Trains, Delays, and Directional Misalignments

This has been THE weekend for the train. So great story, right....

Würzburg to Frankfurt = no problem. In fact, we get there a little bit early, thus allowing me to take an earlier train to Karlsruhe. Which never shows up. And so the Deutsche Bahn assigns another train to run the route. This is still about 15 minutes earlier than the train I was planning on taking, so I gladly hop on board. Please note that the time is now 21:50, and the trip from Frankfurt to Karlsruhe normally takes about 56 minutes.

So here we are, chugging along the tracks, when all the sudden we stop. The train captain comes across the intercom and says that someone near Heidelberg jumped in front of an ICE train and so the path from Mannheim to Heidelberg (a very busy stretch) is completely closed. Therefore, our train can no longer stop at Heidelberg and all the passengers on board who want to go to Heidelberg have to get off in Mannheim and take a bus the rest of the way. So we wait for almost 30 minutes in Mannheim for the buses to arrive. At this point we have to then wait for a train heading a round-about way to Stuttgart because they couldn't cut through the other side of Heidelberg due to all the tracks being full of trains waiting for the path to clear.

So we pull out of Mannheim and are again chugging along, my spirits rather high because we are now going to be going directly to Karlsruhe because all the other passengers took the bus. Great, right? HAHA! WRONG!

About twenty minutes later, the train again stops, and the conductor again comes across the intercom. With the most defeated voice I have ever heard, he informs us that the train got set on the wrong tracks, and we had been heading towards Stuttgart (i.e. following the train that we waited to pass in Mannheim). So we sit for awhile, all the while the lady next to me is freaking out that another train was going to hit us because we are on the wrong tracks. I tried to assure her that everyone from France to Russia was aware of our current position and that no one was going to hit us. This really did nothing but make matters worse, as she was now concerned about French and Russian trains hitting us as well as German ones.

We finally began backing up at an insanely slow pace. I made the mistake of investigating why we were cruising along at the pace of a fish through wet concrete. This is when I noticed that the back of the train had no headlights, and the stewards were having to walk along behind (/ in front) of the train and illuminate the path with flashlights to make sure that the tracks were clear. So our path back (almost the whole way to Mannheim) took twice as long as the way forwards.

Long story short (too late, I know), the train finally pulled into Karlsruhe Hbf at approximately 12:46 AM. That's right, almost two hours later than one would have expected. Everything said and done, I'm just glad we made it alive.

So with that said, "I hope nothing like that happens Saturday morning....Knock on wood.".