This is the main railway station in Oldenburg (Oldb) — not to be confused with Oldenburg (Holst), which is a smaller place in Holstein, on the way to Puttgarten, Rødbyhavn and Copenhagen. The reason for the “(Oldb)” in the name of this Oldenburg is that for centuries it was the Read More …
This is the bar car on the upper level of the French double-decker TGV train that runs once a day — except during coronavirus lockdowns — from Frankfurt am Main (Germany) to Marseille (France) by way of Mannheim, Karlsruhe, Strasbourg, Mulhouse, Belfort, Besançon, Chalon sur Saône, Lyon, Avignon and Aix-en-Provence. Read More …
Even now, after thirty years of German unification, it still feels eerie to ride in a train as it barrels through the town of Gerstungen without even slowing down. Gerstungen used to be the border stop between East and West Germany, and every train had at least a one-hour stop Read More …
Right next to the south station in Mainz (where the InterCityExpress trains go through without stopping) there is an archaeological excavation site called Theatrum Mogontiacensium. With the help of numerous volunteers, including local school children and also some of the Americans who used to live in the area, archaeologists have Read More …
This is the main railway station in Saarbrücken, Germany, located about five km from the French border and eight km from Forbach, the first town on the French side. As of August 2020, there are three direct trains per day from Saarbrücken to Paris, two German ICEs and one French Read More …
Kaiserslautern is still nearly four hundred kilometers from Paris, just as it always was, but the travel time is now greatly reduced since 2007, when the French railway system opened a new high-speed stretch of tracks called TGV Est Europeen running more or less straight east from Paris. Most of Read More …
For those of us who arrive by train from central or southern Germany, this “grand” two-star hotel (grand being a French word for large) is conveniently located just half a block from the Gare de l’Est, i.e. the East Station. For a single room on the fifth floor I paid Read More …
Markt Bibart is a town at the southern edge of the Steiger Forest, on the main railway line between Würzburg and Nürnberg. The first known mention of Bibart in any document was in the year 816, but it has only been a “Markt” (= market) since the fourteenth century, when Read More …
From March 2012 to the beginning of the corona virus pandemic in 2020, there was a direct high-speed train connection (only once a day, but still) from Frankfurt via Mannheim, Karlsruhe, Strasbourg, Belfort and Besançon to Lyon, and then on to Avignon, Aix-en-Provence and Marseille, all without changing trains. Before Read More …
After years of bickering, scandals and cost overruns, Berlin finally has its modern new Main Station (Hauptbahnhof), built from 1993 to 2006 on the site of the old Lehrter Station that had not been used since 1952. The new station has tracks on two different levels. Upstairs is the traditional Read More …