2023-12-16 18:00:30
Empty platforms – hours before the strike. Image: dpa
Anyone who thought traveling with Deutsche Bahn was torture had never been to England and tried to get from Manchester to Hull by train.
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.
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