So we traveled by train back on December 28, 2012.  I never had a chance on December 27th to update what happened with those Bahncard 25 cards, so I’m sure you are wondering: did the new cards, against all odds, actually arrive in the mail on December 27th so that we had them to carry with us for the trip?

That would be, no, of course not. Only the ticket agent at the train station that one day had  believed that would happen. If in fact she really even believed that herself, that is.

In any case, on December 27th,  I went back to the train station in order to get some sort of printed proof that we had Bahncard 25 cards that were still valid. Our ticket were purchased using the cards, and sometimes when you’re on the train, the conductors ask to see the cards to make sure your tickets were purchased with a valid card.

The ticket agent I dealt with on December 27th was not one of the ones I’d dealt with thus far.  He had to call the Deutschebahn headquarters to find out what to do. They gave him some code to use to print out temporary cards, but it didn’t work from the machine at his desk machine. He sent me to one of the public ticket machines and told me to use that machine to print it out myself.

Now, those machines have a way to change the language of the interface on the machine. Having just spent 15 minutes with agent talking in German, I decided to choose the “English” path on the machine to give myself a break. Lo and behold, it turned out that the different language paths don’t have the same options – you needed to pick “German” on the machine to see the option I needed. Who knew the language actually changes the options. I kept repeating the steps over and over and had just switched to German when the agent came over to help me. And probably thought I was an idiot since I hadn’t figure it out – the correct option popped up on the screen just as he came over, which made me look like I had been playing with the machine for 5 minutes without seeing it. Lesson learned: don’t be lazy, use the German if you can, I guess.  Sheesh. Gotta love Deutschebahn systems.

In any case, we wound up with temporary cards to have on hand when we got on the train on December 28th. Chris and I both had remembered that the ticket conductors on the trains always asked to see them. But what do you know – not a single conductor was interested in them on any of the trains we were on this time. Which was good, I guess. But after all the trouble we went to getting those temporary cards, it would have been nice if somebody had wanted to see them, no? 😉

Anyway,  the train travel on the trip overall went off without much of a hitch. Well,except for the missing train car on a train we took (#2 of 3) on the way to Munich. Our reservations on that train were for seats in Car 258.  But at the station in Plochingen, where we boarded that train, a sign on the platform announced that there would be no car 258 on the train that day.

It turned out that our reservations were still valid for car 256. However, there was initially a mother and her little daughter (all in pink) already sitting in our seats in Car 256 when we boarded the train. You see, it is possible to ride this kind of train without reservations, but the seats are marked to indicate whether or not someone has booked a particular seat in advance. The seat reservations only cost about $3 per seat, but most people don’t seem to bother to pay for them in advance, and if they don’t feel like finding seats that aren’t marked “reserved”, they then will just in any seat, even if it is reserved. That’s what the mother and daughter had clearly done.

Rather than hassle with it initially, though, we just sat in empty seats elsewhere in Car 256. However, we noticed that the seats we had taken were reserved for someone who would get on at Ulm, the next stop. We figured we would switch seats at Ulm when that person got on. Which meant, of course, we’d be forced to ask the mother and daughter currently occupying our real seats to move.  This wasn’t the first time this has happened, and people — even when they haven’t purchased the seat reservation — aren’t always good about agreeing to move. Which can be slightly annoying.

However, it worked out better than we anticipated, as the mother and daughter actually got off the train at Ulm.  Whew. We easily made the switch back to our original reserved seats and didn’t have to hassle with anyone.

Oddly enough, though, Ulm for me now means the place where we change our seats on a train. Last year, we had to make a more complicated switch between cars by running down the platform during the stopover at Ulm, which you can read about it here. Some day we need to go to Ulm and check out the beautiful cathedral you can see as the train pulls into the station. Until then, my mentions of Ulm on the blog all revolve around problems with the trains.

Other than that, our train travel was fairly uneventful; we even met a nice young American couple on their way to Verona, with whom we shared a train compartment for the last 3 hours of the trip.

As I said, no one ever asked to see those temporary Bahncard 25 cards that we worried so much about. And now we may never know if they would have worked or not:  the actual cards arrived in the mail today, so we now have real cards to carry on trips this year. Or, at least for most of this year …  they are only good until December 26, 2013. At which time I’ll need to do the negotiations to get the new one all over again.

Something to look forward to, I guess. 😉