Taxi to Bad Segeberg: from Neumünster to the Kalkberg and the clinics

Where Bad Segeberg is and what is there

Bad Segeberg is a small town in Schleswig-Holstein, the German state that sits between the North Sea and the Baltic on the way up to Denmark. It lies a good fifty kilometres north of Hamburg, roughly forty five kilometres south of Kiel, and a little over thirty kilometres east of Neumünster, which is where we are based. It is the seat of the Kreis Segeberg, the district authority for this corner of the state, which is why the Kreishaus, the local court and several state level medical bodies are here rather than in a larger city.

The word Bad in front of a German place name is not decoration. It means the town holds an official recognition as a spa town, and that is why there is a Kurpark, a spa park on the slope above the old centre, with a cluster of clinics around it. The clinics have long outgrown anything a spa season would need and are now the largest employer in the town.

What visitors come to look at is the Kalkberg, the pale hill standing in the middle of town. Inside it is the Kalkberghöhle, a cave you can walk through, and beside it Noctalis, a visitor centre built around the bat colony that spends the winter in that cave. Both open their season on the first of April and close it at the end of September. On the far side of the hill, cut into an old quarry, is the Freilichttheater am Kalkberg, an open air arena with a stand for several thousand people.

For someone arriving from abroad the practical picture is simple. The old town is small and easy to walk. The clinics are not in the old town, the residential Ortsteile are not either, and the station is a walk from all of it. Ortsteil is the German word for a named quarter that belongs to a town but has its own name, its own shops and often its own bus stop, and Bad Segeberg has a fair number of them. That gap between the station and everything else is the reason most of our trips to Bad Segeberg exist in the first place.

Why the trip to Bad Segeberg is worth taking by taxi

Between Neumünster and Bad Segeberg there is exactly one through public connection, and that is the RB82 operated by nordbahn on the single track line running towards Bad Oldesloe. It stops on the way at Neumünster Süd, Rickling, Wahlstedt and Fahrenkrug, and it needs 24 minutes to Bad Segeberg. The catch is the frequency. One train per hour, not one every half hour, not one every quarter of an hour. Miss it and you wait a full hour on the platform with nothing else coming. On working days it leaves Neumünster at minute 37 of the hour and comes back out of Bad Segeberg at minute 02. Those are the times in the annual timetable, so please check them again on the day you travel.

It gets tight at the edges of the day. On Sundays and public holidays the service starts late: the first train does not leave Neumünster until around 06:27, and the first one back out of Bad Segeberg goes shortly after seven in the morning. If you have a Sunday shift at the clinic or you need to be at a hospital bedside, the train simply does not get you there. On top of that, part of the early and late journeys on working days are listed in the timetable as Schienenersatzverkehr, which means a bus is put on instead of the train and the same trip takes around 50 minutes rather than 24.

Even catching the train does not put you at your destination. When passenger services on this line resumed in 2002 the station at Bad Segeberg was rebuilt a few hundred metres further north, in the middle of an industrial estate. From the platform you walk along Bahnhofstraße, past the Kleiner See and the Kleine Seestraße, before you reach the old town and the Kalkberg. With a suitcase, with a rollator, or with discharge papers still warm in your hand, that is the leg of the journey no timetable shows you. We drive the whole thing in one piece instead, from your front door in Neumünster to the front door in Bad Segeberg.

Where in Bad Segeberg we take people

The old town between Marktplatz, Kirchstraße and Lübecker Straße is what people who do not know the place mean when they say Bad Segeberg. The Rathaus, the town hall, stands on Lübecker Straße, next to it the museum in the Alt-Segeberger Bürgerhaus, a timber townhouse from 1541, then the Marienkirche and the path up to the Kalkberg with the cave and Noctalis. On Wednesday and Saturday the Wochenmarkt, the open air weekly market, fills the Marktplatz and part of Kirchstraße with around forty stalls. On those mornings the streets are barriered off and we set you down where the barrier ends, usually at Seminarweg or Am kleinen See, which is a short flat walk from the stalls.

The second big target area is the spa quarter, and it is really four separate addresses. Am Kurpark 1 is the heart and vascular centre of the Segeberger Kliniken. Krankenhausstraße 2 is the general hospital. Hamdorfer Weg 3 is the neurological centre. Klosterkamp 15 is the clinic for psychosomatic medicine and psychotherapy. Tell us at the time of booking which of the four you need. They all carry the name of the same town, but they are not next to one another, and anyone who ends up outside the wrong entrance walks the rest with a bag in hand.

People live somewhere else entirely. There is the Südstadt around the Südstadt-Zentrum, between Fliederweg, Weißdornstraße and Heinrich-der-Löwe-Ring. There is Christiansfelde by the shopping centre, with Julius-Leber-Straße and Schlangenredder. There is the Burgfeld on Falkenburger Straße, with the Schule am Burgfeld, the Franz-Claudius-Schule and the Traveschule. There is Klein Niendorf south of the Habichtshorst, and the ring streets in the north of the town, Theodor-Heuss-Ring, Kurt-Schumacher-Ring and Riihimäkistraße, which is named after Riihimäki in Finland, the twin town. Out at the Ihlsee are the Strandbad, a lake bathing beach with changing huts, and the Ihlwaldfriedhof, the cemetery in the woods. Neither of those is anything like a walk from the station.

