2nd September 2015 - Bavarian Rain DanceWednesday 2nd September A lot had changed in mainland Europe since our last visit in July with the influx of thousands of “migrants” fleeing unrest in the Middle East and North Africa and heading towards Germany and we were heading to one of places that was bearing the brunt of all this, namely München. Viewing the scenes of utter chaos at Budapest Keleti on the television a matter of weeks after we had been there did make us a little apprehensive but we could see no reason for pulling out of the trip and we certainly didn’t want to spend two weeks in the UK so we duly arrived at Heathrow in good time for the flight to MUC. Even though we had checked in on-line we still had to queue at the machine to get a tag for the suitcase and another boarding card then queue again to drop the bag and have our passports checked; in our view, the whole charade made a mockery of checking in on-line in the first place. The plane took off about 50 minutes late and arrived at MUC about 45 late where it was raining. A lot! This was not really surprising as we had received some reports from a friend who was already out there that the weather had been very hot so it was only to be expected that it would break at some stage. The luggage arrived on the carousel as we approached so it was straight off to the station where we only just missed a train via Ismaning; not a problem though as there are plenty of trains from the airport so we caught the next one which takes the other route to the city via Neufahn. As we ran into the underground S Bahn platforms at München Hbf it didn’t appear to be raining too much so we didn’t bother unpacking the coats which proved to be a bit of a mistake but the hotel (IBIS, in Dachauer Str) was not far away and we managed not to get too wet by dodging from canopy to canopy along the road. Dump bags, a quick freshen up, unpack the coats and back to the station to see if there were any required locos around before our main aim today, a trip behind 103.245 to Ulm. Approaching the station we could see several temporary buildings / tents outside the main entrance and dozens of police, more than we had even seen in one place in Germany before, which really brought home the scale of migration taking place. 111 017 at München Hbf2nd September 2015. On RE4030 15:04 München Hbf to Nürnberg Hbf.
New locos for haulage were rather conspicuous by their absence, which was what we had been expecting though we had thought that we would have seen some of the new class 245 diesels, lack of those could be explained by the fact that services towards Memmingen and Kempten looked to be an utter shambles. We weren’t entirely surprised when we bumped into a fellow “crank” from the UK who told us that the engineering works near Geltendorf which were supposed to finish last week had overrun, so the ALEX services were terminating there, the S4 service had been truncated and everything else was squeezing past on a single line, causing much late running. One of the class 245s was eventually tracked down on a service to Memmingen which was the 16:20 departure retimed to leave at 16:04 due to the engineering work. However, the coaches for the 15:53 to Füssen turned up late meaning that train departed at the time we should have and it was a quarter past four before our train finally started moving, running alongside the EC to Zürich until the Memmingen train stopped at Pasing where we got off. This was down to the need to get back to the Hauptbahnhof for the class 103 hauled departure to Ulm at 17:11 but we could not see ourselves ever getting enthused to “bash” class 245s in the same way we did with their predecessors, the class 218s. The 245s might be very clever things with four engines that can be switched in or out as required to save fuel but they make next to no noise at all and we can think of several types of electric locos that make more noise. Talking of electric locos, we knew that 103.245 was going to perform on its booked train this afternoon as it had been noted loitering in the carriage sidings to the south of the station earlier and it was all ready in the platform by the time we returned to the Hbf. We took the train for the full distance to Ulm where it terminated in one of the bay platforms, one of the station pilots removing the coaches leaving 103.245 to head off and park up for the night until the return working tomorrow morning. 103 245 at Ulm Hbf2nd September 2015. A class V60 attaches to the coaches to release 103 245 after working IC2094 17:11 München Hbf to Ulm Hbf. Much as we would have liked to head off across town to one of our two favourite restaurants in this city (“Ratskeller” or “John Benton”) we had another early start tomorrow so grabbed a couple of rolls from the bakers on the station and went straight back to München on EC391 instead. Our friend had been in touch by text to say he would be arriving on a Rail Jet service from Budapest so we waited for that to arrive alongside a large number of police and aid workers who were waiting to meet any migrants arriving on that train and one from Italy due in around the same time. Following a brief chat and exchange of “gen” we went to our respective hotels as we both wanted to be back on the platform by 7am in the morning.
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