I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train
metro.co.uk
metro.co.uk
No, you don't, but you can't discharge student loans in a bankruptcy, and you have to pay them every month once you're no longer a student.
When I got to the end of medical residency, I took a job starting the day after it ended. A German-born and raised doctor of my acquaintance said that I was being foolish, I should take a month off after four years and take a nice vacation.
I said, "With what money? I don't have enough money to take a vacation, so I'll just be sitting at home, and I need a check at the end of this month to pay my bills. Do you want to pay for it?"
He did not. So I went to work.
Seriously, unless you're from a well-off family, have joined the military, or have a well-paid spouse, even making the schooling free would require borrowing living expenses.
"Schlussendlich schaffte ich es nur mit einem Kredit von meinem Onkel, die 5.888€ für die BahnCard aufzubringen"
"I only managed to raise €5,888 for the BahnCard with a loan from my uncle"
Which is fine, we all have to obviously since you can't have everything. The point is just that whatever you didn't choose, you didn't choose.
There are countless things I wish I did, and although at various points I had no money or other potential excuses I could say, none of those actually prevented me from persuing whatever I did choose to persue instead. Many things I didn't do I know were purely from lack of imagination or bravery or effort. Other things I did do, I somehow did despite having no money or only junk versions of tools & resources etc.
I don't have to know your particular life details and hardships because it doesn't matter what they are. This applies to some greater or lesser degree to everyone who is merely lucky enough not to be born a literal owned property slave chained to a wall in a box.
Things as simple as talking to a girl on the train and striking up a friendship to saving up some money and quitting my job that I hated and did not want to do to buy a one way ticket to another continent and living out of hostels.
There have been pain points: , a decade later that girl ended up causing me grief when we did not amicably split ties, the trip caused me to encounter scammers on the run from the law that robbed me of some money and almost landed me in French jail by mistake, the switch from a field I got boxed into that I quit to what I wanted to do was painful and took way longer than it should have.
But looking back, i'd suffer through the dark moments all over again because it made me grow. My life looking back thus far was a mostly mundane existence of missed opportunities mixed in with moments of bravery that spiced things up from time to time and for that I am grateful and blessed.
Efficient and German Rail systems are not words that go together.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-november-train-punctuality-wor...
The only thing that works in Germany are the busses, and even then, some of them you have to call an hour before first...
https://www.thelocal.de/20230410/more-than-a-third-of-german...
[1] https://www.irishrail.ie/en-ie/about-us/train-punctuality-re...
You may have had a good experience here in Germany as a tourist, but it's simply not reality. Trains are not reliably on time here these days, and it's a huge problem.
I do not doubt the DART is unreliable in Dublin, the buses are just as bad (I moved to Germany from Dublin a little over a year ago). I know it's a bit apples to oranges comparison between Germany and Ireland, but I can assure you, it is bad here in Germany currently!
(Take it with a bit of neighbourly humour.)
I've traveled in a lot of countries and used train in a lot of them, none of them have been quite as bad as DB when it comes to reliability.
And the recent articles that claim only around 60% of trains arrive on time bears that.
However, there are typically many more connections than in many other countries. Don't expect to be at your destination in time, but once you have accepted that travelling by train is still better than in many other countries. Yes, Switzerland plays in a different league.
Cars get stuck in traffic jams all the time. Still I don't hear frequently how horrible travelling by car is.
There are lines in Switzerland where some of the trains doing it are DB trains transiting through CH and going from or to Germany. These trains also pickup and drop off passengers in CH, doing the same stops as the national trains.
I’ve learnt to avoid these German trains like the plague: they’re often late, crowded, dirty, or even canceled at the last minute.
Even if they (in theory) offer a shorter travel time, I know by now it’s mostly fictional because of the issues above. I prefer to take the SBB train that I’m sure will show up even if it means the trip will be 30 min longer.
> 60m^2, keine Küche, kein Bad - Für 60,66 EUR warm im Monat.
EN: 60 square meters, no kitchen, no bathroom - for just 60.66 EUR per month, utilities included.
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/20182186004296102...
Hopefully he also has friends he can stay with in various cities.
I think if I wanted to do the digital nomad thing I'd have to cheat on the nomad bit a little and have an anchor flat somewhere.. where else would I keep the NAS?!
As it stands my lil studio flat is 300/yr cheaper with all bills inc and has a coffee machine built into the (admittedly communal, but massive) kitchen. Plenty of caffeine, plenty of legroom!
If nothing else I'm sure we'd agree on remote working being amazing for finding the exact environment that suits you :)
> NAS
I think that is cheating on the nomad thing a lot a bit.
It's no different than paying to use the servers your shit is stored on in some cloud service.
In a colocation?
I mean, I guess I get what you are trying to say, by the NAS is the least compelling reason to keep an address somewhere.
If it was the only thing stopping me doing the nomad thing I'd set it up at a friend's house (with payment in terabytes of storage) or aye colo it
Plenty of trails to walk or cycle, fields everywhere to shortcut through, decent train and motorway connections to the major cities on the rare occasion I do need to be on-site.
There's even a castle to explore within walking distance :)
i think you are talking about lasse stolley rather than corobo
is that correct
if i understand correctly, stolley's €830/month includes not just lodging but also food, computer parts, hosting, and transportation. i spend less than that but that's because i live in argentina
So let's talk about cost: I don't know how often he sleeps in this way[0] but clearly at £8500/year no one is discussing the externalized cost of taking up (arguably empty) seats he didn't pay for and setting the stage for future "nomads" to do the same and turning first class night trains into a substandard hostel
[0] https://leben-im-zug.de/mein-erster-tag-mit-der-bahncard-100... > That night, I decide to lie down under the seats on my air mattress, the air mattress at 2 meters doesn't quite fit under a 4 seat, so there's still a little bit of the footwell of the square in front of me, but with the low occupancy of the train, this is not a problem whatsoever, with my head half under a seat of the 4 seat. It's tight, but it's enough to lie on your side and change position sometimes at night, I take up about 3 seats in total.
Is it at a certain age, or is that only for children born latest at $YOUR_BIRTHYEAR?
They are pointing out that what the previous commenter said was ridiculous, by saying the same thing with merely other variables swapped in which more obviously illustrates how ridiculous the original statement was.
There is nothing ridiculous about the fact that people-that-use-more-than-average (over-users: p>.5) are compensated by people-that-use-less-than-average (under-users: p<.5) to establish an average... it's called spread.