Then there are the addresses that people from Neumünster travel to on purpose. The Kreishaus of the Kreis Segeberg at Hamburger Straße 30, the local court, the Ärztekammer Schleswig-Holstein and the Kassenärztliche Vereinigung on Bismarckallee, which are the state medical association and the body that organises doctors working for the statutory health insurers. Add the Berufsbildungszentrum, the vocational college on Theodor-Storm-Straße, the Dahlmannschule am Markt, and Möbel Kraft, a furniture store that has been in the town since 1893 and is big enough to have two bus stops of its own. Just tell us the street name and we take you there and not to the station.

The route from Neumünster to Bad Segeberg

The route is short and fairly straight. We take the B 205, which begins in Neumünster at the A 7 motorway and runs 25 kilometres east. It is the classic east to west link between the two towns and it is everyday work for us rather than a special trip. North of Bad Segeberg the B 205 meets the A 21, from where it is a short run south and then in on the B 206. Town centre to town centre that comes to just under 32 kilometres and about half an hour, with a few minutes more depending on the time of day.

Along the road and in the ring around it lie the villages that belong to this journey: Schackendorf, Klein Gladebrügge and Fahrenkrug right at the edge of the route, then Negernbötel, Groß Rönnau, Klein Rönnau, Stipsdorf, Schieren, Weede and Högersdorf around the town. If you live in one of them and need to get to Bad Segeberg or to Neumünster, we collect you there exactly as we would in town.

There is a second way round, over the B 430 and the A 21, which is about four kilometres longer. We use it when the B 205 is being resurfaced or an accident has closed it. In Bad Segeberg itself the B 206 towards Lübeck, the B 432 and the A 21 all cross, and the A 20 motorway is meant to be extended this far in the coming years. Until that happens the B 205 and the A 21 are the two roads that matter for this trip.

When we drive to Bad Segeberg most often

Between the end of June and the beginning of September much of the town revolves around the open air theatre at the Kalkberg. A word of background, because this is the part visitors from abroad usually have not heard of. Karl May was a German novelist who wrote adventure stories set in an American West he had never seen, and his best known characters are Winnetou, an Apache chief, and Old Shatterhand, the German who becomes his blood brother. Generations of German children grew up on those books. Bad Segeberg has staged one of the stories in the quarry arena every summer since 1952, and the Karl-May-Spiele are now the biggest thing in the town calendar.

For 2026 the production is Im Tal des Todes, In the Valley of Death, running from 27 June to 6 September, with Alexander Klaws as Winnetou and Bastian Semm as Old Shatterhand. In 2024 the season drew 445,298 visitors, and every year since 2019 the figure has been above 400,000. The stand holds 7,700 people and it has no roof, so the show goes ahead in the rain, and when it ends everybody wants to leave at the same moment.

For the rest of the year the Segeberger Kliniken set the rhythm. With over 1,850 staff they are the largest employer in the town. The heart and vascular centre carries out something like 10,000 cardiac catheter examinations and stent implantations a year, and the neurological centre on Hamdorfer Weg is one of the largest rehabilitation clinics of its kind in Germany. Appointments there are often first thing in the morning, which is exactly the hour when the RB82 is either not running yet or running as a replacement bus.

On top of that come the market days on Wednesday and Saturday, the shows on the Landesturnierplatz Schleswig-Holstein on Eutiner Straße, which is the regional equestrian showground, and the events on the Rennkoppel: the Jahrmarkt funfair, the Kindervogelschießen, an old northern German children's shooting festival held every summer, and the Laternenumzug, the autumn lantern parade. The Kalkberghöhle and Noctalis run their visitor season from the first of April to the end of September. Mornings and afternoons we carry commuters who work at the Kreishaus, at the Berufsbildungszentrum, at the Imkerschule, the beekeeping school, or at Möbel Kraft, and in the evenings people who have been to a Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival concert in the Marienkirche.

Krankenfahrten to the four houses of the Segeberger Kliniken

A Krankenfahrt is a medical journey in an ordinary taxi for a patient who can sit up and does not need care on the way. In Germany a doctor prescribes it, and depending on the treatment the statutory health insurer pays for it. It is not an ambulance and there is no medical crew on board, which is exactly why it works as a normal booked trip.

Many appointments in Bad Segeberg sit in very narrow windows. The chemotherapy outpatient clinic on Krankenhausstraße admits patients on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday from eight in the morning. The breast clinic runs on Wednesday and Friday from half past eight. The outpatient clinic for orthopaedics and trauma surgery exists only on Monday morning. The vascular surgery clinic sits once a week, on Thursday, with roughly three months between the referral and the appointment. Miss one of those and you do not get a replacement the next day, you wait for the next free slot. So we plan backwards. You give us the time you have to check in, we count back the driving time over the B 205 and add a buffer, and we are outside your door in Neumünster that much earlier.

