Today we departed from Frankfurt on a series 403 ICE that can’t operate under Belgian 3kv DC current, so we had to cross platforms at Düren onto a waiting series 406 train that has waited 20 minutes before departing. The reason for this – as so often for this route – is presumably technical problems with the series 406 trains, with a 406 doing Brussels-Düren-Brussels and a 403 Frankfurt-Düren-Frankfurt.

The problem today was hence known right from departure in Frankfurt/Main (and @DB_bahn confirmed it to me on Twitter), but no announcement was made until after Köln – essentially the train manager was telling untruths about the destination until then… The first rule of transport customer service is to inform people what is going on – in the train DB failed to do that.

More generally, in the past I’ve had trains cancelled completely (and without warning, and without any alternative transport means provided), trains that stop at Aachen while the driver has to re-boot some computer systems and a warning voice blares out “Störung, Störung, Störung“, trains that have been re-routed onto the old lines in Belgium, and – at the very least – nagging delays of between 5 and 20 minutes. I do not currently recall the last time I took the ICE on this route and completed the journey without some sort of problem. As if to compound matters, DB increased its service on the route from 3 to 4 trains a day at the end of 2010.

Essentially it strikes me that the service is part of DB’s attempts to gain market share on the route, preparing the ground for through services to London from December 2013. Cheap tickets on the route are surely part of that strategy too.

At least through services to London will use the new series 407 trains, but for the moment persistent technological problems have not been solved, and today and past experience shows there is also scant attention to customer service.

Seriously DB, if you’re going to be a serious rival to Eurostar, you’re going to have to do better than this.

To get to Berlin from London I have 2 options – Eurostar to Brussels, on to Köln with ICE or Thalys, and then ICE to Berlin. The trip takes 10 hours, a whole day. Alternatively I can take the Eurostar to Paris (yes, Paris, i.e. south from London rather than east), and from there a night train to Berlin. 16 hours. There are a couple of half-way similar options, involving late night changes in Mannheim. No.

The problem – in essence – is that there are no night trains from Brussels any more (see this and this). Have a look at the City Night Line map shown above, or their destinations list. CNL trains reach Rome, Copenhagen, Paris, Amsterdam, Prague. But not Brussels. A 2100 departure from Brussels could split in Hannover, with onward carriages to Hamburg, Copenhagen, Berlin and even Prague, plus with Brussels 2 hours away from London, suddenly a whole swathe of northern Europe would be more accessible from London. If Amsterdam has connections like these, why not Brussels too?

DB, SNCB – please sort out your disputes and make it happen!

Here then is a guide to how to get the cheapest Eurostar tickets on the London-Brussels route, using DB’s website rather than Eurostar.com. The standard price is €49.00 single, sometimes a saving of 50%.
NOTE: there’s a worked example at the end of the post.

1. You need to book tickets from London to Germany, or Germany to London, on trains via Brussels. Your best bet is to look for connections to or from Aachen Hbf, the first main station after the border with Belgium.
2. Start first by working out what Eurostar trains you want to take, at which times and on which dates. You can do this using Eurostar.com or DB Reiseauskunft (also available in English). Don’t worry about the prices of these tickets, just concern yourself with the times and dates. Keep these window(s) with the train times open. Note that the price of the Eurostar leg does not determine the price of the total ticket.
3. Next work out the train connections between Bruxelles Midi (the Eurostar terminus) and Aachen Hbf, using DB Reiseauskunft. You need to look for ICE trains only (not Thalys), and you can break your journey for up to 48 hours in Brussels. In other words find an ICE that leaves from Brussels to Aachen less than 48 hours after your Eurostar will arrive, or an ICE that arrives in Brussels from Aachen less than 48 hours before your Eurostar leaves. You need to find ICE trains that offer you a price of €19.00 for this connection. If you’re offered higher prices your total price to/from London will also be higher. The price of the whole ticket is determined by the price of the Brussels-Aachen part, so seek out that €19.00 ticket! Keep these windows open as well.
4. Then put the two parts together, booking using DB Reiseauskunft. Make your starting station London St Pancras International and your end station Aachen Hbf (or vice versa) and – the important part – click ‘enter stopovers’ (Zwischenhalte angeben) and enter Bruxelles Midi. Enter the total amount of hours and minutes needed between the two legs of the journey, making sure that your Eurostar will connect with an ICE and not with a Thalys (or ICE connect to a Eurostar).
5. This should give you €49.00 as the price for a single ticket, plus a €2.50 charge. This can then be booked off the DB website with a credit card, with a PDF file produced that you can print at home. These tickets do not work in the automatic ticket gates for Eurostar – you have to go to the desk beside the gates to get a boarding ticket.
6. Of course there is no need to actually take the Brussels-Aachen leg of the journey.

If you have a BahnCard25 you can save an additional €5, making the ticket €44.00, plus a €2.50 charge.