It's true that the train company does some probability math and figures out some balance point for the proper price for the ticket based on some estimated bell curve of usage, just like a diner selling a "bottomless" cup of coffee for $1.
But that doesn't make the right half of the curve "overusing" any more than it makes the left half of the curve "underusing". They are all merely using the thing that the supplier sold in accordance with the terms set by the supplier.
That`s why he's under the seats, but let's talk about AirBNB-Ghosttown's ;)
And i think it's a absolute nice adventure for a 17 y/o. Talk with lot's of different peoples, see lot's of places....genius i love it!
hey, he paid for it! They gave him an unlimited ticket in exchange for euros.
You're free to say that the train company shouldn't have created an unlimited ticket but it's unfair to paint a person who uses what he legally bought as a thief.
well I'm pretty sure if those seats were taken he'd sleep in its own seat. Perhaps his equation would change if had to sleep upright every night, but still, there is nothing illegal
by that logic, you have until the next stop, and then any claim you have to a seat is forfeit.
Go ahead and try to get a refund when you don't have a seat on a crowded train.
"Each passenger is only allowed to occupy one seat [...] Passengers who behave contrary to the above regulations, ignore the instructions of employees or otherwise pose a threat to safety and order can be excluded from transport or further transport without entitlement to reimbursement of the fare and baggage price."
Translated from https://assets.static-bahn.de/dam/jcr:82c5f579-c786-41dc-abf... (Page 20, 6.1)
> with the low occupancy of the train, this is not a problem whatsoever
This is clearly also something you can only do when you're seventeen. I think if I tried to sleep on a luggage rack then (a) I would wake up in a claustrophobic panic attack, and (b) the rack would break.
Nobody might mind a one-off antisocial behaviour, but if it becomes a pattern, or if everyone starts doing it, everyone might start minding it.
It is not an externalized cost. DB would even make more money if more people did it, up until the point it started costing them more profitable sales (at which point they will change the rules). It is like any mass transport, where it is better to carry a passenger at zero or even negative profit than it is to have a half empty bus/plane/train. A full plane, even if half are traveling at cost, is more profitable than a half full plane, because the fixed costs of the journey is amortized over more passengers. Rather than 50% of the full fare being lost to the fixed journey costs, only 25% of the full fare gets lost. This is how economy class works, where little profit is made, but covers the fixed cost of a flight allowing more profit to be extracted from business, first and extras.
- Lasse's blog (in German): https://leben-im-zug.de/
- r/de thread (in German): https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/1b4syao/dieser_17j%C3%A...
Why wouldn't city apartments have washing machines? (In Germany and most of the rest of Europe we also don't particular need, or care for, driers either, that's what clotheslines are for).
Laundromats I'd say are more for like, students, tourists, travellers, fresh immigrants, people with some temporary arrangements and no stable residence, etc.
In a pinch he could hand-wash them, but I imagine drying might be an issue with that.
Breakfast in Berlin, Dinner in München.
His exit strategy is probably the same as mine, his bedroom at mom and pop’s hotel
They too are away from their old standing friends, and since they are usually not intending to stay forever in the country they stay in, they're probably not investing in any deep connections there either.
In fact, given the huge loneliness/isolation trends, he is probably not that different to the average stationary person in this regard either.
Seriously, I have lived in remote regions and not everybody living there owns a car. Many people need hours to get to their friends as well.
He can hop on the train and trivially go to them. He probably sees his friends more than many others who are separated by long distances.
In a world of instant comms, he doesn’t need to be tracked down. He can be summoned and in a few hours, appear.
When I lived in New York, it wasn't that much different - my friends and I occasionally lived on opposite sides of Manhattan & Brooklyn; now I live in New Jersey, and if I want to see close friends, I have to dedicate at least half the day to it, and going somewhere on a whim is not always an option for me. Depending on where this kid is at any given moment, it might be faster for him to get to a friend than it would take me to get to mine.
Both in terms of cheap throwaway reference and maybe that's actually how he does it?
When I was commuting a lot I'd always see the same faces, eventually got to nattering with some of them. Nothing super deep or anything but that's probably more on my social ability than possibility :)
While this lifestyle is not for me, i tend to concur on the statement. I personally pick my houses as distant from people as possible. People don’t need people. Sure it gets lonely sometimes but let me ask you if you enjoying the company you have all the time.
People don’t need people. It’s rather personality related
My question is: why do you post on HN for others to read? Why not just write your thoughts in a journal and keep it to yourself?
You are on a social networking site right now. People always need people, even if they don't think they do.
That comes down to ~840€ per month. Unless you live deep in the countryside, life is not going to be much cheaper as a non-nomad.
Probably as well as the average not-train dwelling person:
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1173418268/loneliness-connect...
I’ve lived in various different situations that seem in retrospect intolerable, but at the time were perfectly ok - for instance, in the early days of bootstrapping, I didn’t bother with a bed or a home, I just slept on the floor by my desk at the office, using my jacket as a pillow. It became normal frighteningly quickly - to the extent that when I moved into my own place a few years later, I needed cajoling to buy a mattress at the very least - things had just ceased to have a hold on me, and a bed honestly seemed like an extravagance, unnecessary, just something I’d have to move again at some point down the road.
I don’t live such a Spartan extreme now, by any stretch of the imagination - but some traces of that experience linger - but either way my point was that that became very normal for me in a matter of weeks or months. Coming back to a more normal way of life was a strange sensation.
Honestly, I can understand how homelessness works.
Seems a very cautious guy, as he was booking a night train from Budapest to Bucharest, apparently he was warned at the counter by an employee which made him very uneasy. Reminds of the story of that TEDx talk.[1]
He is clearly enjoying it so I hope the positive experiences encourage him to even go beyond Europe, like to India ;) [2]
[0]https://leben-im-zug.de/mein-jahresrueckblick-2023/
His northenmost point seems to have been Narvik (across the border in Norway). From what I can tell, that’s almost 70km (more than 40 miles) north of Kiruna.
From his blog:
>[...]Eine ganz besondere Zugfahrt zum nördlichsten Bahnhof Europas, Narvik.
>A very special train journey to the northernmost railroad station in Europe, Narvik. [0]
I don't think one or the other is a superior way to spend ones formative years, though doing the train thing might make more sense before going to school, as he may form relationships in school that he won't want to give up for riding a train.
