There are some words which you really dislike if you’re a frequent user of trains in Germany: “Weichenstörung” (switch point failure), “Stellwerksausfall” (railway control center failure), “Personenschaden” (damage to persons), “Signalstörung” (signal failure), “geänderte Wagenreihung” (changed order of rail cars) and of course “Schienenersatzverkehr“. It means that you’ll have to go by bus – usually with a longer travel time and missed connections.
Two years ago the Deutsche Bahn had to close the ICE fast train track between Göttingen and Kassel for some weeks to exchange the rubble and repair the tracks. All trains had to take the old tracks via Eichenberg normally only used for local transport. They lost one hour every time but the passengers could stay in their trains. Now these old tracks had to be repaired, too. For one complete month there were no trains going between Eichenberg and Kassel. It was the first time in my life that I was living in a town that wasn’t reachable by train.
I was worrying about this fact but the transport companies did a good job. They established a direct connection between Eichenberg and Kassel and let a bus go from Eichenberg via Witzenhausen and Hann. Münden to Kassel. From Vellmar and Fuldatal the people had alternatives to get to Kassel. Therefore my bus connection only had one stop in Lutterberg where a small shuttle transported people from and to Staufenberg-Speele. My travel time doubled for a month, but it could have been worse. The capacities provided were always sufficient; sometimes there were three bus going at the same time.
The worst things were that I was sick every time (because busses are not going continuously straight forward), that there were sometimes grumpy bus drivers and that the roofs of the bus stops aren’t as large as necessary for such huge groups of people – and we had really heavy rain during that time. Maybe people sometimes underestimate the value of the old railway track: Many people use it to travel low cost long distances from north to south and vice versa. For those the “Schienenersatzverkehr” must have been really annoying. And I hope that such a measure will not be necessary for the next 30 years…
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