How late it was how late – novel by James Kelman
Day 9 – Monday 16th May 2022 – Bled to Regensburg
When I booked this trip I bought a Deutsche Bahn ticket from Lesce-Bled railway station to Regensburg in Bavaria. Only from my researching the route for the previous day did I discover that the line on which I had originally planned to travel to Bled on Sunday was still closed on Monday and that there would be a railway replacement bus service from Lesce-Bled departing about 20 minutes earlier than the train. Not that I would have known any of this if I had relied on the Deutsche Bahn app on which my ticket was stored. It still just said that the train was running on time. Given that I would have to catch a bus to Lesce-Bled to pick up the railway replacement bus to Jesenice where the train should now start, I decided that it would be simpler just to catch a service bus direct to Jesenice.
The hotel in which I stayed in Bled included breakfast in the price, but its own dining room was not operating, so I had to go a little way down the road to a rather more upmarket sister hotel for my breakfast. As the bus to Jesenice was due to depart at 0815, I got up early and went for breakfast shortly after they started serving at 7am. The large dining room was fairly empty when I arrived, but rapidly filled up with French and German tour parties. As a Covid precaution, I don’t like to mingle in large groups indoors when eating and I found the tour groups habit of swarming round me rather off-putting.
After breakfast I went back to my original hotel to check out. I was confused by the receptionist speaking to me in very bad French (as I think she assumed that I, like most of the other guests, was French), but once we established we could both speak English better, the checkout was straightforward.
I walked the short distance along the lake shore to the main Bled bus stand, where my bus had arrived the day before. (To call it a bus station, as it is marked on some maps, would be an exaggeration.) Early on a Monday morning, the lakeside was devoid of the large numbers of people who had been there on Sunday afternoon. I got to the bus stop about 15 minutes before the bus was due to depart. There were two buses to Jesenice that morning, but the later one took a far more circuitous route and cost more. Over the next few minutes several more passengers arrived and they mostly had the same questions: does the bus to Jesenice go from here (yes), is it running today (as the timetable says school days only) (yes), and where do you buy tickets (from the driver). Having researched all this before, I was treated as a guru by the the non-locals.
The bus arrived on time and twenty minutes later arrived in Jesenice, passing a large sprawling ironworks on the approach to the town. My revised arrangements gave me nearly two hours to explore Jesenice, which was more than enough. The place reminded me of the home town portrayed in the film The Deer Hunter – a fairly grim industrial town surrounded by beautiful scenery. I looked in on the railway station, but it had few facilities and very little information. There were no departure boards – just one printed timetable on the platform and a slightly tatty piece of paper stuck to a door giving the details of the replacement bus services operating that day.
After thoroughly exploring Jesenice, and deciding that there was not much to see, I returned to the station about 45 minutes before my train was due to depart. The only people there were two young German men who I had earlier advised about the buses from Bled, who were on an eight week Interrail tour of Europe finishing in Porto, but with next stop Venice. About 15 minutes before the train was due, a few more people arrived on the platform from the rail replacement buses. I also spotted a railway employee in OBB (Austrian Railways) uniform, who confirmed that he expected the train to leave from the platform we were standing on. He occasionally made calls on his mobile phone and when it was only five minutes before the train was due to leave he said that it was about to be brought from the siding. I could see the carriages in a distant siding but nothing happened for a while. Five minutes after the train should have left, there finally was some movement and the carriages were very slowly shunted to where we were waiting.
I had a reserved seat in first class and there was only one first class coach, so I got on it, even though it didn’t seem to have the same coach number as my reservation. It had not been cleaned and there was dirty crockery and other rubbish lying around in the compartments. The seat reservation labels were still those from the inward leg of the trip and had not been replaced. I chose one of the more presentable compartments and sat by the window, to be joined shortly by three other solo travellers. We eventually left Jesenice 20 minutes late.
