I wanted to try out the Greyhound while I was in the USA, but I didn't get the opportunity. Well, maybe next time.
Here in Germany, I tend to take the train for long-distance travel, since probably every city with more than 20,000 people has a passenger train station (and even quite a few
villages have them - and imagine my surprise when Columbus, an American city with about 740,000 people, didn't).
My worst experience in a train was probably when I was passing through Cologne to Aachen... on Carnival Tuesday. What
was I thinking?
The train was 45 minutes late, and extremely crowded with drunken revelers. And to top it off, shortly after Cologne the train just stopped on the tracks for an entire hour. The train attendants made an announcement via the speakers, but nobody understood it because it was just too damn loud from all the drunk people.
A highly unpleasant experience, and I've learned my lesson from this and not tried to travel along that route at subsequent Carnivals.
A very close contender was on the same route, but in the opposite direction. I sat in the last wagon, where it was possible for passengers to take bicycles with them.
In Bonn (I think), another passenger entered the wagon with a bicycle, put it in the space reserved for them, and then sat down in the seat directly in front of me. He was probably in his mid- to late-fourties, and his general appearance was... very neglected. He had a large beard without any kind of trimming, and he made the impression of being under the influence of
some kind of drug. And as bad luck would have it, he sat down on a seat immediately in front of me.
When the ticket controller came around, it turned out that this guy had bought a ticket with a 50% price reduction... for which you need a so-called "BahnCard" (which costs €200 per year), and which he didn't have with him (he claimed that he had already "sent it to his destination", but it's doubtful whether he ever had one). Furthermore, he had neglected to buy an extra bicycle ticket for his bicycle. All in all, he had to pay another €27 Euro or so. He tried to argue with the controller, but the controller wouldn't budge. Finally, he took out a paper cup - like you can get it from McDonalds or other fast food places - filled with an enormous amount of small change, poured it out on the table before him, and contemptuously said: "Here, take your money!"
And after the controller had taken the money and left with a colleague (who had arrived in the meantime), this guy began to mutter death threats against the controller, threatening him to "throw him out of the moving train", "hit him with an axe", and so forth. This muttering continued for
one and a half hours. I wondered whether to call someone from the train staff, but I was afraid this might trigger a fight...
After that, he got a stereo with phones out of his luggage, and played music from Frank Zappa and the Bee Gees at a very high volume. He also started talking to me from time to time, apparently mistaking my monosyllabic answers and fixed grin as interest.
Unfortunately, I was stuck with this guy for the entire way to Nuremberg - a distance which took the train about four hours...
