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Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

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Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#321

Post by encom »

prmoustache wrote: post #247
nephihaha wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Not being under any obligation doesn't mean it is not a sensible a courteous way to do. You like it or not, english has become a defacto common international language. While I speak 5 languages and try to learn some basic words of the local languages of any country I visit out of courtesy (how to say hello, bye, thank you, ask where are the toilets, etc), I wouldn't expect any traveller to know enough to understand t…

>common international language

Not nearly as much as people on the internet seem to think. In large parts of Europe, speaking english will get you absolutely nowhere.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#322

Post by smcl »

matrss wrote: post #260
Zufriedenheit wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DB is not privatized. It is 100% owned by the state.

DB has been reorganized as an AG in the 90s, i.e. a corporation under private law. They are forced to (at least try to) make a profit for their shareholders, which is a common trait of private organizations. They consistently do so via short-sighted (mis-)management, another common trait with many private organizations. This privatized corporation is indeed fully owned by the state as its only shareholder, but unfort…

I wonder how many times a low-effort "truthy" sounding comment like that is written without someone like you to correct them and to clarify. There's also comments here suggesting UK's privatisation fixed BR that I do not have the energy to correct anymore, so they just sit there being wrong for all to see

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#323

Post by em-bee »

xenocratus wrote: post #239
indiantinker wrote: post #17

DB is weird. They seem to make their own rules and then run the game and “dont tell the rules to anyone”. I was on my way to catch a flight from Munich to my home (Madrid). I didn’t knew that apparently at one point the train splits into two parts and the front part goes to the airport and the other part just goes to the nearby cattle farms and comes back in 3 hours. Google Maps - No idea Citymapper - what? English a…

We took that train, realised when we got to the other end of the line that we hadn't gotten where we expected, then turned back to the place where it separates. Waited for the next advertised train to airport (it's signalled on the electronic board as two separate entries; yes, it says "board whatever carriages for airport, and the rest for ...", or at least I assume it did, as it was in German of course; but again,…

germans don't use credit cards. finding an automated ticket machine thst handles credit cards would be extremely rare.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#324

Post by locallost »

tsimionescu wrote: post #99
locallost wrote: post #56

I don't know what to make of this. Of course everyone has a right to be pissed off for losing time because of someone else's mistake, but at the same time the language is... I mean if you feel kidnapped because your train connection didn't work out I am not sure how you'd feel if you were really kidnapped. Was my family kidnapped when they were sitting for two hours in the airplane before takeoff because of xyz? No,…

> I mean if you feel kidnapped because your train connection didn't work out It's not "your train connection didn't work out", it's "you were planning to go somewhere, and the train took you somewhere else entirely, much farther away than when you started, and gave you no way out of this, and not even an apology or explanation". This is absolutely comparable to a form of kidnapping.

Yes because after kidnapping you are always allowed to leave the vehicle you were kidnapped with and continue with your day.

Sorry, but no.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#325

Post by bombcar »

tirant wrote: post #77
rwmj wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's going to the airport and so might be full of travellers and tourists?

To be fair, it’s announced in the platform screens in a language abstract way, by indicating the destination and the platform segments (A,B vs C,D) to take to reach the destination.

The key is that on hundred of trains around the world this is done to indicate the convenience - these doors will be closer, etc.

Trains splitting in half are rare enough that THAT is what needs to be described.

The US equivalent is the empire builder which splits in Spokane (I believe) but it’s much more old fashioned and you have a tag above your seat showing your destination- if you somehow end up on the wrong car the conductor will wake you up and move you to the right one.

A similar one that can catch you (and has caught me) are express elevators or the two-story ones which mean you only can stop at even or odd floors depending on where you got on.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#326

Post by encom »

delfinom wrote: post #278
manarth wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And French, as Germany is adjacent to France. There are train connections to Scandinavia, so let's add Swedish, Danish and Finnish. Also Dutch and Polish to accommodate the other adjacent countries.

Look, as an EU country citizen, English is more or less the defacto language of the EU, regardless of what politicians declare. Everyone in the EU speaks english in some form as even traveling to a next door country like you state requires communication. There are cases where in Belgium you will see signs in 4 languages (Dutch, French, Flemish and English) Also if you ever travel in Japan, they have signs, especially…

>Everyone in the EU speaks english

That's not even slightly true, where in god's name did you get this idea?

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#327

Post by mcv »

101008 wrote: post #10

I know the author mentioned this, but I just got nervous imagining this as a tourist who doesn't speak German at all. This shouldn't be like this. Why they don't help at all? It's also funny considering how here in South America we look at Germany trains (and Switzerland trains) as always on time, and the best train system, etc. But I am sure if this happens here it would be on the cover of newspapers.

Swiss trains are always on time. I've heard they've start to refuse delayed German trains entry to the country because their delays disrupt the system too much. The Swiss train system is excellent. The German train system is a joke.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#328

Post by db48x »

BloondAndDoom wrote: post #131

I feel like we lost humanity somewhere in modern world. I grew up in 3rd world country and if this were to happen, train would literally stop somewhere, anywhere. (With the assumption it’s safe from crewing into another train). But the idea that you go 55 minutes just because of policy; and skip 15 stations is crazy to me. Again with the assumptions that it can safely stop somewhere for 5m and I’m pretty sure the ans…

Same here. An Amtrak train would just stop at the next convenient road crossing, if there were really something preventing them from stopping at the scheduled station. Most Amtrak stations don't even have staff, or any way to prevent people from coming and going, so this would most likely involve construction on the station platform itself. That’s fairly rare but the last time I took the Zephyr headed east there was exactly that situation. The construction crews had the whole platform blocked off so we boarded at the road crossing a block away.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#329

Post by apexalpha »

rcbdev wrote: post #264

I never understood why the Germans cannot get their shit together on commercial train travel. Austria manages to coordinate a wonderful federal train system across nine federal states without issues via the ÖBB, the Swiss also seem to have it down.

Fundamentally, the Germans tried to cheap out on high speed trains by trying to engineer them to run on normal tracks so they didn't have to build new, expensive high-speed tracks like France and Japan did.

This is the fundamental mistake underpinning their train service since the long distance trains frequently have to wait for other trains to pass, cascading delays through the system.

That and an almost criminal level of underinvestment in the past 20 years or so.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#330

Post by whstl »

raverbashing wrote: post #283
pjmlp wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, although quite often they forget not everyone speaks German. I once had a bit of Schadenfrunde while travelling in Netherlands, having the conductor telling us to switch trains in Dutch, and all my German fellow travellers wondering what it was all about.

I wonder what's the level of mutual ineligibility between DE NL (probably DE is easier to NL) but it's funny how Germans sometimes seem to play dumb and not understand a thing in NL

As a German speaker, spoken Dutch REALLY trips me up because of small pronunciation differences in almost every word. Written Dutch is way closer.

The Dutch seem to understand German better, but my Dutch friends credit that more to education and exposure.

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