German trains run on time, right? As opposed to Italian ones, or indeed our own. Well, actually no. German trains are reliably unreliable, as I found on a trip to Bavaria.
I booked with Trainline – an excellent site that makes travel from one end of Europe to the other a doddle. Put London in the out box and your destination in the other and it’s all there, timetable and tickets, as simple as going from London to Aberystwyth.
So, my trip to Augsburg was dandy to begin with. You leave St Pancras on the Eurostar and change trains from the Gare du Nord to the Gare l’Est, leaving enough time for bavette and chips near the station. The two stations are ten minutes apart and eventually there’s going to be a dedicated walkway to get you from one to the other without a map.
Trouble is, the timetable works on the basis that you’ll arrive on time. And with Deutsche Bahn, you probably won’t. At the outset, the 11 minute change time on the schedule at Stuttgart made me nervous. I did try to fiddle with departure times to get a margin of error, but each time the system came back with 11 minutes to change trains. So it was with a sinking feeling that I found that the train to Stuttgart just wasn’t going to make it. The train was comfortable and clean and felt fast. It just wasn’t fast enough. So by the time we were running nearly 20 minutes late, there was quite the little crowd gathered round the door. “Munich?” one lady enquired. “God knows”, I said in my best German.
Hope, however, springs eternal so when we piled off the train at what should have been 17.04 but wasn’t, we noticed that the 17.15 was still on the departure boards. So we all sprinted – well, sort of – to the platform and it was, mercifully, crowded. If the arriving train was late, so too was the departing train. And when it pulled in, the lady bound for Munich caught it, and so did we. But the arrival time at 18.41 at Augsburg was notional too. We were a good half hour late.
But all was well. We got to our hosts, who couldn’t have been nicer. Bavarians are friendly, down to earth people. The beer is excellent. Augsburg itself is quiet these days, but it was the favourite city of the Emperor Maximilian (who’s everywhere), the home of the largest banking house in Europe in the Renaissance, run by the Fuggers (they’re everywhere too) and one of the hotspots of the Reformation. The church of St Ulrich is beautiful; so too is the cathedral.
My ultimate destination, however, was Altotting, a little pilgrimage village in eastern Bavaria. That meant travelling to Munich, changing at Muhldorf, a small station, and taking a train from there to Altotting. And yep, the train to Muhldorf was delayed, but there was no trouble about getting on the following one. In fact, as a rule on German rail, there seems to be that you simply get on the next train to the one you missed, usually an hour later.
Altotting, once I got there, was worth a trip, always supposing you like places of pilgrimage. There’s a little blackened statue of the Madonna there, dressed in stiff jewelled robes, which has drawn pilgrims since the fifteenth century, The little shrine is plastered with homely pictures of the miracles attributed to her: lots of runaway horses, burning houses, a ravening bear and a nice baby plus a couple of pictures of Russian prisoner of war camps from which the petitioner felt thankful to return. All human life really.
There are other lovely destination churches, around the square, and more shops selling wooden cherubs (heads and whole) than you can handle. I can recommend the Munchner Hof for elegant Bavarian food – just go for the Weissbier, the light beer, and anything with dumplings or a schnitzel - or the Glockelwirt, for the spectacle of nuns tucking into half a chicken and with a beer to go with it. It’s very quiet, apart from assorted pilgrim groups who take in Altotting as part of one of the network of pilgrim routes that crisscross the area – a walking pilgrimage from Mariazell or Einsiedeln would be terrific.
On the return journey, I was primed for delays, so I simply got a train an hour early. That too was late arriving in Munich – the driver, announcing a 20 minute delay, seemed depressed, but not surprised - but, being ahead of schedule, I wasn’t panicking.
So, what would be the advice for taking the train? Plainly, we should all be travelling by rail rather than by air. It’s not just that it’s environmentally sound; you register the country that you travel through. Some of the Bavarian countryside is lovely. Trainline was a tremendously useful tool. My advice for dealing with delays is to break up journeys into their component parts where there’s too little time for changing trains. I would in future book the leg of the journey from Stuttgart separately, opting for a train that left a good half hour after the notional arrival time. If you go for a relaxed itinerary rather than a rushed one, you’ll still get where you’re going; just in a better frame of mind.