> ‘If I feel like travelling to the sea, I take the train north in the morning. If I long for the hustle and bustle of the big city, then I look for a connection to Berlin or Munich. Or I take the express train to the Alps for a hiking trip.’
I'm curious to learn more about how his feelings being so quickly satisfied makes an impact on him...
I suspect the secret here is that a lot of people adopting this type of lifestyle produce really mediocre output and some way or another fit into the gaps at a large company that doesn't conduct aggressive performance reviews.
Everyone is different but I find it hard to believe that high quality code is generated from working consistently in that type of environment. Perhaps lots and lots of boilerplate.
Lately I've been programming less and less with wifi while sitting at libraries and cafes without wifi. It's fine, just have proper dev environments, use isync for offline emails, download docs and learn to read manuals instead of stackoverflow.
So you can basically be offline most of the time. I envy that bliss, it’s so difficult to do when you’re much older, with kids, pets, and the family.
Not my first though when I think of trains, but I'm not in the UK.
(Their are exceptions to this and not all train companies are linked to other countries state owned railways, but many are. They get cheap travel and we get scammed)
So TOC/ROSOC profits 'take out' 1.5% of the money in the system. Saying they are 'mostly' a profit making enterprise is completely ridiculous.
Also, while the UK has privatised TOCs, Germany and other countries are also opening regional/long distance rail routes to franchising of sorts. National Express (a British company) operates a surprising amount of routes (and growing) in North Rhine-Westphalia (and probably other regions) for example. It's not just a one way thing.
Perhaps it helps that I don't tend to travel at peak times or on peak routes.
Saw so many places without the stress of driving.
https://www.amazon.de/MC-Rene-Alles-Karte-sehen/dp/349962969...
But it does seem like a good way to explore the country.
I've also considered going freelance and doing all work from the train with an unlimited ticket like this, it'd work great I think.
But sleeping there is a bit too much.
Does this guy have a passport? Then he has a mailing address.
He claims to work. Then he pays taxes. In which country? he has a mailing address.
At 17, I'd bet good money that his mailing address is also his parent's mailing address. This is a gap student having fun bouncing around Europe, about as nomadic as any other backpacker.
At that age he's also mostly included in his parent's insurances, so one less thing to worry about. Taxes are deducted automatically from his wage. And to receive the wage he just needs a bank account.
But I don't really understand how this small legal detail would change the whole character of his life experience, in any case. No matter what is written in his passport, he spends the whole year in a train.
Look at the "Van life" trend. The people are forced to live in their cars/vans really do not appreciate those who glamorize it. It is not an easy thing.
With the upgrade to "Registered Address" it costs a whopping 79.95€/month though, so it is not really a really an option for me. But good to know that it exists.
I spent 2 years driving from Alaska to Argentina all on tourist visas. I spent 3 years driving around Africa all on tourist visas. Technically I could have done that without paying tax anywhere, though I continued to do so because I was working towards permanent residency in another country.
I now have a passport from a country I've never been to. I've renewed my passport from the country I was born in three times without going there.
I only need a mailing address to actually pick something up, and I usually use a friends address, or even that of a hostel or campground.
I'm curious, what country let you work towards permanent residency without you being physically present in it? (Sounds like you were driving around different places at the time)
BTW I spent the last 15 mins enjoying your blog, particularly the entries on Tanzania (I grew up there). Glad you enjoyed your time there :)
but anyhow, you could plausibly get by with not paying any taxes by continuously moving countries. The real question is to which bank is the payment being made? If your an employee you'll probably have your income reported. you could skirt that, somewhat, by being a contractor, but even then, to which business, or to which bank account is being made?
Anyhow, none of that precludes him from being a nomad. it seems you have more of a bone to pick with the choice of the word nomad, which descends from 'noman' or more modernly 'nobody'. I think it has more to do with a lack of permanent community than a lack of a mailing address.
"He travels first class, sleeps on night trains, has breakfast in DB lounges and takes showers in public swimming pools and leisure centres, all using his unlimited annual railcard."
For washing your clothes there are plenty of laundromats in cities, for visiting the doctor or dentist, you make an appointment, and then plan your travels so that you are in the right city at the right time. It's really not that complicated.
With the Bahncard 100 he can also use the public transport in cities, so it's not like he's limited to walking distance of the train stations.
...also, his overall cost of living is apparently around 10k Euros a year. The unlimited train ticket is just 3/4 of that (7714 Euros).
Sounds fantastic.
That alone is amazing. Is 16 normal in Germany or did this guy graduate years earlier than normal?
Answering my own question, seems maybe they went to a "Realschule"? If I understand it correctly kind of a trade or technical school for those whose path leads into a job right away. Otherwise it's Gymnasium (funny sounding to English speakers) a regular school path that leads to University.
With each, you also have the option to continue afterwards and work towards a higher degree. He most likely finished Realschule, although it would be possible to skip classes and finish Gymnasium by 16 (but this is exceptionally rare).
I'm actually curious how many really have stopped a minute to imaging what does it means be homeless and not owning anything. OF COURSE IT'S CHEAP.
Freedom?
In my mid 20s I maintained a not-too-extreme minimalistic life style where I could pack literally everything I owned into my car. I could decide to just leave and lose at most some months' worth of rather cheap rent.
I never actually did use the opportunity, but it gave me a lot of comfort knowing that I wasn't stuck somewhere, that I could at any moment just leave.
If I own a home I can't relocate as easy as if I rent, of course, that's a slavery. BUT the home it's under my control and I can sell it. I have insurances if something goes wrong, and I can choose between many of them, the home is inside a State, I can't have the same home in multiple States but the State is formally a Democracy (not much in reality, but that's another broad topic) and it's stable enough, so I can sell the home and change state before being trapped in a harsh dictatorship. On contrary if I live on trains I have not much choice if a train get canceled let's say because of a storm and that's happen while I'm in a mountain area only with bank cards and no connection and no hotel nearby. As a simple example.
We are all a bit free and a bit slave, the point how much freedom we have and how dramatic is exercise it or not.
As long as this is strictly a personal project, with a goal, and an exit strategy, it's absolutely fine.
He'll probably grow up to be quite a successful person, and no doubt will have learnt a fair bit this year, as well as being humbled. Being homeless is grim, but it's nice to have perspective sometimes and a heightened sense of empathy, and not constantly live life on ezpz mode.