Which of the houses you mean decides everything, because the clinics are spread across the town. Even the town bus network treats them as separate destinations. The stops Herzzentrum and Krankenhausstraße are on line 7751, the neurological centre is on line 7752, and the Klosterkamp is reached another way again. Anyone who drives themselves usually ends up on the Backofenwiese, the paid car park below the site, because there are very few short stay spaces on the clinic grounds themselves. Only the neurological centre on Hamdorfer Weg has room enough. In a taxi the search for a space disappears, for you and for whoever comes with you, and you get out at the entrance where you are expected.

For an outpatient appointment you are asked to bring your medication plan, your allergy passport, all previous findings and your Gesundheitskarte, the chip card that identifies you to the German statutory health insurance system. With that folder, plus a bag and perhaps a rollator, the walk from the station through the industrial estate and along Bahnhofstraße is no stroll. We carry you seated, a rollator or a folding wheelchair goes in the boot, and the driver helps you in and out. Anyone who has to be moved lying down or who needs supervision on the way belongs in a Krankentransportwagen, a staffed patient transport vehicle. Your doctor decides that on the prescription, we do not.

For a series of appointments, a course of chemotherapy or the sessions at the psychosomatic day clinic, you book once instead of booking every time, and where it can be arranged we send the same driver. If your doctor has prescribed a Krankenbeförderung on the form known as Muster 4, the health insurer can cover the cost, and depending on the treatment it has to approve the journey in advance. Settle that with the practice, with the admissions desk or with the social service at the clinics before the first trip. If you are insured outside Germany none of that applies to you: you pay for the ride and we give you a receipt to hand to your own insurer. When you are discharged, the house and the time are all we need. We wait at the entrance and bring you, bag and paperwork included, right into the flat.

Evening and night trips back out of Bad Segeberg

The town bus service in Bad Segeberg finishes early. Lines 7751, 7752 and 7753, run by Autokraft, go every half hour on working days, but the last departures leave shortly before eight in the evening: 19:32 from the Ihlwaldfriedhof, 19:35 from the Strandbad Ihlsee and 19:52 from the ZOB into the Südstadt. In plain terms that last one is twenty to eight at night, and a few minutes after eight the town is done. On Saturdays the town service starts about two hours later than on working days. On Sundays it runs only once an hour between half past nine in the morning and half past seven in the evening, and part of those journeys go only as an Anruf-Sammel-Taxi, a shared taxi that runs on the bus timetable but has to be ordered at least half an hour before it departs. ZOB stands for Zentraler Omnibusbahnhof and simply means the central bus station.

After that the station still has trains, but that is all it has. Christiansfelde, the Gustav-Böhm-Siedlung, the Südstadt, Klein Niendorf and the Ihlsee are then walks straight across town from the ZOB, in winter in the dark and uphill towards the Burgfeld. This is the point at which people phone us: after a late shift, after a concert in the Marienkirche, after a club evening, or after a long day of competition on Eutiner Straße.

The RB82 holds out longer than the bus does. Under the annual timetable that runs until the middle of December 2026, the last train leaves Bad Segeberg shortly after one in the morning and reaches Neumünster around 25 minutes later. In the other direction the last connection leaves Neumünster shortly before midnight and arrives after it. That only helps you between the two stations, though. If you step off a train in Neumünster after midnight, or you are standing on the platform in Bad Segeberg with the whole town still between you and your bed, it does not get you home.

We drive the B 205 at two in the morning as well, and at that hour it is empty, so the trip comes in at the lower end of that half hour. For shift work at the clinics, for evening events, and for anything that ends after the last bus, the sensible thing is to agree the return trip beforehand with a time and a meeting point. Our office is staffed at night too, so calling at short notice also works. The times given here are the ones in the timetable that is valid now and they can change, so check them again on the day you travel.

A fixed price instead of the Taxameter

Inside Neumünster we are not allowed to set our own price. The city's official tariff applies there, and the calibrated Taxameter, the sealed meter in the car, works the fare out as you go. That tariff is binding within the Pflichtfahrgebiet, the compulsory service area, which covers the city itself and journeys to and from Tasdorf, Bönebüttel, Padenstedt, Ehndorf, Wasbek, Großharrie, Rendswühren and Schillsdorf. Bad Segeberg is not on that list. It belongs to the Kreis Segeberg and therefore lies outside the area. That is precisely why we are allowed to agree a price for this journey in advance, and it is what we do.

The price for Bad Segeberg is shown on this page and appears once more in the booking form before you confirm. It does not move during the trip, not even when the B 205 is being dug up or a closure sends us round over the A 21. We do not charge you for the drive to your address in Neumünster. You pay cash or by card in the car, or online beforehand, and as long as no driver is yet on the way to you, cancelling costs nothing.

Included in the fixed fare

• A price fixed in advance for the route from Neumünster to Bad Segeberg
• Right to the door, in the Südstadt, in Christiansfelde or at the Ihlsee
• Straight to the correct house of the Segeberger Kliniken
• Return from the Kalkberg agreed beforehand with a time and a meeting point
• Early on Sunday too, when the RB82 is not yet running
• Großraumtaxi, a van seating up to eight people, on request

Frequently asked questions

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