German lessons

Amid calls to make Britain’s railway more user-friendly, TONY STREETER looks across the North Sea to a network that he argues already is

“Why don’t you go by rail?” My boss seemed allbut incredulous when I explained my plan to drive for the weekend to Berlin - 200-or-so miles from my then home town south of Hannover - on Autobahn all the way. The truth is, as a Brit, I’d not even thought about the train.

But she was right, of course. Why wouldn’t you consider an InterCity Express high-speed service straight there, in comfort, and at reasonable prices?

In fact, scientists at the Göttingen Institute I worked in used the ICE all the time - and that was despite the place having a dedicated BMW available… with driver. That car seemed to do mostly local trips, such as to the station.

It all seemed to tie in with an advert around the time that exhorted people to “have a car - but travel by train”. Clearly, a different thought process was at work - but why?

That example was a good couple of decades ago, but the point holds good. In fact, Germany’s dedicated high-speed network has been steadily expanded since.

Slide into a seat on an ICE at Kassel, south of Göttingen, and you can be in Lower Saxony’s capital of Hannover (inclusive of a stop in my old home town) 56 minutes later. Try that journey via the A7 motorway, and you’re probably talking two hours. There seems little doubt that Germany’s geography helps favour high-speed rail.

In his 923 column, Christian Wolmar argued that to make train travel more attractive post-pandemic, we need not only fares reform, but also to make prices more competitive.

I’d argue that this is precisely what Germany does. For example, as one step forward, Wolmar suggests pricing journeys per leg rather than adding a nominal pound or so for a return ticket. This is already how it works on Deutsche Bahn and the country’s private franchised services.

Kassel to Hannover is some 90-or-so miles by the dedicated high-speed line, and a punt at the timetable shows you can do the trip for 35.80 euros (under £ 32) there and back - even if you travel at around 0730/1730 on a weekday. Turn up and go with the Flexpreis (which includes a city ticket for Hannover), and that rises to 93.80 euros (around £ 83).

For comparison, the equivalent Anytime ticket between my current home town of Peterborough and London King’s Cross - a slightly shorter journey at 76 miles each way - is £118.20. Advance (for similar-timed trains) when I checked was £41.20; off-peak £ 37.40.

All that, however, is but a small part of the picture. Regular passengers will feel a bigger difference.

Any frequent traveller in Germany is highly unlikely to pay the top-line price for tickets. Instead, they’ll have a railcard known as a Bahncard, which comes in three versions offering a 25%, 50%… or 100% discount. The Bahncard 100 is effectively an all-lines season ticket. Only a tiny number of services are excluded.

A Peterborough-London annual season is £ 6,936 (Great Northern/Thameslink only), or £ 8,224 (if you want to use LNER). So, what might the price be for a year’s Bahncard 100…? The answer is 4,027 euros (around £ 3,550.) And remember: it’s network-wide.

Sorry Peterborough commuters - you’re in the wrong country.

As for the other versions, the current Bahncard 25 annual price is 55.70 euros. Bahncard 50s are 229 euros - so both pay at even fairly modest levels of usage.

Now, if you’re an occasional traveller and prepared to shun the white and red ICE and IC trains, there are other deals, too.

translates roughly as ‘across the land’, and the day ticket of that name qualifies you to travel anywhere on the red Regional Express services and their private equivalents (top speed 125mph if you’re lucky, although more likely 100mph).

It’s valid from 0900-0300 Mondays-Fridays, or from midnight at weekends. The price for one adult is 42 euros, then a further seven euros each for up to another four.

That means five adults travel for 70 euros total; and you can take up to three children free, too. Eight people… and a day’s travel on a rail network roughly twice the size of Britain’s… for under £ 65. Regional tickets are even cheaper.

OK, but all this would never work here in the UK, right? With our slimmed-down network and at times chronic overcrowding, wouldn’t aggressively encouraging more passengers in such ways just lead to problems with capacity?

Yet things have changed, have they not? Firstly, because the Coronavirus crisis has depressed passenger (and particularly commuting) numbers, perhaps permanently.

And secondly, because we as a nation are at least starting to say we want to draw people out of their cars, as we aim for ‘net zero’ carbon emissions - although if we truly mean that, then the price (and convenience) of rail travel surely has as much a part to play as anything.

That view diametrically conflicts with the mood of recent years, which has been for passengers to pay an increasing percentage of rail’s costs through ongoing ticket price increases. But whereas the UK persists with such inflation, ticket prices in Germany fell twice in 2020 - following government decisions to lower VAT on travel as part of a packet of climate change measures.

Perhaps notably from a UK perspective, the 180 million euro (£159m) Regiotram scheme was fully up and running a decade or so before we started our so-far only (‘pilot’) tram-train scheme in Sheffield. It was also 15 years after Germany rolled out its first tram-train development in Karlsruhe in 1992 - and these two cities are far from the only places with such systems.