After a full day of exploring the wonderful city of Hamburg which included the obligatory visit to Miniatur Wunderland as well as plenty of other sights, it was time to make my way back to Hildesheim. For this return journey, I’d be travelling on a Deutsche Bahn (DB) ICE service from Hamburg Hauptbahnhof (Hbf) to Hanover Hbf where I’d change on to the Hanover S-bahn network to get back to Hildesheim. And so, with about an hour before the train departed I was sat nursing a coffee in the McDonalds overlooking the platforms at Hamburg Hbf as although DB do have a lounge for first class passengers, access isn’t allowed for those travelling on cheaper tickets.

With just a few days left in Germany before we began our journey home, I had decided to have a solo day trip whilst the rest of the group had decided to visit the town of Wolfenbüttel. With our base in Hildesheim being less than a couple of hours by train from one of my favourite cities, it felt only right that I headed there for the day and so I set off from Hildesheim to begin my journey to Hamburg. Unfortunately, whilst Hildesheim is on the east-west Berlin to Hannover high-speed line, services to Hamburg generally run along the north-south lune and so I would have to change trains at Hannover.

Our arrival into Berlin Haupbahnhof (Hbf) had been by way of a slightly delayed DB Intercity service which had dropped us off in the depths of the station’s low-level platforms. For the second leg of the journey, we’d be travelling on a DB Intercity Express (ICE) service from Berlin to Hildesheim, the town in Lower Saxony that would be our base for the second half of our holiday. So, with around 45 minutes until our next train was scheduled to depart we made our way upstairs to the entry level of the five-tier station ready to get on with the second part of our travel day.

Midway through our holiday in Germany, having spent a week based in Dresden and exploring both this fabulous city and some of the surrounding area, it was time to move to the location that would be our base for the second half of the holiday. Getting from Saxony to Lower Saxony would require us to catch two trains, the first of which would take us from Dresden to the German capital, Berlin. And so, around 40 minutes before our train departed, we arrived at Dresden Haupbahnhof for the last time this trip ready to catch the DB Intercity service towards Berlin.

Having had a great day exploring the city of Prague, it was time to head back to our base in Dresden and so we were back at Praha Hlavní Nádraží (Prague Main Station) ready to catch a train back across the border. As with the journey to Prague, this service would be operated by České dráhy (Czech Railways) as a EuroCity service, however instead of running to Berlin like many of the Prague to Dresden services do, this one would instead run to Zurich overnight as the ‘Canopus’ sleeper train. Whilst the journey overnight to Zurich takes over 14.5 hours, our journey to Dresden would take around two and a half hours, with us due to arrive at 2059.

With our base in Dresden providing good connections across Saxony and into Czechia, we had decided to have a daytrip to another city partway through our stay. As such, on our third full day in Dresden, rather than jump on a tram from the Haupbahnhof into the city centre, we headed up to the high level through platforms ready to jump on a service to Prague. This journey would be with České dráhy on one of their Eurocity ‘Berliner’ services which, as the name suggests connects the Czech and German capitals via Dresden.