2023-12-16 18:00:30
This was my best holiday experience of 2023: It was Thursday evening, and it was 6 p.m., and Berlin Central Station was empty. Empty! The GDL strike was only supposed to begin four hours later, but the tracks looked as if it was already Christmas: a few scattered people like me, a team of reporters from ARD who interviewed a few of these people in front of the camera, the cool, vast silence Architecture – it was wonderful. It was empty! But the train almost deprived me of this experience again.
“Please rebook, we’re going on strike,” she begged me in a push notification that afternoon. I wouldn’t have gotten into it at all because I was supposed to leave early enough. Maybe the train didn’t want to protect me with this warning, but rather itself – so that I don’t get used to the sight of a comfortable, quiet station and end up with the idea that traveling by train could always be like this. So it would be something that would be possible without fancy escalators and two hundred people with excess luggage looking for their seats on a fully booked train, and then the toilets are also out.
It can always be worse
I can not help it! That’s what happens when you’ve been traveling by train for years and constantly have to chase trains whose cars arrive in reverse order. So you become ungracious. And thinks: It could be that they no longer put wagon position indicators on the tracks because they want to move everything into their app and you can conveniently search for your seat on the train and the section of track in front of the entrance digitally – but I’m sure they do That’s just because they’re tired of having to constantly admit that their trains arrive at the station upside down!
This text comes from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
I’m not sure if I expressed that technically correctly, but the railways condition you to expect that things can always get worse. And when it doesn’t happen that way at all, but actually becomes much nicer than usual, you become completely confused and forgiving. So there I stood, waiting for my ICE and always keeping an eye on the team of reporters, hoping that they would also ask me about my frustration with the train and the strike and Weselsky – and I already gave myself a few de-escalating generous sentences just in case.
It couldn’t be worse
“Oh, you know,” I wanted to answer and take a deep drag from my pipe, “this strike will be over in 24 hours, of course I feel (poof, poof) with the many poor people who are now stranded somewhere, but what are these 24 hour strikes – which we have a right to! – measured against the 365 days a year on which we are governed by an FDP transport minister?” So I wanted to answer, I whistled, but then my ICE arrived, and even if it had done it in the reverse order, it would have been I didn’t care. It was so empty! Nothing is nicer than a generous patronage mood without detailed knowledge.
Andreas Lesti Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 17 Oliver Maria Schmitt Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 69 Arezu Weitholz Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 10
So that was my best holiday experience of 2023. My most terrible holiday experience, on the other hand, was four train journeys in northern England between Manchester and Hull two weeks before, where nothing worked. Apparently there was a storm, but isn’t that always in England? No train ran on time, everyone was overcrowded, I learned that “delay due to a delay in operations” is called “congestion” in the newspeak of the privatized English railway companies, caught a bad cold – and decided never to say a bad word about the German one again Railway to say. Paff paff.
#Deutsche #Bahn #worse