What are the downsides? First, if you’re booking really long in advance, Eurostar.com might be a fraction cheaper. This trick works best for trains booked a month or so in advance. Second, it works only for tickets that cannot be exchanged. Third, you don’t earn any Carte Blanche points. Fourth, you do not get to choose your seat in Eurostar (although you can probably ask the people nicely at the terminal!)

Anyway, as the explanation above is not too simple to follow, here is a worked example. Click each screenshot to view it at full size.

The train I want to take – the 0827 from London – is highlighted.

The next available ICE at €19.00 to Aachen leaves at 1425, a little over 2 hours after the Eurostar arrives.

When I click ‘Enter stopovers’ I then enter Bruxelles Midi and 02:10 in the stopover time, and hit search.

Bingo – a €49 single ticket on Eurostar.

These trains are more than a month away at the time of writing, but a single for the 0827 departure on Eurostar.com is already £56. I have managed to book €49.00 DB tickets when the price of a single on Eurostar.com was more than £100, hence saving more than 50%.

A pedestrian bumps into another pedestrian who is blocking the pavement.

The pedestrian gets a wet foot from a loose paving stone and clambers over bags of rubbish on the way to the Métro.

The same person takes the Métro, and when leaving the train at Gare du Midi he knocks into a passenger trying to board before he leaves the train.

He’s late for his train, and then when ascending the escalators from the Métro to the concourse other people are blocking the escalators. He asks them to move, he’s met with a ‘je m’en fous’ shrug and a snide comment, and a raging, verbal argument ensues.

By this point he’s so mad he shouts at an employee of the STIB, who hits him.

OK, this is not a true story. But all of the pieces of this I have seen (sometimes regularly) over the years I lived in Brussels, and all of this was brought to stark attention this week when a Brussels Métro, Tram and Bus strike in Brussels was provoked by… a Métro driver punching a customer. Seriously. Le Soir in French here, Google translation here.

But what is actually at stake here?

Brussels is a city where everyday anger is all too prevalent – in the public spaces, between customers and owners of enterprises, between car drivers and pedestrians, and in the public transport. There’s also an annoying level of street crime. I’m aware that what I’m writing here is an intuition, but I sure have heard less raging in 6 months in London than I did when I lived in Brussels, and I know others feel the same.

So how do you solve this? I’m far from convinced that the British (or anyone else) are inherently less rage-prone. But – just to take the London Underground as an example – the rules are relentlessly repeated, over and over, until they eventually become social norms. “Let passengers off the train first”, “Move down inside the cars”, “Stand on the right” (on escalators). Even tourists very soon get the message on the latter, and everything runs more smoothly, for everyone. Isn’t it about time that Brussels started to do some of this – on the STIB network at the very least – and started to enforce some more civilised behaviour?

The route is Eurostar to Bruxelles Midi, then Thalys on the new HSL-Zuid to Rotterdam Centraal. Total journey time is just over 4 hours, making it comparable to the plane from London to Schipol and then the train to Rotterdam. It’s a journey that anyone should be willing to contemplate.

So how do you book?

I started at Eurostar.com, just to see what it would give me. £168 to get to Rotterdam on 6th March, and £155 to get back, £323 total, and this in standard class. For reasons I don’t understand it would only give me semi-flexible tickets.

So I returned to my standard 3-step process for booking European rail tickets:

FIRST, get all the timetable information from German railways – reiseauskunft.bahn.de. Screenshots: London-Rotterdam, Rotterdam-London

SECOND, work out where to split the journey for booking purposes. For London-Rotterdam it’s rather simple – split at Bruxelles Midi where you change trains (for more on complicated splits see this blog entry)

THIRD, book the tickets direct with the train companies involved, in this case Eurostar and Thalys

The result? £79 return for London-Bruxelles Midi, and €75 (£63.89) return for Bruxelles Midi-Rotterdam Centraal, total £142.89 return. Less than half the price quoted by Eurostar.com for the complete journey. OK, these tickets are non-exchangeable, non-refundable, but why are those not actually offered by Eurostar.com in the first place? Also considering this journey is 5 weeks away from now, it still strikes me as rather costly…

Once more the case for proper Europe-wide train booking systems is very clear – something for the workshop on transport and mobility at the conference?

It all started fine. I waited for the bus to Kolding at a freezing cold bus stop outside Lego HQ but the bus arrived, departed, and got me to Kolding with enough time for a pizza before the train. All day Friday there was no more snow, but nothing melted either, and an impressive firework display of sparks from the pantograph lit up the sky as the locomotive arrived in Kolding and left on time.

At the border station (Padborg) nothing happened. For a long time. Except the lights going out. And then we waited. And waited some more. After about 75 minutes of waiting, and no announcements, a locomotive was connected and we started to move. By this time the beer drunk with the pizza had kicked in and I was dozing in the couchette… Aside from a temporary disturbance when a passenger boarding at Hamburg turned the full, bright light on in the compartment, that was it. Until the guard bangs on the door and tells us we have to get out shortly – in Dortmund!

