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Hallowe'en at the Deutsche Bahn	[Oct. 31st, 2011\|11:41 pm]Footpad
[Tags\|bahnsinn, deutsche bahn, home, mischa] [Current Mood	snarky]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 replacement bus that'd take less than half an hour.After the bus turned up twenty minutes late, it turned out that the Deutsche Bahn had decided to route the Ersatzverkehr through every cobbled cornery alleyway in every witch-burning mediaeval village from here to Cologne, through which it was hard enough to get one bus, let alone two going in opposite directions. By the time the bus drivers were actually having to stop the buses and get out to shepherd each other through, it was pretty obvious I wasn't getting to Switzerland tonight.Deutsche Bahn 1, Common Sense 0.So I sent a message to the boss at work, then turned around and went home again, where I lay down on the floor with our dog and petted him. Then we humans had supper; then we sat on the sofa and watched a documentary and petted the dog some more; then we talked and petted the dog; then we fed the dog; and now I'm in bed, where I would gladly pet the dog if only he saw fit to join me (he finds beds much too warm for comfort). Tomorrow I will pet the dog, walk the dog, do some geeking, pet the dog, and once again try for that train.Meanwhile, I feel that missing my train was a profound blessing.
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[Oct. 31st, 2011|11:41 pm]Footpad

[Tags**|bahnsinn, deutsche bahn, home, mischa] [Current Mood**

snarky]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 replacement bus that'd take less than half an hour.After the bus turned up twenty minutes late, it turned out that the Deutsche Bahn had decided to route the Ersatzverkehr through every cobbled cornery alleyway in every witch-burning mediaeval village from here to Cologne, through which it was hard enough to get one bus, let alone two going in opposite directions. By the time the bus drivers were actually having to stop the buses and get out to shepherd each other through, it was pretty obvious I wasn't getting to Switzerland tonight.Deutsche Bahn 1, Common Sense 0.So I sent a message to the boss at work, then turned around and went home again, where I lay down on the floor with our dog and petted him. Then we humans had supper; then we sat on the sofa and watched a documentary and petted the dog some more; then we talked and petted the dog; then we fed the dog; and now I'm in bed, where I would gladly pet the dog if only he saw fit to join me (he finds beds much too warm for comfort). Tomorrow I will pet the dog, walk the dog, do some geeking, pet the dog, and once again try for that train.Meanwhile, I feel that missing my train was a profound blessing.

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Bahnfahrt	[May. 20th, 2011\|10:21 pm]Footpad
[Tags\|bahnsinn, germany, trains, travel] [Current Mood	drained and sad]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.Just one of however many thousand stranded passengers, I am trying to find my way home. I don't know where I'll make it to tonight. The Bahn tells us stuff-all, except to put us on a train that will hopefully connect to a bus that will take us to another train which might get us far enough north to... nobody knows. The Bahn no longer even mentions that this train just sat at the platform for twenty minutes without moving. The woman on the Deutsche Bahn helpline was as sweet as could be and tried really hard to find me a way home, but even she couldn't penetrate the obdurate denial of the Deutsche Bahn computer.So I have at best a scant hope of making it home to Mischa tonight. A grotty hotel somewhere, most likely. Maybe Frankfurt if I'm lucky, and you know things aren't going well when you consider yourself lucky to be in Frankfurt.It's been a very long week and the prospect of rest remains distant indeed.
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Bahnfahrt

[May. 20th, 2011|10:21 pm]Footpad

[Tags**|bahnsinn, germany, trains, travel] [Current Mood**

drained and sad]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.Just one of however many thousand stranded passengers, I am trying to find my way home. I don't know where I'll make it to tonight. The Bahn tells us stuff-all, except to put us on a train that will hopefully connect to a bus that will take us to another train which might get us far enough north to... nobody knows. The Bahn no longer even mentions that this train just sat at the platform for twenty minutes without moving. The woman on the Deutsche Bahn helpline was as sweet as could be and tried really hard to find me a way home, but even she couldn't penetrate the obdurate denial of the Deutsche Bahn computer.So I have at best a scant hope of making it home to Mischa tonight. A grotty hotel somewhere, most likely. Maybe Frankfurt if I'm lucky, and you know things aren't going well when you consider yourself lucky to be in Frankfurt.It's been a very long week and the prospect of rest remains distant indeed.