Now try to imaging you works on YT, your revenues came form Alphabet for the video you publish. You produce them with a laptop in a rented office and on the go. Well, you have non backups, YT have your videos and your audience. A ban and you have no choice but to restart nearly from the ground, no insurances, laws, asset under your control and so on. Then you are a slave of YT.
I've choose to live the big city for the mountains, so I'm slave of a car to move. But I have three cars, of different brands, two moderns connected so potentially risky "not fully mine", one classic, so risky only in mechanical terms. Having choices I'm slave of "a car" but not on one in particular, so I'm free. I have desktops and homeservers, WFH if one break my data are locally available and locally usable on another, no slavery to wait for a new system get delivered of the nearest shopping mall to open to buy one in person. I have fiber and mobile with a good enough 4G/dummy 5G (700MHz, in France, it's both 4G and 5G) and no data cap issues. I'm evaluating if buying a Starlink base service might be a wise choice, so I'm not slave of a specific ISP to work/live BUT for instance to access my bank I'm slave of my mobile carrier, due to the mandatory OTP via SMS, no banks here allow classic RSA OTP or using a smart card or something else not connected anymore. That's a BIG slavery even if 99% of the time works issueless.
The difference between slavery and freedom it's not the mere presence of a choice but both choice and backups that allow you to choose without dramas. In freedom terms I can even took my life, but that's not a wise choice without drama, if I work on YT as described above I can formally change tomorrow but if it's my sole source of income it's not a choice without drama and so on.
You're falsely equating ownership with exchange. He can do stuff for people, who can do stuff for him. He can choose who to do things for, and who does things for him. That's the opposite of slavery.
When you have alternatives there is no slavery, you can pick many options all the time, you have backup between them. When you depend on single entities you are their slave, no matter how "formally free" you are. Now I'm slave of my home to live in it, to continue this "strange journey", but the home is mine, I control it, I'm a citizen of a state with certain rights and laws and so on. I have then alternatives and backups. So the slavery from my home it's not much oppressive. I have three desktops at home, two homeservers and some spare parts, so if something breaks I can switch immediately not waiting for a spare part to come by the mail or a shopping mall to open to buy it ASAP. If I depend on a laptop I have no backup and if my data are all in someone else hand I depend on them, no backup. If I have no assets I own, I depend on my source of revenues CONSTANTLY meaning I have no backup to hunt for another job if I live paycheck to paycheck. That's slavery de facto, even if formally I'm free to go.
That's is.
You're describing instead a world in which everything isn't available for free, and so you have to make choices on how the resources you receive are deployed.
And sorry - I couldn't make out what the game was from your text. I don't think it particularly helps either way. It's easy to construct a game that misses an important component of reality.
> someone who exists until he can produce for someone else, who effectively own him, then can only die since he have no more option to live.
Congratulations on spotting what "wage slavery" is only 150 years after Marx.
> really have stopped a minute to imaging what does it means be homeless and not owning anything. OF COURSE IT'S CHEAP
It's more often appallingly expensive, especially since many jurisdictions take it as a license to destroy your property.
Also, 10k Euro a year for living expenses isn't actually cheap, he would spend less money with a more traditional lifestyle and renting a small flat (outside big cities at least).
It's likely just a phase. Young people have been doing this since time immemorial. I think you are overreacting a tad.
The article says he often eats (for free) at the 1st class lounges at the train stations
"technically has no fixed abode" I think here probably actually means he's registered at his parents house. This would likely be a lot more difficult if you were truly homeless.
For exchange of no fixed location, and just a single tiny sleep room, though.
I'd be willing to bet that even a regular home (unit/flat/apartment/small house/whatever) can likely be rented for 1/5th of London rental rates, if you look in the right places: i.e., not in major cities.
Cities are expensive; Being able to work from "anywhere" makes it quite easy to make your money go a lot further, particularly in terms of housing, without resorting to being a glorified homeless drifter.
The train could go around the country (or even, say in Europe, multiple countries) picking up the attendees, stopping at various places to eat or whatever, then drop everyone off after a couple days.
- rent a 2 storeys shop for a year 1/3 - start a small business - 1/3 - personal monthly expenses for a year - 1/3
in a medium town in Indonesia.
Enjoy the journey in bootstrapping your business.
* Rail passes do exist, but they are mostly for tourists. They are short-duration, can be relatively expensive, and often specifically exclude Japan residents.
* Night trains have mostly disappeared. Buses and airplanes have proven to be more competitive options.
many people pay specifically for place to retreat to
I know one person that travels "nomad style" 100% of the time, and the only way they can do that is by not having a partner or kids. They've tried with the partner, and it didn't work out for them.
I would much prefer my kids be well educated by my fantastic public schools, have a strong social group that they grow up with and bond with over time, and when the time comes for them to explore the world, they take that opportunity.
We do travel with our kids, but I would much rather work when I need to work, and rest and relax and travel when I am not working. I have no interest in combining work and travel.
Why bother telling people what they should be doing?
Did you miss the post of igetspam which started this thread? This is what they explicitly wished they could do, but think that they cannot because of partner+kids.
I was responding to that. I'm not sure what you were responding to. Did I reply to you or told you to do something against your will?
I am a W2 employee, and not able to move to another country to work without getting approval and incurring unknown tax liabilities.
My employer requires I do most of my work in a secure location. I am unable to have conversations with my customers in public places, and I talk with my customers constantly.
Also, I'm fucking old, and I couldn't stand sleeping sitting in a chair when I was 18. I still can't now, unless it's my big comfy lay-z-boy.
Wow, is this the common attitude about trains in the UK? how dour
This feels inhumane to me. I can't imagine someone being happy doing this for any length of time.
edit: but for the whole of Europe you do have Interrail but not sure how much it costs. I doubt you can do that every day but could be wrong.
At its best this could enable you to maintain friendship groups in multiple cities.
I mean, is it possible to keep some sort of a healthy movement regimen like this?
Cool otherwise, if I were 20 years younger, single, and had the kind of money to do it, I'd try at least a vacation like this.
Another practical question is how would you keep your gear from getting stolen?
This is essentially living subsidised by the train company who didn't expect someone to take an unlimited train ticket quite that literally. One guy doing this could be interpreted as marketing. A hundred would focus the operator's mind on words like "fair use". Drawing attention to himself like this may mark the end of this experience.