I hadn’t realised, but the train had accrued more delay (90 minutes in total), and the decision was taken to run it direct from Dortmund (through Essen, Duisburg) to Amsterdam, and not via Köln (my destination to change for Brussels). So all passengers for Wuppertal and Köln disembarked, and were supposed to wait 45 minutes for a connecting train.

I wonder whether this was the right decision, not least because Dusiburg is a lot closer to Köln than Dortmund is, and there may well have been more services from there to Köln, allowing more people to catch their connecting trains. Was an unscheduled stop in Duisburg even considered? Plus with so many CityNightLine tickets being booked electronically a system to automatically work out where passengers could change according to their final destinations should not be a hard thing to program.

Anyway in Dortmund a French biologist, Jean Philippe, overheard me asking DB staff about the best way to get to Brussels. The DB staff had no clue, so we decided to board a RE train direct from Dortmund to Aachen Hbf (via Wuppertal – Düsseldorf – Mönchengladbach), with that train due to arrive there 20 minutes after the ICE to Brussels would have passed. That was less of a time difference than if we had waiting the 45 minutes in Dortmund and taken the train to Köln.

Problem was it didn’t work… The RE train ran on time, but the Brussels bound ICE left Aachen with only 10 minutes of delay (about the lowest delay I can recall for an ICE3 from Aachen!) so we were stuck there. The solution was a IR train to Liège (an ancient railcar), then a Belgian IC from there to Brussels. We arrived at 1301, almost two and a half hours late, and long after the Eurostar I was due to take had departed.

Rather than negotiate for a new ticket, I decided at this point to cut my losses and stay in Brussels – I have to be here on Monday for work anyway, and heavy new snow in Brussels made me fear whether Eurostar would work properly anyway…

So – in short – the journey to Billund was eventful and ultimately successful, the return was beset by bad communications and no luck at all. Still, lessons learned, and I’ll drink a Chimay this weekend in Brussels.

So what happened on the trip?

My DB ICE3 left 2 minutes late from Brussels, running more or less to time as far as Liège. Then after having left Liège we were diverted onto the old line via Verviers, rather than HSL3. The reason cited was electric problems – but how does that explain the diversion? And why tell is when we’re already diverted, rather than before?

At Aachen we waited too long in the station, then slowly headed eastwards, and were the told we had to get off in Düren and board another ICE3 there – but this whole thing was clearly planned, as the ICE3 we had disembarked was headed back to Belgium, and the one we were on was a single voltage unit, heading back towards Frankfurt. But why the drip, drip, drip of partial information? Tell us what’s really happening, DB! Plus once the problems started the DB staff were conspicuous by their absence – I had to rely on my iPhone to work out connections from Köln rather than be advised by the DB staff.

In Köln I was lucky – the IC train to Hamburg was still in the station as it was 20 minutes delay, my ICE having arrived 70 minutes late – I had 55 mins planned for the connection. The heating was broken in the carriage where I had reserved, but there were seats elsewhere, so I sat by the window and watched the white landscape, eventually arriving in Hamburg 30 minutes late. I had planned 35 mins for the connection here, and the RE train to Padborg was 5 minutes late, so I managed it easily enough.

Yet by this point I was starting to worry a bit – the heaviest snow of the journey was in northern Germany, with high winds too, and the RE train was covered in snow when it arrived. Here too the heating in one carriage didn’t work, but we headed northwards across the fields of Schleswig-Holstein with it still snowing heavily. All fine as far as Neumünster but then shortly afterwards the brakes were swiftly applied and we were told the points were stuck with snow. The driver tried to dig the snow out, failed, and a rescue crew was called. At least we were warm in the train. We arrived at Flensburg, the last station in Germany, with more than an hour of delay.

Then luck and geographic knowledge combined. A DSB ICE TD pulled into Flensburg moments after my RE train, bound for Århus. That will pass Vejle I thought, digging into my vague knowledge of Danish geography. So I hopped off the RE and into the ICE. The guard in the RE train had actually advised me against this! Turned out this ICE was running more than 2 hours late (it should have departed much earlier!) and all the passengers were understandably furious. I thought it was my lucky day, as the ICE powered it through Jutland, snow and all, getting me to Vejle just 15 minutes later than I was due there, and 5 minutes later than the Billund bus was due to leave. But passengers were queuing to board the bus, delaying its departure, I joined the queue, boarded the bus, and arrived in Billund literally two minutes after my scheduled arrival time. Really remarkable!

Anyway, I am about to leave for the return journey to London… How’s that going to go I wonder? Fingers crossed. Billund – Kolding – Köln – Bruxelles – London here I come!