Taxi Itzehoe: from Neumünster to the district town on the Stör

Where Itzehoe is, and why that matters for the journey

Itzehoe is the Kreisstadt of the Kreis Steinburg, which means it is the town where the administration of the district sits, in the south west corner of Schleswig-Holstein. It stands on the river Stör, a tidal river that runs down into the Elbe, and it has roughly 32,000 inhabitants. From the middle of the town you can be in Hamburg-Altona in about forty three minutes on the RE6 regional train, and the station is also served by long distance IC trains towards Westerland on the island of Sylt in one direction and towards Cologne, Karlsruhe and Berlin in the other. For a place of this size that is a good position to be in.

The catch is that all of it points north and south. The A23, the Autobahn (motorway) that runs from Hamburg up to Heide, passes Itzehoe on its northern side and gives the town three junctions of its own, Itzehoe-Nord, Itzehoe-Mitte and Itzehoe-Süd. The railway does the same thing, north and south along the coast. Neumünster is neither north nor south of Itzehoe. It is due east, forty kilometres away across open country, and there is no motorway and no railway that connects the two directly.

That single fact shapes everything else on this page. It is why a journey that looks short on a map turns into a change of trains at Elmshorn, why the last useful connection back in the evening is earlier than you would expect, and why so many of the people we drive to Itzehoe are not tourists at all but patients, court visitors, shift workers and families collecting somebody from hospital. Once you know that the two towns sit on different arms of the network, the rest of it makes sense.

If you are visiting the region rather than living in it, Itzehoe is also a useful base for a few things you may be heading to anyway. Wacken, where the metal festival takes place at the start of August, is about twenty two kilometres away and just under fifty from Neumünster. The B5 leads on west towards Wilster and Brunsbüttel, where the Kiel Canal meets the Elbe. And the old town centre, with the Klosterhof, the Stadtkirche St. Laurentii and the Wenzel-Hablik-Museum, is small enough to walk around in an afternoon once you have been dropped off in it.

Why the trip to Itzehoe is worth taking by taxi

There is not one single direct connection between Neumünster and Itzehoe. Anyone travelling by rail goes south first, as far as Elmshorn, changes there out of the Kiel line and into the Marschbahn, and then travels north again. By road it is forty kilometres straight west. In the timetable that same journey becomes a detour around the one point where the two lines happen to touch each other. On a map the towns look like neighbours. On the railway network they sit on different branches of the same tree.

The quickest combination is the RE7 as far as Elmshorn and then the RE6 on to Itzehoe, fifty eight minutes station to station, for example leaving at 8:26 and arriving at 9:24. Taking the RE70 and then the RB61 costs a good hour and five minutes. There are also ways round it, over Hohenwestedt with bus line 755 to the Viktoriastraße, or over Wrist with line 6180, and both of those sit at roughly an hour and ten. During the day that works out at about two usable connections an hour, and Sundays are no thinner than weekdays. This is the position at the beginning of September 2026 and it can change with every timetable revision.

Those figures are station to station, which is the part people forget. They say nothing about how you get to the Hauptbahnhof (the main station) in Neumünster with a suitcase, and nothing about the distance from Bahnhof Itzehoe to wherever you actually need to be. The station in Itzehoe stands on the Adenauerallee, and the hospital, the courts and the industrial estates are all a separate journey from there. Counted from front door to front door, the honest comparison with a taxi is usually much closer than the timetable suggests.

In the evening the picture tips over completely, and on the way back out of Itzehoe it tips furthest. Leave Itzehoe at 22:18 and you are in Neumünster at 0:05, which is nearly two hours for forty kilometres. After that there is a gap that runs deep into the night. Measured on the night going into a Saturday, the last one went at 0:15 and the next not until 3:11. There is a fare complication on top of that: since 1 January 2022 Itzehoe has belonged to the Hamburger Verkehrsverbund, the Hamburg transport association, and Neumünster does not, so the trip crosses a boundary between two ticketing zones. In our car none of that applies. You are picked up where you are and set down where you are going, at any hour.

Where we drive in Itzehoe

Itzehoe spreads out much further than the tight little centre suggests. Besides the Altstadt and the Neustadt, the old and the new town, it is made up of Ortsteile, which are the named parts of a German town that people actually use when they give directions, more often than a postcode. Here they are Edendorf, Sude, Sude-West, Wellenkamp, Tegelhörn, Klosterforst, Kratt and Pünstorf, along with smaller pockets such as Klosterholz, Neuhof, Schulenburg and Stormsteich. The first tower blocks the town ever built stand at the Marienburger Platz in Tegelhörn and on the Lindenstraße in Sude, and the Bronze Age burial mound known as the Galgenberg lies in Wellenkamp. Tell us the Ortsteil or the street when you book, and that is where we take you, not merely as far as the station.

The address we drive to most often is the Klinikum on the Robert-Koch-Straße. After that come the courts and the offices around them. Itzehoe holds the Landgericht (the regional court), the Amtsgericht (the local court) and the Sozialgericht (the social security court), together with the public prosecutor's office and the JVA, the Justizvollzugsanstalt or prison, plus the Kreisverwaltung, the district administration for the whole of Steinburg. A town of this size having all of that inside it is the reason so many of our passengers are coming for an appointment with a time printed on a letter.

