Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder and yes I'm on a train and yes it's a German train. I'm very impressed though with the way that they make announcements in English as well as German.

It's very, very welcoming for those of us whose command of German doesn't go much further than Zvaibir Bita.

But the subject of much of the announcement was how late the train is.

And I would love to talk to you about

German trains and how I find them and what their good points are and also what their bad

points are and let's start on the bad points. They are very often late. Now usually it's just by a few minutes. That's certainly been the case on my trip so far,

just two, three, four minutes here, then on this train, 11 minutes late. So neither here nor they

except that one of what should have been the good things about German trains is the way that

they duffetail the connections and while in the UK a two-minute connection would be forbidden

you just wouldn't even go there in Germany it's something to be welcomed they will organize it so

that you cross from one platform to the other and you

have a very happy stroll across and off you go. Now that's fine when everything is working like

clock workers it tends to do across the border in Switzerland. It's not brilliant when things go

awry. And I've also had just trains arbitrarily cancelled for no reason at all.

I was in Stuttgart.

Well, I was trying to get to Stuttgart from Frankfurt late last year.

And I bought my ticket well in advance.

I think the ticket collector might be coming

around so I'm going to have to show him my pass. I'm actually here on a Euro, on an interrail

pass at the moment, which is why I'm enjoying my time here. Yep, he looks as though he's checking

everything, so maybe I'll record that interaction. But for now, let me tell you what happened at Frankfurt. So I was just walking up to the station. And they suddenly said, oh, the train's been cancelled. No reason. No, we're really sorry. And here's what we're going to do. And you can travel on this one. I had to figure it out for myself which I'm capable of doing and it did

actually mean I believe changing trains at Frankfurt Airport station and at that point I was so cheesed off that I went to the lounge and I said I'm

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