In the winter of 2019/2020, I took four short city-and-opera trips (three days and two nights each time) by train from Frankfurt. This was something I used to do fairly often in December and January, because I typically had fewer teaching commitments in those months than in the months before 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 …
In 2004 I posted a ‘tip’ on the now-defunct website VirtualTourist about the central railroad station in Stuttgart. Little did I know, at the time, that the fate of this station would later turn into one of the hottest political issues in Germany. My original ‘tip’ read as follows: In Read More …
In July 2011, I went down to Stuttgart by train (from Mannheim, where I had attended an opera premiere the night before) to take part in a large demonstration against “Stuttgart 21”. As you can see from the photos, the demonstrators came from all age groups, including lots of older Read More …
This imposing train station was built from 1895 to 1905 as a terminus station, meaning that all the tracks ended here. The station features a huge dome, which aside from being impressive had the function of collecting the steam from the steam engines that were used at the time, thus Read More …