealed that just boarding the train and hoping to set off in either place for the other by bike isn’t that easy since many travel restrictions still exist and individual journeys by cyclists are regarded by the authorities as dangerously eccentric at the least.
However we were on our way to a Workshop, aka Trade Fair about bus and group travel but with increasing interest in cyclists. Who knew what ideas and information, what routes and fantasies, we would have by the late afternoon?

German Railways, yet again

Sorry about this but we saw a news item that struck us as important enough to publish a quickie blog about it: The ADFC the German cycling club has issued a map online that lets cyclists travelling through Germany find which long distance trains still take bicycles. There is a growing trend for Deutsche Bahn to replace ICs and ECs with ICE (Very High Speed Trains) that do not take bikes. If you then wish to travel with your bike on one of the routes where only ICEs run, then you will need to either have a folding bike or take to the regional trains, by far the majority of which take bikes. These are however much slower and long journeys can involve changing 6 or 7 times. Check the map at www.adfc.de/bahn. The map is in German, but is fairly obvious what it means. Click on "Netzkarte" and then you can see the words "Interaktive Entdeckerkarte". Below this there is a row of words: Täglich (Daily) Donnerstag (Thursday) Freitag (Friday) Samstag (Saturday) Sonntag (Sunday)Gesamtübersicht (Total). You can download various maps as pdf files. You will still need to check the German Railways website (www.bahn.co.uk) to find out the times of the trains.