Almost immediately after leaving Jesenice the train entered the 8km long Karawanks tunnel which crosses the border between Slovenia and Austria. The first few minutes in the tunnel were in pitch darkness, but eventually the lights were turned on. Not long after leaving the tunnel the train arrived in Villach in Austria where it was due to be combined with carriages that started in Klagenfurt. I thought that my carriages were going through to Munich, but after sitting around for a while in Villach I noticed that the train on the adjacent platform was the continuation train and that the indicator board on my platform said that my train was terminating. So I crossed over to the adjacent platform to see if I could find my reserved seat, only to discover that the carriage that I had been on previously was being shunted round to this new platform. It turned out that this carriage was the one in which my reserved seat was located, but there were still no seat reservation tickets to indicate which seats were free and which were not. I found my seat, but the train was now very crowded and the compartment was full. Despite having a twenty minute scheduled stop in Villach, the train did not make up any of its delay and left about thirty minutes late, which was not good news as I only had 20 minutes for my connection in Munich.
Other than myself and one other man, my compartment was filled with an American family consisting of a grandmother, a couple and a small child. The small child was sitting next to me, playing video games for much of the time and occasionally poking me as she fidgeted in her seat. When the ticket inspector came round, it turned out that the Americans didn’t have first class tickets, but rather than evict them, he accepted their sob story that there were not sufficient seats for them to sit together in standard class. The windows in the compartment didn’t open and it quickly became very hot and stuffy.
As we travelled up the Drau valley, it started to rain and the the weather worsened the further up the valley we went. At the head of the valley is the long single track Tauern tunnel, which offers a shuttle service to transport cars. The Americans started to eat a picnic lunch, and after stuffing their small child for a while, she loudly announced that she wanted to be sick. Fortunately her mother took her from the compartment before she could be.
On the the other side of the Tauern tunnel things started to look up. The weather on the other side of the mountains was much improved, the Americans got off at the next station and the train began to make up some of its lost time. When we arrived in Salzburg at about 2pm the train did not sit around for it full scheduled waiting time and by the time we left we were only about 15 minutes late. More people had got on at Salzburg, filling up the spaces vacated by the Americans.
While the train was paused briefly in Salzburg station, I remembered my only previous visit to Salzburg on my 1983 Interrail trip. Back then Austria was not in the EEC and the station was split into German and Austrian parts requiring a full passport check to pass between them. I thought such days were over – but I was wrong. As I subsequently discovered, Germany has for the past six years obtained ‘temporary’ exemptions to the Schengen rules to allow it to do identity checks on people crossing the land border from Austria. The first stop on leaving Salzburg was at Freilassing in Germany, which is really just a suburb of Salzburg, served by frequent local trains. At this station German border police got on the train and demanded ID documents from all the passengers. It took 45 minutes to process the whole train, scuppering my chances of making my intended connection in Munich. The irony was that while my train was being delayed, the local trains were continuing to serve the station without any checks.
My train eventually arrived in Munich’s main station 45 minutes late at 1625, and the 1603 departure to Regensburg that I intended to catch had long since gone. Fortunately there was another Regensburg departure scheduled 40 minutes after the one that I had missed, and I just had time to buy some more water on the station concourse before boarding that train. This train was operated by Alex, a private operator, which runs services using refurbished but slightly old fashioned rolling stock. The train was in two parts going separately to Hof in Germany and Prague in the Czech Republic, but as it divided in Regensburg it did not matter which portion I boarded. The train was quite full with commuters returning from Munich. I shared a compartment with a man who spent most of the journey making business phone calls.
On leaving Munich there were menacing black clouds which eventually started depositing torrential rain at the station before Regensburg. My fellow passenger in the compartment and I agreed that we were lucky we were not getting off there as the rain was bouncing off the platforms and we would have got soaked. By the time the train reached Regensburg at 1810 the rain had nearly stopped and I walked the short distance from the station to the hotel.
I did not spend long in the hotel, but set off to find dinner. I chose a pub in the historic centre which brewed its own beer. Germany makes a big deal of the asparagus season, with most restaurants having special asparagus menus. The pub I chose was no exception and I dined on schnitzel served with asparagus and new potatoes. I also tried a couple of different home brewed beers. After dinner I went for a wander to get my bearings in the centre of Regensburg, exploring the area around the cathedral before heading back to the hotel.
Day 10 – Tuesday 17th May 2022 – Regensburg
I left my hotel and walked to the collection of bus stops near the railway station to catch the first bus after 9am when it is possible to use a cheap all day ticket. My destination was Donaustauf on the banks of the River Danube, a 45 minute ride away. My purpose for visiting Donaustauf was to visit the Walhalla, a slightly strange monument to German-speaking heroes created by Ludwig I of Bavaria and finally opened in 1842. I had wished to visit the place since since I learned about it in an episode of Neil McGregor’s excellent Radio 4 series, Germany: Memories of a Nation.