Not all environments are conducive to musterable control but when it lines up stuff can happen.
He's subsidized by the state and other passengers, not the company.
Exactly. It's not comfortable, it's not safe and cozy, it's not that cheap that homeless people would buy the BahnCard 100 that you couldn't find some form of cohabitation for a similar price.
And then there's the constant strikes as of now, so you might go days without shelter or need to pay for hotels which adds up quickly.
I'd say this is a rounding error
What's unsafe about it?
Unlikely, the FAQ on the ordering page explicitly states that the Bahncard 100 can be used for "any number of trips": https://www.bahn.de/angebot/bahncard/bahncard100-1-klasse.
Also, 7714 Euros is expensive (it's more than I pay for a year's rent in a small appartment in Berlin for instance).
I guess he's eating the additional cost for a 1st class Bahncard 100 because the 1st class usually isn't as extremely overcrowded as the 2nd class.
€600/month In Dublin would get you a 1m2 closet and shit bucket
I don’t know if that’s as viable a lifestyle in Europe as it is in the US, though.
It’s very common actually. As you probably know, Germany has a three tiered school system where kids move to after finishing elementary school at circa 10 years old.
Going to school is mandatory for 9 years here, regardless of graduation or not. You’ll leave Mittelschule after grade 9, so at 15-16. Realschule/mittlere Reife is usually finished after 10 total years in school, so at age ~16. Meanwhile gymnasium takes 12-13 years (depends on the state, our schools are weird), so you’d regularly be finished at 17-18 years old.
iirc the distribution across those three tiers is relatively even on average. That would mean that most are finished with the primary education at 17 or younger.
> Also this is probably a "try it for a while" thing rather than the permanent / long-term lifestyle.
Absolutely. I’m a bit of a train nerd myself, but even I wouldn’t consider this lifestyle for much longer. But as long as it’s fun for him, I bet he’s DB‘s most reliable service tester
I would recommend to any kid - if they can afford it/have the proper support system - to take off a year after finishing school and just explore. And if you need money, do try some freelancing and see if it suits you. And if you're done, you can always enter the 9-to-5 grind by entering the workforce proper.
Not only by train unfortunately. Pretty much all of the post war modernist construction didn’t age well at all. Ironically, the most beautiful parts of most cities are often the ones that were reconstructed or somehow preserved.
0 - https://www.daft.ie/property-for-rent/dublin-city?showMap=fa...
Lowest I'm seeing in all of Dublin is €140 once you exclude twin rooms, monday-to-friday terms and whatever "Dublin Host Families" is
They can change that though (if there's a material cost impact to them of this). They could just say from next year that you're capped at N journeys per month or something, where N is a very large number for anyone other than someone trying to live on trains.
"How dare this fucker weasel his way out of giving me 50% of his income! That's MY money!"
I've heard Berlin is very expensive. I guess it's overblown like some other places I've lived that have a reputation for being "very expensive": if you're really looking, you can find affordable options, but the reporting data is being mostly skewed by outrageously expensive outliers.
It doesn't help that her parents live in a different EU country and need to use Russian-German lawyers, who seem to be fine taking money even if they can't do much.
I imagine that cases like this have driven up the rent prices quite a bit.
Can you elaborate on why you imagine this?
A landlord may want a high price to 1) bake in future raises, if they can't be done year to year and 2) a filter to only rent to people with high paying jobs in an attempt to avoid situations where someone doesn't leave because they'll never find something as cheap.
To be clear, this is my inductive reasoning after asking this friend many questions in disbelief at her situation. I can't say definitively that this is a cause of higher rents. Nor do I mean to imply that there aren't bigger effects.
What apartment can you still get for less than 640 Euros in Berlin today?
On a personal note, I like trains, but not that much. One downside is that it's not guaranteed that he spends all his time in one train. It can be a bit of a distraction to have to switch trains. And also a bit tiring. Although since he I guess rides without a real destination he can just pick a train that goes across Germany, something like Hamburg - Freiburg.
If you book like 2-3 weeks ahead, there's plenty of 35 EUR first class tickets on the Warsaw-Berlin trains.
* including ferries, busses, underground, but also has exceptions that don't matter for normal commuting such as "no intercity express" and "a seat isn't guaranteed".
not true. ICE trains for example (see pic in article) are not part of the deal.
Do you have a source? That's an extraordinary claim, the sort of thing I'd expect to find in Nigel Farage's bag of lies
I believe it's a little out of date now, as some of the lines have been renationalised due to failures of the private sector.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arriva_UK_Trains : subsidiary of DB
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C2c : subsidiary of Trenitalia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avanti_West_Coast : part owned by Trenitalia
And so on.
(Don't forget that the real profit ends up with the "train landlords", the ROSCOs: https://www.leasinglife.com/features/who-owns-the-trains-ros... ; all of them are parented in Luxembourg for tax reasons)
It isn't an EU thing, though it has at times been something Farage and his ilk have banged on about as if it is an EU thing, it is the way the Tories setup the privatisation of the railways (running them into the ground first as part of making the case for taking them away from the public purse (which it isn't as there are still significant subsidies involved)).
which they did to implement... EU Directive 91/440 ("First Railway Package")
yes, the UK tended to gold plate EU regs, but the spark was the EU
Everywhere you see very cheap train fares it's because they are subsidised.
Everywhere you see cheap road travel it's because they are subsidised.
The killer is that there are still significant subsidies involved, so we pay through the nose for bad service due to the way privatisation is arranged and also pay extra through indirect taxation too. In fact, even adjusted for inflation we pay more for the railways via taxation now than we did when they were a publicly funded industry. Funfunfun.
A quick reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financing_of_the_rail_industry...
I agree that the way privatisation has worked is poor, though.
The public purse should not be raided more after privatisation than before, surely?
In any case, railways are expensive and need significant investment. In terms of financing the question is then to find the the sweet spot between fares and public spending (i.e. taxes).
Neither privatisation nor nationalisation are silver bullets. As is often the case it is a question of good management and customer focus. That being said, it is hard to imagine a system with real competition because of the very nature of railways, which tend to be natural monopolies. That being the case, state ownership may make sense, with the caveat that it should be well managed along private sector standards.
