Swiss (and German) adventure: the postscript

A Deutsche Bahn ICE train approaches Frankfurt's main station during the author's unscheduled stop there. (Photos by David Lassen)

Also in Frankfurt, a French TGV trainset awaits its return trip after arriving from Paris.

I touched down at O’Hare Airport on Friday afternoon, closing the book on my second European trip for Trains, my fifth journey across the Atlantic overall. As always, I found time overseas to be memorable and enriching, and as always, I was ready to get home.

A few final thoughts before getting back to the day-to-day routine, before going to work on the first of a few stories from the trip that will eventually appear in the magazine:

Because the train out of Frankfurt was so packed, I had to stand for about a half-hour early in the trip. The only reason it wasn’t longer was that I’d headed to the customer service desk as soon as I arrived in Frankfurt, anticipating such a problem, and had my first-class reservation rebooked. The agent found what was literally the last seat available, even if it wasn’t quite for the entire journey. (In normal circumstances, I might have done the rebooking myself online — Wi-Fi is free to first-class passengers on the DB — but along with everything else, the on-train Internet wasn’t functioning.)

I’ve heard Deutsche Bahn is no longer the flawless operation it once was, and I believe it — based not just from my own experience, but on conversations with other passengers. If and when I get back to Germany, I will be a little more conservative (perhaps pessimistic is a better word) when it comes to trip planning.

• There was one positive out of those two dysfunctional trips: To get to Nuremburg, I ended up riding from Karlsruhe to Frankfurt on a French TGV running direct from Paris, and I was very, very impressed. It seemed to me to have a much smoother ride than the first- and second-generation Deutsche Bahn ICE trains I rode elsewhere. This was true even when the train was living up to its name (TGV, you’ll recall, stands for Train à Grande Vitesse, or “Train of Great Speed”), rolling along at 246 kilometers per hour, a rather brisk 153 mph.

• Living in the transit-poor Milwaukee area, I am truly envious of Europe’s more enlightened approach to public transit — not just the extensive systems in most cities, but the efforts to encourage their use. When I checked into my hotel in Bern, Switzerland, I was given a card good for transit use for the duration of my stay, and a copy of my hotel reservation was good for transit to get me from the train station to the hotel. (Other Swiss cities have similar programs.) And when I went to a soccer game at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, my ticket was good for public transit from five hours before the game until 3 a.m. the morning afterward.

Switzerland, though, may have the best deal of all. Its Swiss Travel Pass essentially covers all ground transportation. (A handful of operations — the Glacier Express and the GoldenPass Chocolate Train, for example — aren’t covered, because they’re tourist-oriented, rather than Point-A-to-Point-B transportation. But even the Glacier Express gives a 50 percent discount to passholders.)

As Maurus Lauber, CEO of the Swiss Travel System, told our tour group in a talk at the Swiss Museum of Transport, “Switzerland has 260 different transportation companies. But you have a ticket in your pocket which allows you to travel on all those 260 different companies. And I think in no other country in the world can you buy a ticket that you can use for the tramway, for the high speed train, for the boat … and with the same ticket, you can even go into 500 museums. So the cooperation in the Swiss transportation industry is on a very, very high level.”