The German railway company Deutsche Bahn have come up with a corona timetable for it’s passengers to ensure they reduce the spread of the coronavirus and also they want to avoid crowds forming on the platforms. Here are the measures set you’ll have to abide by as reported by Bild.
From Friday (November 27), only window seats can be booked on the trains. Aisle seats are blocked.
Table
For seating groups with a table, only the diagonally opposite seats can be booked (window seat on one side and aisle seat on the opposite side).
Compartments
In closed compartments with six seats, only two seats can be reserved, the window seat on one side and the aisle seat on the other.
Operational exceptions if part of the train is missing and seats are missing. Then rail employees should check the allocation of seats and distribute seats when things get tight.
The mask requirement is tightened.
–In total, the Deutsche Bahn corona timetable only offers 60 percent of the seats for reservation. By the way, there will NOT be a general reservation requirement.
The train says: All travellers, even those without a reservation, should be taken along. However, it is urgently requested that passengers inform themselves about the load on the trains during Christmas and, if necessary, take another train.
Deutsche Bahn also assumes that there will only be a few cases in which single travelers will book adjacent seats.
“In these cases, our train attendants help to find alternative seats and to distribute the passengers so well on the train.”, Said a DB spokesman to BILD.
Germany: Restrictions extended and tightened. Holiday exceptions
For families with, for example, four passengers, extra areas are offered on each train so that they can sit next to each other – in 1st and 2nd class.
And: “Reservations that were made before the new regulation, of course, remain valid: A family who has already reserved seats next to each other is traveling together,” a DB spokesman told BILD.
So that there is no rail chaos at Christmas due to the higher number of trips, additional seats are to be created by using the new ICE 7000. In addition, the timetable is to be restarted. The aim is to implement the 20 million kilometers of seats that the Prime Ministers asked for at the Corona summit with Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU).
That means: an ICE with 800 seats travels 300 kilometres from Berlin to Hanover. 800 times 300 are 240,000 seat kilometres.
The changes are now coming, although the transport ministers of the federal states and Federal Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer (CSU) had spoken out against a general reduction in space in the network of the entire railway and in local public transport last week.
Source: Afronews.eu. Bild