As Boeing is finding out now with the 737 max and their Spirit subcontractor, every time you need to organise something across a contractual boundary, like who's responsible for making sure the doors don't fall off your aeroplane, it adds a lot of cost and time in contract negotiations, paperwork, inspections and inflexibility if you want to enforce what you have asked the other party to do and to understand what still remains your responsibility. Therefore when you go to a subcontractor for something you try to make sure it is very clearly defined what they are responsible for. For example, when an architect designs a skyscraper, they will try to design the cladding in a way that makes sure that watertightness is solely the responsibility of the one cladding subcontractor. If it leaks they are on the hook, simple. If you create complicated interfaces between systems then subcontractors can get out of responsibility for problems by blaming each other or the design of the interface.
So back to the railways. The government specifies where, when and how many seats a train service should have, they let contracts to train operating companies who then pay another (now government owned after it went bankrupt) company, Network Rail, to access the track. These train operating companies don't own the trains, they lease them from one of three other government created private (and now highly profitable) companies that provide all rolling stock. The train operating companies are generally responsible for light maintenance while the leasing companies are responsible for heavy maintenance. The train operating companies also provide staff for stations and branding but they don't own or maintain the stations although they are responsible for some maintenance and keeping them clean (or they used to be, it's complicated). All the money for this comes from the government as subsidy and from fare revenue paid to the train operating companies through a central clearing house. Train fares are for the most part dictated by government. Train operating companies have a little bit of freedom to sell discounted tickets to fill spare capacity, but there isn't really any on our main intercity routes and on commuter routes when people need to travel so most people are paying the government capped fares.
Here's an example of why this system is crazy. If we want to upgrade a rail line to electronic moving block signalling to increase the number of trains that can run per hour there are negotiations between the department of transport, the track owner, all the train operating companies that run on that route and their leasing companies about who is paying for the equipment to be fitted to the track and the trains, the specification to make it all compatible, when this will happen and who is responsible if things go wrong. On a complicated route like the West Coast mainline, this could involve multiparty negotiations between say 10 operators, 4 leasing companies, network rail and the department of transport. It could involve hardware and software modifications to more than 20 different types of train, some of which are up to 40 years old. Guess who is actually paying for all this anyway? The taxpayer and government dictated fares from rail passengers. There is no real free market incentive operating anywhere here to drive cost efficiencies in providing these modifications and all these negotiations need to be documented, have responsibility assigned and have procedures agreed. Guess who you need to do this? Lots of corporate lawyers... Guess how long this takes, fucking ages.
That is why we have a system where a ~350 mile journey from London to Glasgow takes more than twice as long and typically costs more than twice as much for half the legroom compared to a ~350 mile journey from Paris to Bordeaux.
A train network is like the mechanism of a clock, the trains are like the teeth on the cogs; they have a place they should be and they need to move in sync with perfectly with each other. We've designed a system that makes organising this insanely complicated with no overall coordinated strategy for improvements. A densely populated country like ours can't function properly without an efficient train network to allow its workforce to be flexible and move around easily and it affects our productivity and our ability to remain competitive globally.
</rant ends>
Edit: corrected missing word
Just for my own interest as an American, I can take a 350 mile journey on a train from where I live (Jacksonville, FL) to Miami. There are two trains a day, one of which takes 11 hours and costs $72, the other takes 9 hours and costs $94. Based on my experience, both of these trains are likely to be between 3 and 6 hours later than the scheduled time. How does that compare to the London to Glasgow cost and time?
Paris-Bordeaux takes 2h05m and is non-stop. If I go online now the next train is at 6:30pm and costs €60 2nd class. There is a non-stop train roughly every hour and there are also trains that stop 2-3 times that take about 3h but are a bit cheaper. The 2nd class seat is spacious your legs are about 5" from the seat in front and there is a table with enough space to comfortably use a laptop which has an individual socket and usb charging point per person. The ride quality is very smooth, you can easily use a laptop trackpad or mouse accurately enough to do CAD work, you wouldn't realise that you are travelling at 200mph. Edit: 1st class is available for €72 and did I mention that the train is double decker? it's just a lot cooler. Another edit: There are quite a few trains tomorrow with tickets for €29 and one train with a ticket for €12.50
The rail network was cut right back in the 60s by the then transport minister, who happened to have a large share in the corporation building out the motorway network.
And so on.
Completely dysfunctional politics. Utterly unsuited to the 21st century.
I have to go on a cross country journey this Sunday which would suit the use of the train, except there are none at all on my section of the main line early in the morning, so I shall drive all the way into London. The data may make it look as if no-one needs or wants to use the train early on a Sunday, except we might, if we had the option.
Looking at number of trips/head, surface rail was 13 in 2002, rose to a pre-pandemic peak of 22 in 2018 and fell back to 15 in 2022. Bus (London + non-London local + long-distance) was 74, 48, and 37 respectively; motoring (car driver + car passenger + motorbike + taxi) was 694, 614, 512. Overall was 1074, 986, 862. So rail had a modal share of 1.2%, 2.2%, and 1.7% in 2002, 2018 and 2022.
The distance measure looks similar for rail: 482, 683, 493, from 7193, 6530, 5373. Modal share 6.7%, 10.5%, 9.2%. (I haven't done separate sums for buses and motoring.
So at least since 2002, it looks like rail has had a small but growing modal share of a steadily declining travel market, until disrupted by Covid to a place below peak but still considerably ahead of where it started.
Caveats: I haven't included the tube, and these data don't disambiguate light rail systems from 'other' (including flights). Rail remains dominated (like bus travel) by London & South East commuting, at least in number of trip terms.
[1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/tsgb01-m...
This is all fine and dandy until enough people decide to travel by car, and eventually there are traffic jams making you virtually unable to travel (by car) at certain times as well.
The problem is that for whatever reason rail users ""don't count"" politically.
In order to make driving less attractive than mass transit outside of urban cores like Manhattan or London, driving would have to be made more costly via increased tolls, removal of parking spaces, and less road capacity in conjunction with mass transit being made more frequent (every 5 to 10 minutes) with more routes.
Point to point travel in an individual vehicle is just very hard to compete with, especially on amount of freedom.
For instance, Southern Railway is owned by Govia Thameslink Railway, which is part of Govia which also operates Gatwick Express, Great Northern and Thameslink services.
However, Govia is a partnership between the Go-Ahead Group and Keolis.
Keolis is a French transportation company owned by SNCF, the French national railway, and CDPQ (a crown company of Canada).
