The Great Escape (original) (raw)
January 27 2013, 19:25
Several of my friends-and-readers are subject to the British rail system, or other dysfunctions. Let's face it: travelling by Deutsche Bahn today, I've actually got it pretty good. I have a comfortable seat in a quiet compartment in a train which stands an excellent chance of actually arriving at its destination in Switzerland.
In fact I was supposed to be on a completely different train. But when I got to the platform in Berlin, I found this train sitting there instead, eighty minutes late due to "technical difficulties". My train was posted as running five minutes late.
With the Deutsche Bahn, you have to take this with a pinch of salt. "Five minutes late" means "at least five minutes late"; usually ten or fifteen, possibly twenty. Since my connection in Hannover had only thirteen minutes' space, those "five minutes" presaged an ugly day of missed connections.
Compare and contrast with Switzerland, where, if a train is posted as being five minutes late, you can be pretty sure that it'll leave the station between four and five minutes behind schedule. Not three or six. Definitely not fifteen. The really nice thing about the Swiss railway system isn't its punctuality, but its predictability.
So, seeing this train here, posted as going all the way to Switzerland, I just jumped on the damn thing, with no idea of its route or schedule or even if it was going to get into more "technical difficulties". The important thing, as with WWII prisoner-of-war escape stories, is just to evade ze Germans and make it to Switzerland. The rest will sort itself out.
If only that didn't mean evading my German husband and our German dog. :-(