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Return of the Bahnsinn	[Dec. 20th, 2010\|06:03 pm]Footpad
[Tags\|bahnsinn, deutsche bahn, trains, travel] [Current Mood	perplexed] [Current Music	ought to be the Benny Hill theme]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 guaranteed to miss.The Deutsche Bahn, having woefully under-invested in rolling stock in order to save money in the hopes of getting privatised, is often reduced to splitting its long-distance services in half. This is such a truncated service.The final comedy comes when the train conductor comes on the PA system and announces that the train is filled beyond its legal capacity. Would people please, he asks with an increasingly pleading note in his voice, volunteer to leave the train and take a later service so that the train can depart?Incredulous laughter breaks out all through the carriage.I laugh too, because to me the Deutsche Bahn still counts as a fairly good rail service. Just you wait, you poor buggers, until your government actually manages to privatise your trains. Five years after that, you'll find nothing to laugh about at all.
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Pet hate: train loos	[Dec. 17th, 2010\|10:01 pm]Footpad
[Tags\|bahnsinn, pet hates, trains] [Current Mood	surly]Dear designers of train toilets, regardless of your nation,How, after all these years, can it still escape your notice that trains move?In 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.So why, oh why, do you monomaniacally persist in making toilets those lids topple and slam down at the slightest wobble of the vehicle that contains them?It's bad enough having my nerves jarred by an unexpected BANG while washing my hands. But it's positively ridiculous that I should have to go about my daily business in a Yogic position to stop the bloody lid from hammering on my lumbar realms. Makes it hard to relax the ol' sphincter, you know what I mean?You know what I'm doing to you if I ever catch you? I'm putting you on the Trans-Siberian Express with nothing to eat but prunes. That'll learn ya, yer fuckers.
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Pet hate: train loos

[Dec. 17th, 2010|10:01 pm]Footpad

[Tags**|bahnsinn, pet hates, trains] [Current Mood**

surly]Dear designers of train toilets, regardless of your nation,How, after all these years, can it still escape your notice that trains move?In 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.So why, oh why, do you monomaniacally persist in making toilets those lids topple and slam down at the slightest wobble of the vehicle that contains them?It's bad enough having my nerves jarred by an unexpected BANG while washing my hands. But it's positively ridiculous that I should have to go about my daily business in a Yogic position to stop the bloody lid from hammering on my lumbar realms. Makes it hard to relax the ol' sphincter, you know what I mean?You know what I'm doing to you if I ever catch you? I'm putting you on the Trans-Siberian Express with nothing to eat but prunes. That'll learn ya, yer fuckers.

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Das Sinn im Bahnsinn	[Dec. 13th, 2010\|10:36 pm]Footpad
[Tags\|bahnsinn, beer, travel] [Current Music	everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance] [Current Mood	happy]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 direction, found that it was delayed, and realised that I not only probably wasn't going to make my connection to Zurich, but that I was probably wasn't even going to make it to the safe haven of Switzerland and sane transport. Let's face it: I was going to get stuck in the arse end of Germany in some bedbugbucket of a hotel with nothing to do for the next six hours but hold a staring competition with the wallpaper.Fortunately, everything was delayed. The entire German public transport system seems to have time-warped itself twenty-five minutes into its own future, and is reeling around there looking shell-shocked. So I'm now sitting on a nice warm ICE train that's going in roughly the right direction, and I'm sipping cold beer while tapping away at my computer and really feeling that, despite all the myriad things that have gone wrong today, the world is a promising and gentle place.
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Insouciance of circumstance	[Jun. 27th, 2010\|09:12 am]Footpad
[Tags\|bahnsinn, peace comes dropping slow, travel]Zugausfall. Train cancelled.Dammit, there's nothing like a cancelled train to get your nerves on edge. All you want is to get home to your dog, your boyfriend, your supper and your beer. You had a nice reserved seat on an air-conditioned ICE (the sleek and comfortable German high-speed train). You had a reasonable expectation of uneventful travel and maybe some hot chocolate from the Bordbistro, and now all you know is that it's swelteringly hot and loudspeakers are shouting in German at you and your two hundred fellow passengers to cram your sweaty selves into a tiny electric scooter-train to somewhere you've never heard of.So you get scooted out of Switzerland and over the river into Germany, where you decamp into an even hotter (but considerably roomier) old rattletrap of a train, barely younger than the days of steam, which they've obviously dug out of its peacefully rusting retirement in the arse end of some siding somewhere, and off you go again, communally grouchy because you still don't have a clue where you're going or how you'll get there.Meanwhile the window is wide open and there's a warm summer wind blowing and you can see for miles and miles out across the verdant German plain. Rest your forearms on the window's edge, out in the rushing breeze, and you can take a hundred glimpses into the secret lushness of fertile woodland and muddy river, and vicariously dream of going for walkies there with your dog, and watch the sun drifting behind the distant hills as it sets into an ever deeper evening of rose and amber and gold.And suddenly you remember the long-forgotten sense of it being all about the journey, and how it felt to live with the eternal uncertainty and anticipation of travel without a destination.There's a certain part of your soul that was made to be elsewhere.If you don't go anywhere then it gets left behind.If you go somewhere then it stays firmly put.And if you go away to nowhere, you find it there waiting.That was meant to sound kinda Zen and profound. Cut me some slack plz.
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Insouciance of circumstance

