…for traeweling wif Deutsche Bahn!”
Is one of the sentences I hear quite often during my last weekends. This is because of two reasons: On the one hand it is because I started to extensively use the transportation services of the German railway company and on the other hand the english skills of the service people working in the trains are often questionable. My english isn’t that good either, but at least I try to speak a proper english when communicating with people.
I admit that I had a kind of aversion against riding by train since I did my military service a hell lot of years ago. Possibly because I even didn’t like the basic training at the military at all and I had to go there a long way by train and the connections…well…sucked bigtime! Lately this changed quite a bit since I often travel quite some distances during the weekends and travelling by car is not always the cheapest or most pleasant way.
Overall I really seem to get used to travelling by train. The only thing that sucks is the unreliability of the Deutsche Bahn in General. The hasn’t been a single planned route lately where one of the trains didn’t get delayed for some reason. 96 minutes was the most horrible delay one of the trains had. When you have to switch trains on your route this can be extremely annoying because your ETA is skyrocketting. And another point that’s extremely annoying is the way you have to claim refunds when using an online ticket. You can use an online form for it and then print it out and send it by snail mail. WTF?
I also found out a single train that never ever seems to be “in time”. It’s the IC 2213 from Koblenz to Mannheim (on saturdays) that always manages to be late. Let’s see if it will fail for the fourth time next weekend! I decided to buy a small bottle of champagne or do a congratulation certificate to carry with me for handing it over to the service people of this particular InterCity train when they finally manage to arrive and leave Koblenz in time! 
Nevertheless the train brings me to the place I eagerly want to be…so I even like to tackle with the inadequacies!