Go-Ahead is owned by Globalvia, a Spanish multinational transport infrastructure company, and Kinetic Group (formerly known as AATS Group) which is an Australian-based multinational bus company.
Globalvia are owned by OPTrust, one of Canada's largest pension funds; PFZW, the second-largest pension fund in the Netherlands; and USS, a large UK Pension scheme.
Kinetic Group are also owned by OPTrust, but also by Foresight Group Holdings plc a British private equity and venture capital business, supposedly focused on clean energy generation and associated infrastructure (*cough* Go-Ahead spends £100 million a year on Diesel *cough*).
Now, try to imagine how many small subsidiaries those companies have where transfer-pricing can occur and how many layers of profit are being extracted.
France's SNCF trains are run by SNCF (owned by the French Government) who also do all the track and maintenance.
Germany's Deutsche Bahn (owned by the German Government) runs Germany's trains.
Deutsche Bahn also own Arriva and were nearly banned by the UK government for how badly they ran the trains in the north of England (spoiler: they weren't).
Avanti West Coast are part owned by Trenitalia, who are mostly owned by the Italian Government. Trenitalia also owns c2c who run the London, Tilbury and Southend franchise.
The northern railways were run by a succession of similarly named companies before being returned to the UK Government as operator of fast resort.
The whole thing is a tangled mess of the worst kind of vampire capitalism: sucking up subsidies, bleeding companies dry by overloading them with debt, providing terrible service, then handing the drained husk back to the government once they've bled them to death.
I've concluded that the private companies that replaced the UK publicly owned companies are run to be a front for borrowing money and sucking up subsidies to pay to shareholders. The train companies are no better than the water companies, though they seem to be better at obfuscating what they are doing.
It's the same formula over and over again: you borrow; pay as much of it as you can out to shareholders; run a minimal service to bring in just enough money to pay the debt payments; invest the minimum to allow you to keep operating and if possible, you do it through transfer pricing with other companies in the parent companies' structure. When your creditors eventually catch up with you, you go cap in hand to the government looking for a bailout and if that fails, you hand the franchise back before forming a new company to bid again.
Southern Water, for instance, uses 1/3 each bill to pay debt payments. Even Network Rail, who are owned by the British Government, are paying 1/3 of their income to service their debts.
This is very similar to the "hollowed-out firms" of the UK who distribute more to shareholders than they generate in net income—1/5 of FTSE 350 paid out on average 178% of their net earnings after tax in 2010-1019.
It's all a con and we are chumps.
Further reading
This unfathomable financial overview of the rail system in England:
https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/A-financia...
This summary of who owns the British Railways:
https://weownit.org.uk/who-owns-our/railways
This article about water profits:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2023/...
Hollowed-out firms:
https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2021-02/Tran...
Given passenger numbers increasing in the last couple of decades have given trains huge economies scale reducing their costs and yet fares go up, public subsides go up and train companies bust. The only answer I can think of is UK trains are expensive because we are really bad at running them.
Tbh I can't imagine it to be relaxing being cooped in your seat the whole day, with people around you. (1) https://int.bahn.de/en/bahnbusiness/offers/businesscards/bah...
Trains in France are not vastly cheaper than the UK, but the service pattern is awful outside the very main routes. Often huge gaps in service for parts of the day and non-clockface timetabling. Seems to be very poor utilisation of rolling stock, with a lot of the stations having trains sitting for hours doing nothing (which should really be operated more intensely to give a better service pattern).
DB has horrendous reliability problems, basically the entire network gets something similar to TPE on time performance (the worst performing TOC in the UK). ICE/IC trains are also not particularly cheap for on the day travel.
Spain's high speed lines are excellent and very cheap. But outside that the network is incredibly limited and slow, so much so that buses will almost always beat the train in journey time.
Netherlands is good, affordable, frequent services and reliable. I think NL is the only country I've been to where the system is noticeably better than the UK across a lot of dimensions.
Do you really think people don’t know which continent the UK belongs to?
Do you think people are in danger of thinking the UK is actually in Africa or Asia when the colloquialism of ‘Europe’ is used?
Do you really think people don’t know which continent the UK belongs to?
As a regular train traveller in Germany, it averages out. It's almost exclusively the intercity connections which are delayed, but those usually run on an hourly clock. It's actually not that uncommon that I can save half an hour of travel time because I can catch a delayed ICE from the previous time slot instead of waiting 45 minutes for the next train ;)
(Of course when I say doesn't allow it, I mean they could, but it would be very impractical and require major tradeoffs.)
Most of these routes have about 1-2tph running on them max. The UK (and I'm sure many other countries) manages to run clockface timetabling (for the most part) with a lot of routes on 10tph++.
It's not the lack of clockface timetabling that is the problem per se, it's the constant huge gaps in service. Eg approx 1tph, then a big gap of 3 hours, then 1tph. It's all over the place.
But no, it's so easy for you to just shout "it doesn't make any sense" without first wondering if you had the complete picture. The French are incompetent and wasteful, that's obvious isn't it?
There's a lot of externalities around transit that aren't directly priced into costs vs ticket revenue.
If France decides "We want high speed national rail connectivity between cities", I'd look at it more of an entitlement / service than a profitable enterprise.
Nobody expects national healthcare services to be profitable.
(Also, both France and Germany's relatively recent experience with their national rail networks being the reason their countries are still independent sovereign states)
Germany and France were on the verge of collapse or being conquered but government trains saved them? Do tell.
But also, they're maybe not very sovereign when a foreign body drafts, ratifies, and enforces their laws
Public libraries don't run as profit centers, and yet everyone generally agrees they provide a social benefit and are worth funding.
Ref: world wars, part I and II.
So you're saying that if the Nazis didn't have subsidized train rides for tourists they would not have been able to collapse the Soviet Union in 1991 and regain East Germany? Interesting. Very interesting, sir.
You cannot possible rate the Netherlands good on comfort. It's cattle class, even on 'long' (for Dutch standards) haul routes. They _just_ started to operate carriages with power sockets! I rode better trains in Poland 10 years ago than in NL.
I take el cheapo French TGV (Ouigo) over any Dutch rolling stock any day.
from the handfull of times I've taken Ouigo, it's just normal TGV, just without first class and sometime less convenient train stations (like outside of Paris instead of close to the center)...
Haven’t been on regular TGV to compare, but it can’t be much worse than Ouigo…
Intercity trains have had sockets for a while, but YMMV if this wasn't on the most used tracks.