The bus dropped me off on the edge of the village and I walked a short distance down the road before cutting into a field and climbing steeply to the Parthenon-like building high on the hill overlooking the Danube. By the time I had ascended the several sets of stone staircases to enter the building I was sweating profusely, even though the sun had not yet reached full strength. I was rather out of breath when I went in and bought a ticket from the kiosk just inside. A benefit of coming here early was that when I first went in I was the only visitor and was able to enjoy the spectacle without the distraction of other people. The interior walls of the Walhalla are made of pink marble and there are displayed 130 busts of prominent German-speaking figures. The original selection favoured rulers, military figures and artists, whereas more recent additions have tended towards scientists and musicians, together with a few individuals who tried to resist Nazism. The choices are sometimes puzzling – for example the mathematicians Leibniz and Gauss are included (though Gauss was only added in 2007), but no Euler or Riemann.
When I had finished examining all the figures on display I left and returned the way I came. The walk back to the bus stop was considerably quicker, as it was now all downhill. During the day, buses back to Regensburg only run hourly, so I had timed my departure to ensure that I got back to the bus stop in time for the next bus, on which I rode back to the city.
My next stop was Regensburg City Museum, which describes the history of Regensburg from ancient times to the present day. At the time of my visit there was a special exhibition on the life and scientific achievements of Johannes Kepler who had died in Regensburg in 1630.
I visited a local bakery to buy a roll for lunch which I ate while sitting by the banks of the Danube. After lunch I went for a walk along both banks of the river and onto the surprisingly rural island in the middle, before returning across the 12th Century stone bridge. At the end of the bridge is a small exhibition centre and museum – celebrating Regensburg’s medieval city centre as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the history of the bridge.
My next stop was the Museum of Bavarian History, located in a modern building next to the Danube and only opened in 2018. There was a special exhibition on the traditions of the Bavarian pub, which I went to first. While the numbers of pubs in Bavaria has been in steep decline in recent years, the exhibition offered the hope that the good ones will survive. The permanent exhibition covers the history of Bavaria from it becoming a Kingdom in 1805 (thanks to Napoleon) right through to the present day. The exhibition space is large and it took me most of the rest of the afternoon to view it. When I was done I walked back to my hotel via a different route to take in more of the historic city centre, including a brief visit to the cathedral.
In the evening I visited another traditional pub, dining in the open air courtyard on asparagus soup, followed by roast pork served with dumplings and gravy, with a selection of beers to drink.
Day 11 – Wednesday 18th May 2022 – Regensburg to London
My hotel was a short walk from the station and I checked before I left that my 0827 train was on time. When I was crossing the road from the hotel I heard a notification sound from my Deutsche Bahn app and when I looked it was a message that due to overhead wire damage my train was running 13 minutes late, which I thought wasn’t a big problem as I had 45 minutes to make my next connection. When I arrived at Regensburg station the departure boards confirmed the 13 minute delay, but a short while later they were saying that the train was now running an hour late, which the app explained was due to it being rerouted to avoid the damaged wires prior to Regensburg. As I would now definitely miss my connection I went to the ticket office to change my reservation for a later connecting train. I also took the opportunity to change the station at which I was due to change from Frankfurt Airport (which the computer had allocated as the change point on my cheap Sparpreis Europa ticket) to Frankfurt, as I would now have more time for the change and I thought Frankfurt itself would be more interesting to look round than its airport. The consequence of this delay meant that I would swap time in Brussels for time in Frankfurt, which, as I had been to Brussels a few times in recent years, did not bother me unduly.
About ten minutes before the revised time for my train I went to the platform to await its arrival, but instead of my train, a local train then pulled in, despite there being no change to the estimate of late running. The local train eventually pulled out and my ICE train arrived, now 70 minutes late. I was travelling first class again on this train, which was pleasantly empty. I had a reservation for the sought after Seat 61 on this leg of the journey, but although it was unoccupied, the only other person in the carriage was sitting in the seat opposite with a load of luggage surrounding him. So I went and found another empty seat elsewhere in the carriage, but this meant I was denied the opportunity of trying the DB app’s automatic check-in and at seat refreshment ordering service.
