One of the great myths about Germany is that the trains run on time. Increasingly, they don’t. ‘We are one of the richest industrial nations in the world, but we have one of the worst railways in the world!’ screamed a recent headline in Bild.

A key issue is a lack of funding, with only €69 per capita annual spending on infrastructure compared to €165 in the UK and a whopping €362 in Switzerland.

A further issue is the sheer size of Deutsche Bahn, which has myriad business interests across the globe (including Arriva in the UK), to the point where transporting the average German by train is only a small part.
I have had plenty of personal experience of delays over recent years, with a service from Stuttgart to Heidelberg an hour late on a visit in 2016. The following year, waiting for a cancelled train at tiny Sinsheim station in the snow and ice was not an experience I’d care to repeat.

And on my latest visit when travelling from Düsseldorf to Hannover my train was 20 minutes late setting off, not great in itself, but then proceeded to lose a further 45 minutes, meaning I arrived over an hour behind schedule in Hannover.

The next day my 75 minute journey back from Hannover to Magdeburg took just over two hours, with no apparent reason for the delay. After watching a game of football in Magdeburg and needing to catch a flight back to the UK, with my faith in Deutsche Bahn precarious, I left the match early. It was a wise decision, because the train, despite leaving on time, finally arrived an hour and quarter late! Three journeys, three major delays.

All this is a huge shame because rail travel through Germany, something I first experienced whilst living there as part of my degree, is one of the great pleasures in life. The quality of the trains themselves, once they arrive, is superb, and now as the parent of a disabled child I am immensely impressed by the availability of specialist facilities, including a fully accessible toilet.

Tickets are comparatively cheap (if you book in advance) and the extensive network means that it is easily the best means of seeing great swathes of the country. There can few pleasures as great as sitting on a state-of-the-art ICE train and watching the beautiful German countryside rolling past. If only they could run on time!

Heidelberg’s location, in a cleft in wooded hills with the river Neckar running through and the ruins of a castle rising above, is unerringly romantic. Add to that Germany’s oldest university, the equivalent of Oxford or Cambridge, and a beautifully preserved Old Town, and hey presto! one of the most popular cities in Germany for visitors.

Approaches, however, are not all that inspiring. The city, some 80km due south of Frankfurt, is in Germany’s most populated region, and its railway station is rather insipid, as well as being located considerably more than walking distance away from the Old Town. However there are plenty of good public transport options in the square outside, and it won’t take more than 10 minutes before you find yourself in a completely different world. It’s a bit like going through the back of the wardrobe into Narnia.

Through the back of the wardrobe

That ancient world, which starts on the other side of Bismarckplatz, is one of cosy cobbled streets and gabled and half-timbered houses, mostly Renaissance or Baroque, dotted with church towers and filled with little bars, bakeries and boutiques. Amongst its key locations, the best place to start is the Alte Brucke, a narrow-arched red sandstone bridge over the Neckar. The river here can be fast-flowing, so big river cruisers stay safely on the Rhine a short distance away, whilst their passengers flock in by road.

At the far end of the bridge a footpath leads up through a patch of vineyards to the Philosopher’s Walk, a broad path much frequented by German intellectuals such as Goethe and Hegel, both Heidelberg students.

The view across the river to Heidelberg Castle is one of the most famous in Germany. Parts of the castle (reached by flights of steps or a funicular) date back to the 13^th century, and in the 17^th century there was an English princess here – Elizabeth Stuart married Frederick V on St Valentine’s Day 1613 – but over the centuries a combination of war and decay has rendered it (mainly) a massively picturesque lump of scenery. There are guided tours to some parts, and the castle grounds host all kinds of events, including huge fireworks displays.

Below the castle, the key streets are Hauptstrasse and Unterestrasse, the former for shopping and the latter for socialising, particularly in all the student bars. Just off Unterestrasse are the Student Prison, where it was once a badge of honour to be locked up, and the Knösel Chocolaterie, the place for the Heidelberg Student Kiss, a chocolate with a story attached, dating back to those days when Heidelberg was all about high society. Girls were highly chaperoned back then, and when the (male) students were out and about it was all they could do to make themselves known to an object of their desire. So back in 1863 Fridolin Knösel invented a delicately-wrapped ‘student kiss’ chocolate that could be passed from boy to girl as a token of interest, without the chaperon taking offence. That act of chivalry has long gone; these days a girl out on the town usually buys her own drink.

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