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Review: DB Bahn ICE, Munich Hbf – Hanover Hbf

We turned up at the Munich Hautbahnhoff at about T-45. Being a Monday, the place was packed with people coming and going being the first work day of the week.

DB Bahn – Inter City Express
ICE 856
First Class
Munchen Hautbahnhoff – Hannover
Dec 10, 2018
1:18 PM – 5:32 PM
Actual: 1:50 PM – 6:20 PM

We easily found our train track on the displays and headed for gleis 19; right in the middle of the train station.

We wandered all the way down to the front of the car and helped ourselves on board. We had purchased our tickets online via the DB Bahn website. The ticket printouts came in German with no englsh translation so it took a little bit of time for us to figure out what and where we were supposed to be since the car number, seat number and other information was wholly in German. Our train appeared to be a split train, in that half the train was being decoupled and going to a different destination midway on our journey.

Inside the Train Cabin:

We found our First Class seats. There are no luggage carts on the DB ICE Train we were on. We kept all luggage on rack above our seat.

The train departure time of 1:18 PM rolled by. There were several announcements in German that weren’t translated to English. It turns out there was a snap train strike going on, which resulted in a major delay of approximately 1 hour. We would never end up re-couping this time. This made staring out the window at Jennifer Aniston while we sat at the Munich Hbf the only way to pass the time.

We eventually got going. There wasn’t much interesting scenary on the trains on the way by. There were quite a few hundred Audi’s stacked on train decks when we passed though Ingolstadt. Ingolstadt is the home of Audi.

As the journey continued on, there must have been several cancellations of trains. We ended up with about 30 people in our car that would randomly board and stand in the aisles seated on their suitcases. MrsWT73 had a bum in her face for the last half of the journey. Quite the First Class experience (laughing). Many were cracking open bottles of wine that they had brought with them. There were also lots of senior citizens shouting into their phones in German. I am assuming that these were updates to their family about their lateness.

We eventually arrived to a very busy Hannover Hautbahnhoff station at about 6:30 PM. It seemed most of the world was passing through here at this hour.

The most interesting part was another Christmas Market immediately outside the front door of the Hanover Hautbahnhof. We passed through in order to get to a taxi.

The snap strike ultimately made the trip a lot less comfortable than travelling by aircraft. I think we’d probably opt to fly next time.