Germany

Germany covers about 357,600 square kilometres between the North Sea and the Baltic in the north and the Alps in the south, and holds some 83.6 million people — the largest population in the European Union. It borders nine countries: Denmark to the north, Poland and Czechia to the east, Austria and Switzerland to the south, and France, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands to the west. Berlin is the capital, Frankfurt the financial centre and the Ruhr the largest built-up area. Sixteen federal states divide the country, and that federal structure reaches all the way into the railway.

The main network runs to roughly 33,400 route kilometres, about 20,500 of them electrified, and carries around 2.9 billion passenger journeys a year. What surprises visitors is how plural it is: more than 450 railway undertakings are registered, and regional services are not run centrally at all but specified and put out to tender by the individual states — which is why the train across one state border may be a different colour and a different company. A single monthly ticket, the Deutschlandticket at €63, covers every regional train, bus, tram and S-Bahn in the country, which makes improvised travel unusually cheap.