Riding the rails

I traveled a lot by train while I was in Deutschland. The trains in Germany are very accessible and go nearly everywhere you would want to go. If you plan ahead ticket prices are not bad. My round trip ticket Lueneburg to Munich, for example, was about 90 euros, or about $120 and the ticket to Berlin was 49 euros. There are different types of slow and fast trains. The RE trains are the slowest. Next up is the ME, known as the Metronome trains in Lower Saxony. The ME are double-decker trains that made good time and I often used them. Then you get into the IC trains, Intercity, or ICE, Intercity Express. From Hamburg to Berlin, the ICE train pictured above did over 130 mph and covered the distance in about an hour and a half without a stop. Very cool.

At the top of the photos is the train station in Lubeck. A historic building it is undergoing an extensive renovation inside. The next two photos going down are from the central Munich train station or Hauptbahnhof (main train station.) The next photo is from the very busy Hamburg station and you can see the rows of trains arriving and departing. At bottom is the newest and largest train station in Germany in Berlin. It is so big that it was hard to take a photo to do it justice. In this shot you can see the multi-levels of shopping with the trains at the very bottom.