Space for families, desks and the regulars’ table: an “ideas train” is intended to show what future rail travel in Bavaria could look like. However, an important feature was not built in.
Anyone who wanted to see the future of train travel on Bavarian tracks in advance had to go to Berlin. “InnoTrans” took place there last week, an industry event with a lot of what could be tomorrow in rail transport. This morning, in turn, was presented for Bavaria in the form of a life-affirming, gray-painted double-decker car, quite similar to an ordinary regional train from the outside. But inside? Oops!
In fact, the “train of ideas” could cause astonishment more often as soon as it has left the exhibition grounds. From March 2023 onwards, the Free State, Deutsche Bahn and Bayerische Regiobahn want to test the unusual car in daily operation between Mühldorf and Munich; it serves as a kind of rolling laboratory that serves the different needs of travelers and, at best, should convince them to switch to local public transport.
The “train of ideas” is divided into several modern designed modules. The office module, for example, offers desk cubicles for undisturbed work. Ergonomic armchairs await in the “New Seating” module, while there is space in the family module. And then there is the Stammtisch module. Transport Minister Christian Bernreiter, as a Lower Bavarian, was “particularly impressed” by this, at least according to a press release sent out on the occasion of the “Ideen Train” presentation.
You should be able to sit together at a long table in front of a large screen as comfortably as in a tavern. However, one looks in vain for a tap like in the tavern, perhaps out of concern that it could be overused in the event of delays.
Otherwise, rail commuters could still miss one or the other idea. The compartment with the spinning bikes can be admired as a draft online – but according to media reports it was rejected in practice due to the lack of showers. Passengers will also be looking for what is rumored to be the most important feature with the exotic name “punctuality” for a long time. The fact that it was not installed as standard should be checked by the “Ideenzug” developers. In view of the recent summer of chaos on the rails, which was characterized by infrastructure deficiencies, something like reliability would probably have become too much of a future utopia.