A clear case: the new night train from Copenhagen to Berlin is preferable to the cheap flight for climate reasons alone. However, our author’s journey was not entirely carefree
Chatting cheerfully in Danish, Ellen and her sister Gretelise waited for the night train to Copenhagen. That was hygge at Berlin Central Station. While I brooded in silent anger and in my German mother tongue: Who was to blame? Everyone is to blame for everything, says Dostojekwsi, quite correctly. Here I was to blame for the prospect of a second endless night without sleep.
When the inner dams were broken, I asked my children’s mother how long she, as a travel planner, had known about the five hours delay on the way home that lay ahead of us. After the two and a half hours delay on the way there. Ellen replied alarmingly quietly: “I don’t want your aggressions.”
It was her idea that we should try the new Stockholm-Copenhagen-Berlin night train just before hibernation. What a nice invitation to a sensible use of time and the environment. No longer with a guilty conscience sitting in a cheap plane that doesn’t even make the ascent for this short-haul flight before the landing begins. Are you allowed to destroy the future of your own children with ten times as much CO2 emissions as a train passenger?
Of course not. As more and more people understand this, there are again more night trains like these from a Swedish company called Snelltåget. This is an old-fashioned generic term for express trains. Sounded good. Ellen booked a three-berth compartment just for us. As a result, two emails came with the expected delays due to track work.
When our train arrived from the godforsaken Copenhagen suburb Ørestad station, all advance information about delays was immediately forgotten. Because he was on the wrong track. Simply that way. The three of us had to drag our 209 years of life together with our luggage in an autumn storm and rain at a sprint pace up one flight of stairs and another down again in order to eventually come along.
After the successful start, it became clear that this night train could also have been the one with which Ellen and I had traveled to Berlin in 1983 through the now-vanished GDR. Our car and its interior were at least as old. Thin new mattresses had simply been placed on the worn bunks. I looked in vain for a stepladder to climb into my top bunk. As well as down again during the inevitable toilet visits at night. I liked the fact that it succeeded twice without broken bones, on the one hand, as proof of still existing suppleness. On the other hand, the toilet was, how should you put it, fully retro and more and more retro as the journey time increased.
The fact that I couldn’t shut my eyes had nothing to do with the age of the train. The Danish women slept in perfect harmony with their fate, while I quarreled with mine in an original German, wide awake. After waking up, they not only expressed their joy once that, thanks to the two-hour standstill somewhere in the open field in northern Germany, we could now enjoy our liver sausage sandwiches in complete peace. I was sent to get the inexpensive Swedish coffee from the train attendant’s compartment.
On the way back there was even free coffee, as an excuse for four hours of nocturnal standstill at the Danish-German border station in Padborg. Because of track construction work, of course. Here one could study the markedly different attitudes in the two countries on the question of what a border means today. On the way there, we gave our travel and corona passports to the train attendant, who then passed them on to the German customs officers. You could go on sleeping. So you could.
On the way back, a Danish inspector woke everyone at two in the morning in a certain tone: “Passport control!” Everyone had to hand over their travel documents. If the point was to deny terrorists or other undesirables access to the beautiful kingdom of Denmark, my case was slammed. I could just stay in the dark and who knows what kind of villain could have been. I have to say that the inspectors were more consistent during the GDR era, but I acknowledge that the Danish border controls are on the right track.
All’s well that ends well: We arrived in Ørestad shortly before eleven a.m. instead of the scheduled 6.45 a.m., the sun was shining, even I was in a good mood after beautiful days in Berlin and the eventful 27 hours of travel on the night train instead of the definitely boring 19 according to the plan. Ellen and Gretelise immediately arranged the next Berlin tour. Then also with sister Mari. I wasn’t asked. The three booked their plane tickets.