When the ticket inspector came round, she was fine about me sitting in a different seat and gave me a refund form to make a claim for the delays – I eventually got half my money back for the whole Regensburg to Brussels journey, which was transferred to my bank account, despite my having paid for this trip using a refund voucher from my Covid-cancelled 2020 trip.
The train stopped in Nuremburg and Würzburg, both of which I had visited previously, and got even later, being 80 minutes late on departure from Würzburg. I am not sure if it was because of the delays, or just normal service in first class, but the ticket inspector came round dispensing free chocolates. As I had not had breakfast in the hotel, my original intention had been to have breakfast on the train, but the delays made this less attractive, so as we approached Frankfurt I ordered an early lunch of currywurst and chips with a glass of Erdinger beer to be delivered to my seat, served in proper crockery with metal cutlery and a real brewery-specific glass, which made me feel much better about the delays.
The train didn’t lose any further time and finally arrived in Frankfurt 80 minutes late, just before 1pm, which gave me 90 minutes to explore. The area immediately outside the station seemed rather seedy, so I walked to the River Main and crossed over on a footbridge by the Städel Museum. I considered paying a visit to the Städel, which had a special exhibition of Renoir and French Impressionism, but concluded that I would not have time to do justice to the entrance fee, so contented myself with walking along the Main and through a small park before returning to the station.
My train to Brussels was sitting in the platform when I arrived, but rather annoyingly the doors were only opened five minutes before departure. The new reservation I had made was in a six-seat compartment, which I shared with a Georgian woman who had just flown into Frankfurt from Tbilisi and was on her way to Brussels. As she did not have a seat reservation, I advised her that four of the seats were due be be filled from Cologne onwards, so she should take the only one that was unreserved for the whole journey.
When we arrived in Cologne the platform was packed, as the train to Brussels two hours earlier (the one I was originally due to catch) had unexpectedly terminated in Cologne and now the passengers from that full train were trying to cram into the fully booked train that I was on. This delayed the train for 10 minutes before it could depart and even in first class, the corridors were packed with people standing.
I had built in sufficient contingency for my connection in Brussels, but even so, by the time that I arrived there it was already time to check in for the Eurostar back to London. I only had time to pay a quick visit to the supermarket on the concourse at Brussels Midi station to get some supplies. Then, before going to check in to the Eurostar, I popped outside to take a picture of the entrance of the station, hardly pausing before heading to the Eurostar terminal. As I walked inside I was aware of someone talking to me in Flemish, but assuming that he was just a typical random character you often find outside stations I just kept walking. He then became more forceful and started speaking in English, saying that he was a (plain-clothes) police officer and that I had committed an offence by photographing him outside the station. He demanded that I show him the photos on my phone and indeed he could just be spotted on the edge of my picture of the station sign – he insisted that I delete the photo and then he let me go. I then joined the queue for the security checks for the Eurostar, but I was so incensed by the episode that I recovered the photo that I had taken (which had not been permanently deleted) and tweeted the picture anyway.
Having passed through security and passport control, I remembered the Brussels terminus as being not too unpleasant a place to wait for your train. Not any more. A large amount of the previous space was now taken up with a ridiculously overpriced duty free shop and the former cafe area had been removed. The terminal was full and there were not enough seats for everyone – the whole place seemed to have become very tatty compared with how it used to be. This would have been not too bad had my train been on time, but on this day of delays, it was not to be. The train I was catching to London was an Amsterdam starter which had been delayed on its journey through the Netherlands and was expected to be about 35 minutes late, but this was only announced at about the due departure time. It was a relief when they let us on to the platform to wait for it there rather than in the dump which is now the Eurostar terminal.
When the train did eventually arrive everyone got on quickly and after an uneventful journey it arrived at St Pancras at 2030, 30 minutes late. From there I caught the tube home, but just a few stops from my final destination my tube train stopped and the driver announced that we were being held because of an incident on the line ahead. I thought that all my trains that day were cursed, but fortunately after only a couple of minutes wait the train was given the all clear to proceed.
The trip overall had been great fun – the places had been chosen because I had not visited them before and they lived up to my expectations. I had picked Dijon just as a first night break of journey, but it was a lovely city well worth taking the time to explore. The new country, for me, of Slovenia was delightful, but as with all the places I visited on this trip I could really have spent two or three time as long in each of them.
Europe Explored 