Starting a nearly nine-hour journey on the regional train to Berlin in the newly renovated DB Lounge at Frankfurt Central Station raises false expectations.

There, on the first floor, Deutsche Bahn has tried to realize everything that they announced in the last few weeks during their product presentations.

Where throne-like wing chairs are available, the customer can feel like a king in his almost private realm.

At the same time, countless USB sockets and sockets create a kind of home office atmosphere, as in the latest ICE.

Uwe Ebbinghaus

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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It is obvious: Germany wants to overtake Switzerland in terms of rail comfort - albeit with a fraction of the per capita expenditure on rail transport.

And if, in a historically unique situation, 2.5 billion euros are available for local transport, you throw this sum out of the window for a mega cheap ticket.

Contradictions everywhere: How do you intend to lure car commuters onto trains in the long term if fuel is made cheaper at the same time?

And if you don't invest the billions substantially in local transport?

The makers of the nine-euro ticket will not be able to dispel the impression of planlessness this summer.

A teacher tames her school class

The regional express we board at nine o'clock in the morning represents familiar shortcomings.

It's a bit uncomfortable and there's hardly any electricity or even a network.

But the panorama is better on the upper floor than on the ICE, and the regional transport is more punctual.

Twenty minutes before departure, half of the seven million nine-euro customers already booked the RE 30 to Kassel.

A teacher tames her school class (“Whoever takes off the mask can do it very quickly …”), desperate questions about WiFi passwords make the rounds among the students.

Ukrainian families without fathers look for a seat, pensioners who want to be close to the doors occupy the seats on the lower level.

When the doors close on time, the train is miraculously filled to exactly the right size, without any reservations, which do not exist in local transport.

After ten minutes the first fields can be seen, huge gravel beds and concrete structures for new railway lines pass behind Frankfurt-Bonames.

We drive into Kassel almost on time.

The waiting RB 83 to Eichenberg is already half full ten minutes before departure.

Now it's getting very tight.

Soon the standing room is occupied, bicycles and prams are hopelessly wedged in, it gets stuffy.

Voluminous printouts with endless bargain journey histories are nervously studied.

The lady next to us travels from Wiesbaden to Hamburg for nine euros.

Since the hotel prices there - as in Berlin or on Sylt - have skyrocketed,

she spends the night in a boarding house in Lüneburg.

She says some of her colleagues are driving to work for the first time in June because they fear overcrowded commuter trains.

A confused elderly gentleman without a mask squeezes through the train and randomly insults the passengers.

In terms of local transport, this small train has recently become a bottleneck on the eastbound rail route.

The rucksack density is high, two high school graduates want to go to Prague via Dresden.

The kindergarten group on the platform of the cherry blossom town of Witzenhausen has to wait for the next train.

With a little delay we reach Eichenberg, which probably hasn't seen such a trolley concert for a long time.

The rush to platform 10 begins, where the RE 9 to Sangerhausen is already waiting.

Two law students from Halle try to dial into the online lecture on inheritance law, but they don't succeed.

The geographic center of Germany must be somewhere on the journey to Sangerhausen.

In the slow train to Magdeburg, you already know the faces of your fellow passengers. A tanned lady with Dior glasses asks conspiratorially: “Are you traveling with nine euros too?” Nothing can happen on the RE 1 from Magdeburg to Berlin, even at the fourth change, everyone is accommodated , the feared riots of rejected nine-euro ticketeers do not materialize.

They may come.

May was already a record month for Deutsche Bahn in long-distance traffic.

Now the Pentecost weekend and Corpus Christi will follow with a nine-euro alarm.

Let's see how the most absurd idea in the recent history of the German traffic turnaround will develop.