The big train ride, day 1 - the longest journey starts with a single community bus ride…

I enjoy travel, as regular readers will testify. And it is as much the actual journey as the destination sometimes. It’s not that being somewhere isn’t enjoyable, but the process of travelling from A to B should bring some joy.

A month ago, it was Europe Day and, to celebrate this and the fiftieth anniversary of the introduction of the Interrail ticket, there was a short lived offer of half-price Interrail tickets. So, I bought myself a one-month first class Interrail ticket, usage any time in the next year.

Which brings me to a train somewhere in Hesse…

I left Creeting St Peter yesterday morning, dragging a pleasingly small suitcase on wheels and with a small rucksack on my back, using our Connecting Communities demand responsive transport to get me to Stowmarket station in time for the 9.32 train to Liverpool Street. I’d activated my pass and was curious to see how it would work.

The idea is that you select your train using the handy app that Interrail offer and, once you know that you’ve boarding it, you mark the train by sliding a little ‘button’ to the right. This ensures that the train company get their share of revenue from the ticket. If asked by a ticket inspector - they all seem to be called train managers these days - you show the QR code for your pass and all is well. They are theoretically supposed to check that you’ve entered the train on your pass, a throwback to the time when they were in paper form, but nobody seems to be too bothered about that.

The first problem was as Liverpool Street, where the QR code didn’t trigger the barriers, but there was someone on duty so they let me out with merely a perfunctory glance at the QR code, so no harm done.

I’d cautiously left more than enough time to get to St Pancras but it was a nice day, and my 10,000 steps don’t walk themselves, so, rather than take the Elizabeth Line to Farringdon and then ThamesLink to St Pancras, I walked through the Barbican Estate to Farringdon, where my ticket again failed to trigger the barrier. And, again, I was admitted to the platforms. I do find myself wondering what QR codes I could show and still be let in…

St Pancras International was, as news reports has suggested, busy. However, the Eurostar staff had separated the queue by departure time, so it really didn’t take that long to clear security and French immigration control. And I’m a big fan of Eurostar, which offers happy memories of trips to ALDE Party Financial Advisory Committee meetings. A first class Interrail ticket gives you access to the Standard Premier carriages, although you do have to pay €38 for a seat reservation (€30 in standard), which means wider seats and a meal (in this instance, a salmon quiche and a fennel salad, plus dessert and a quarter bottle of wine).

I had a tight connection in Brussels, fifteen minutes for a Deutsche Bahn ICE train to Frankfurt Airport and an on time arrival was good news. The bad news was that all of the shortcuts from Eurostar to the main station were closed, with a full complement of passengers attempting to make it past a narrow gap.

I did make it to platform 5 though, although there was no sign of a train. Now there are certain expectations of German trains, the primary one being that they run on time. Given my final destination, it wasn’t a crisis, but for the two young Americans attempting to get to Kiel via five connections, it was looking a bit grim. I hope that they made it…

We were twenty minutes late into Frankfurt Airport, which meant a later train to my final stop for the day, Mannheim. And, again, the train to Basel was late, by about twenty minutes. So much for German efficiency, it seems… On the other hand, the hotel couldn’t have been much more convenient for the station and, having checked in and dropped off my luggage, it was time for a brief explore and a bite to eat.

Mannheim is not an obvious tourist destination, although it is convenient for Heidelberg, which most certainly is one. It is quite prosperous looking though, with a main shopping street full of big names from the retail sector, and the Innenstadt is very walkable. The main feature is the Wasserturm, an enormous water tower which stands at the eastern end of town.

Sleep was calling to me though, and I was soon back in the hotel, where I fell into a deep sleep, ready for another day…