Short distance or trains that stop at towns (called sprinters) didn't. Haven't ridden a train in quite a few years so that might have changed.
The trains are mostly on time though, which is something most countries fail at. Granted Dutch people still complain about public transport, me included. Most people think it's too expensive and it takes too long to really get anywhere that isn't a direct connection. These days it is often cheaper to go by car too, especially if you are going somewhere with more than one person.
Depending on the article the Netherlands seems to be either high in the top 10 or low in the top 20.
Checked the latest WEF report I could find (2021), and it's ranked 14 on there. But that includes much more than just public transport. So not that useful. (Travel & Tourism Development or T&T index).
It's abysmal.
Compared to German stock — yes, the German stock is nicer (mainly has to do with different usage patterns, though — Netherlands train network has been said to resemble a country-sized metro network).
Outlets — who cares, just bring a power bank — again, compare to networks like London Overground or Paris RER.
i'm not from the uk
That would be £6816 for a year, although (again) "You can use a BritRail Pass if you’re not a UK citizen and have not lived in the UK for the last six months or more.". I guess you'd have to go home before the end of the 6th consecutive month of using the passes otherwise you'd disqualify yourself.
https://www.thetrainline.com/trains/rail-passes/britrail-pas...
The All-Line-Rover would be the version for anyone who does live in the UK: http://www.railrover.org/pages/all-line.html and it is much more expensive.
I hate this fetishization of anything European as if it's the land of milk and honey. If you live in Haiti OK, but I'm guessing the authour doesn't.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/oct/14/its-the-sam...
This said, DB is probably still better than what I've heard about the UK train system, but it's long ago lost its lustre and in my experience when taking IC(E)s through it, delays and cancellations are common occurrences. While I've never got stuck there overnight, I've had several hours added to 6-ish hour journeys regularly.
There's a fallacy where people believe the actions of an individual have any significant impact on emissions; be it travel, energy efficient homes, dietary lifestyle choices like vegetarianism and veganism. But the effect of those are all rounding errors at best. The only change can come from companies and large businesses.
the large polluting companies don't exist in vacuum. They sell what they sell because consumers are buying it. E.g. saying that Shell / BP is the largest polluter is nice but there is no way to run oil company without selling oil to the individual to be burned.
I hope this doesn't mean he was actually bathing in the pool but rather using the shower facilities at public pools.
With €10k/y you can afford a house+food+bills in most of Europe and in many places it is way cheaper than that.
So... yeah, I find it incredibly stupid.
Im in the UK so I work in pounds. 800 Euro = £684.29
I guarantee you that you cannot get house, bills, and food for this amount per month.
I actually think its a pretty smart and cheap way to live if you are young and can handle the requirements.
That is basically the minimum state pension, which some people do live on, but it is a pretty miserable existence.
But there are like 20 other countries in Europe where it is totally possible. Don't judge everything based only on you backyard.
Providing German healthcare can keep up with all the antibiotics he'll inevitably need it sounds like a good deal.
I can't see how you could survive long-term on around 1/3 of a nation's average salary, even in the most rural of villages with hardly any amenities, rent alone is going to take up the majority of your budget.
You could probably get by reasonably well in Greece, and could live very well in the Balkans.
10k/12 is 833. Now let's say half or less of that to rent+etc. possible in certain not so desirable areas. Leaves you around 10€ a day for food and then 100€ for other stuff like used clothing and so on.
Realistically this living on a train thing isn’t a sustainable lifestyle, but it certainly is a fun adventure
I don’t see how that can be true if you want to live alone. Maybe in some of the poorer countries outside the EU.
[0] For one thing, сигурно ще трябва да научиш български, which doesn't sound like a great use of time.
Monthly rent €450: https://www.property.bg/property-67234-fully-furnished-house...
Both are enough for bills and food, or at least seem to be (I don't know how property taxes work in Bulgaria).
And given that figure I gave you was average salary and thus won't cover kids or pensioners, mostly of the people at or below that threshold will be supporting a family with that money, not just themselves, and that's the main reason they won't be living alone.
FWIW, I could manage on €10k/year even though I live in Berlin, but I'm (a) weird and (b) also living with someone in an apartment. Still more space each than if we were trying to live on a train, though.
Back in the UK, you can also find cheap actually-a-house houses despite the nonsense that is UK housing: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/144969266#/?channel=R... (£380 ~= €444 / month) — I think £332/month should just about cover one person's food and bills, including council tax, in the UK, so I'd be surprised if one couldn't do at least that well in Bulgaria, where 5% of the population have an income of €208/month or less.
It’s pretty clear from the article he’s not doing this to save money, he’s doing because he loves travelling on trains and sees it as an opportunity for exploration and adventure. There’s nothing stupid about being curious, and brave enough to indulge that curiosity.
In your opinion. I think its pretty cool and would have loved to do this when I was 17.
He seems to live a relative "adventurous". Relative in relations to other German 17 year old.
> 2023 war einfach unglaublich! Ich habe so viele neue Erfahrungen gemacht, Freundschaften geschlossen, verschiedene Orte bereist und unterschiedliche Kulturen kennengelernt. Für mich persönlich war es das beste Jahr aller Zeiten.
Sounds rad.
But he is young and everyday another place. Try going skiing and visiting North See multiple times per year AND have a place to live.
I live in one of the cheapest countries in EE.
But no, he's likely been sleeping in beds since he's first class in night trains, in 3-bed compartments that generally have showers as far as I know. The lights can obviously be turned off.
If you restricted yourself to sleepers, there is quite a broad network across Germany, but still not comprehensive (https://assets.static-bahn.de/dam/jcr:5e469db8-ee74-46b0-a27...)
https://leben-im-zug.de/meiner-erster-monat-mit-der-bahncard...
So I guess he really is just sleeping in the regular compartment rather than a sleeper berth.
The trains he mentions are just regular ICEs that operate for some overnight trips.
I can imagine how this can be reasonably comfortable in an older ICE1 in first class, but i wouldn’t want to sleep on ICE4 seats for extended periods of time
Lasse travels 600 miles a day throughout Germany aboard Deutsche Bahn trains. He travels first class, sleeps on night trains, has breakfast in DB lounges and takes showers in public swimming pools and leisure centres, all using his unlimited annual railcard.
‘I’ve been living on the train as a digital nomad for a year and a half now,’ Lasse told Business Insider recently.