[Jun. 27th, 2010|09:12 am]Footpad

[**Tags**|bahnsinn, peace comes dropping slow, travel]Zugausfall. Train cancelled.Dammit, there's nothing like a cancelled train to get your nerves on edge. All you want is to get home to your dog, your boyfriend, your supper and your beer. You had a nice reserved seat on an air-conditioned ICE (the sleek and comfortable German high-speed train). You had a reasonable expectation of uneventful travel and maybe some hot chocolate from the Bordbistro, and now all you know is that it's swelteringly hot and loudspeakers are shouting in German at you and your two hundred fellow passengers to cram your sweaty selves into a tiny electric scooter-train to somewhere you've never heard of.So you get scooted out of Switzerland and over the river into Germany, where you decamp into an even hotter (but considerably roomier) old rattletrap of a train, barely younger than the days of steam, which they've obviously dug out of its peacefully rusting retirement in the arse end of some siding somewhere, and off you go again, communally grouchy because you still don't have a clue where you're going or how you'll get there.Meanwhile the window is wide open and there's a warm summer wind blowing and you can see for miles and miles out across the verdant German plain. Rest your forearms on the window's edge, out in the rushing breeze, and you can take a hundred glimpses into the secret lushness of fertile woodland and muddy river, and vicariously dream of going for walkies there with your dog, and watch the sun drifting behind the distant hills as it sets into an ever deeper evening of rose and amber and gold.And suddenly you remember the long-forgotten sense of it being all about the journey, and how it felt to live with the eternal uncertainty and anticipation of travel without a destination.There's a certain part of your soul that was made to be elsewhere.If you don't go anywhere then it gets left behind.If you go somewhere then it stays firmly put.And if you go away to nowhere, you find it there waiting.That was meant to sound kinda Zen and profound. Cut me some slack plz.

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Final destination	[May. 25th, 2010\|02:48 am]Footpad
[Tags\|bahnsinn, delays, no sympathy, suicide, trains]Dear despairing persons of the world,It's not that I don't sympathise. I've been there; I've looked at those big ruthless metal wheels and thought how swiftly and (with a little bit of luck) painlessly they could end it all. I feel for you, I really do, and it grieves me that you saw no alternative but to end your days in such an extremity of torment.But, please, now that I and hundreds of other people have been sitting for hours on a stalled express train outside Baden-Baden while they hose you off the tracks, could I ask you please not to kill yourselves by throwing yourselves in front of a train?It's really not difficult to kill yourself tidily. There are high places, razor-blades, pills if you're sensible enough to read up on the effects, car exhausts, bin-bags and nitrogen, projectiles, hypothermia, household and naturally-occurring poisons... any number of gentle or ungentle but undeniably effective, controlled and reasonably painless ways to snuff the life out of your carcass and let the ephemeral essence of your being scatter to the void.I'd rather you didn't kill yourself but, if you have to go, make your last act a considerate one. You're going to cause enough grief for those you leave behind, and enough labour for those who must clear up your mortal remains. Don't take it out on a thousand or more people whose only concern is to get home to rest after a weary day.—But here's a shout out to the Swiss Federal Railway, who held the last train of the night to pick up all us waifs and strays, and paid a lot of money to pack us all into taxis to our final destinations. I guess they'll send the bill on to Deutsche Bahn, and I'd like to think that DB could charge it to the estate of the suicide, but I doubt there's that much justice in the world.
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Final destination

[May. 25th, 2010|02:48 am]Footpad

[**Tags**|bahnsinn, delays, no sympathy, suicide, trains]Dear despairing persons of the world,It's not that I don't sympathise. I've been there; I've looked at those big ruthless metal wheels and thought how swiftly and (with a little bit of luck) painlessly they could end it all. I feel for you, I really do, and it grieves me that you saw no alternative but to end your days in such an extremity of torment.But, please, now that I and hundreds of other people have been sitting for hours on a stalled express train outside Baden-Baden while they hose you off the tracks, could I ask you please not to kill yourselves by throwing yourselves in front of a train?It's really not difficult to kill yourself tidily. There are high places, razor-blades, pills if you're sensible enough to read up on the effects, car exhausts, bin-bags and nitrogen, projectiles, hypothermia, household and naturally-occurring poisons... any number of gentle or ungentle but undeniably effective, controlled and reasonably painless ways to snuff the life out of your carcass and let the ephemeral essence of your being scatter to the void.I'd rather you didn't kill yourself but, if you have to go, make your last act a considerate one. You're going to cause enough grief for those you leave behind, and enough labour for those who must clear up your mortal remains. Don't take it out on a thousand or more people whose only concern is to get home to rest after a weary day.—But here's a shout out to the Swiss Federal Railway, who held the last train of the night to pick up all us waifs and strays, and paid a lot of money to pack us all into taxis to our final destinations. I guess they'll send the bill on to Deutsche Bahn, and I'd like to think that DB could charge it to the estate of the suicide, but I doubt there's that much justice in the world.

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