We also set people down in front of the theater itzehoe at the ZOB, the Zentraler Omnibusbahnhof or central bus station, at the CineMotion cinema, at the Holstein-Center and at the edge of the pedestrian zone between the Dithmarscher Platz and the Lange Brücke. The Wenzel-Hablik-Museum, the Kreismuseum Prinzeßhof, the Klosterhof, the Stadtkirche St. Laurentii, the swimming centre, the sports hall at the Lehmwohld and the Stadthafen, the town harbour on the Stör, all turn up regularly as destinations on the booking sheet.

Schools work the same way. We drive to the Berufsbildungszentrum on the Juliengardeweg, to the Auguste-Viktoria-Schule on the Große Paaschburg, to the Kaiser-Karl-Schule behind the Sandberg and to the Sophie-Scholl-Gymnasium at the Lehmwohld. On the working side of things it is the Itzehoer Versicherungen, the Fraunhofer institute ISIT with the IZET technology centre next door, Flowserve SIHI and Trede und von Pein. And if you want the Tourist-Information in the Feldschmiede, or the Wochenmarkt, the open air weekly market that stands on the Malzmüllerwiesen on Thursdays and on the Marienburger Platz on Saturdays, just put that in the form and we will drop you at the right end of it.

The route from Neumünster to Itzehoe

The drive does not use the motorway, although plenty of people assume it must. Itzehoe has three Autobahn junctions of its own, but the A23 runs from Hamburg to Heide, north to south, and that is straight across our direction of travel rather than along it. From Neumünster, Itzehoe is a country road journey from beginning to end.

German road numbers carry a letter that tells you what you are on. An A is an Autobahn, the motorway network, with no general speed limit. A B is a Bundesstraße, a federal road, usually single carriageway, often with long straight stretches and a limit of a hundred outside built up areas. An L is a Landesstraße, a state road, narrower again. Everything in the description below is a B or an L, which is why the time on this route is fairly predictable in a way that motorway journeys around Hamburg are not.

We leave Neumünster heading west on the B430, cross over to the B206 by way of the L121, and come into town on the L119 and the Viktoriastraße. There is a second way, along the B430 and then the B77. To Bahnhof Itzehoe it is just under forty kilometres and around forty four minutes. To the Klinikum on the Robert-Koch-Straße it is one kilometre more, but the traffic inside the town pushes that closer to fifty.

On the way you cross the Kreis Steinburg, passing Hohenlockstedt and Kellinghusen, through village stretches with a limit of fifty and, in summer, occasionally behind a tractor for a kilometre or two. Inside Itzehoe itself several main roads come together: the B5 out west towards Wilster and Brunsbüttel, the B77 north towards Rendsburg and Schleswig, and the B206 east over Bad Segeberg. Coming the other way, out of Itzehoe back to Neumünster, you should allow exactly the same amount of time. The route is the same in both directions and so are the villages you pass through.

When we drive to Itzehoe most often

The commonest reason by a long way is the Klinikum Itzehoe. It is the main referral hospital for the whole west coast region, treats around 28,700 inpatients and just under 48,000 outpatients a year, and with more than 2,900 staff it is the largest employer in the Kreis Steinburg. Appointments, operations, discharge after a stay and the visits in between almost never fall at a time that fits the chain of connections through Elmshorn. A discharge in particular tends to be confirmed a couple of hours in advance, which no train timetable can be planned around.

Then there are the court dates. With the Landgericht, the Amtsgericht and the Sozialgericht all sitting in Itzehoe, along with the prosecutor's office and the prison, a great many people from the surrounding districts have to be in a particular room at a particular minute. A summons names a time, and that time takes no notice of when the trains happen to run.

Commuters make up the third group. They travel to the Itzehoer Versicherungen, to the Fraunhofer ISIT, into the IZET or out to the industrial estates on the edge of town, and very often on early or late shifts that begin before the first workable train and end after the last one. Students and apprentices go to the Berufsbildungszentrum Steinburg, which with more than 3,400 people learning there is the largest school in the town.

In summer the place fills up. The Itzehoer Herbstmarkt, which despite a name that means autumn fair is held in August, takes over the Malzmüllerwiesen, in 2026 from the 13th to the 17th of August, with around seventy showmen and their rides. On the first weekend of August the Wacken festival, a good twenty two kilometres away, fills the entire Kreis Steinburg, and for a lot of people arriving Itzehoe is the nearest town with a railway station. In June there is the Itzehoer Woche with the wine festival around the market square and the flea market down the Breite Straße, and in May the Störlauf road race, which starts and finishes on the Große Paaschburg.

Krankenfahrten to the Klinikum Itzehoe and to dialysis

The Klinikum at Robert-Koch-Straße 2 is not one destination but a whole row of addresses under a single roof. Outpatient chemotherapy, haemato-oncology and psycho-oncology run in the Onkologisch-therapeutisches Kompetenzzentrum, the oncology treatment centre known locally as the OTK, inside the building. For radiotherapy the hospital works with practices outside the town, among them Elmshorn and Rendsburg, so one course of treatment can consist of appointments in two different places. Alongside that there is a perinatal centre of the highest care level, a Sozialpädiatrisches Zentrum (a paediatric development and disability centre) attached to the children's clinic, departments for geriatrics and palliative medicine, an EndoProthetikZentrum for joint replacement, a spinal centre and the Zentrale Notaufnahme, the emergency department. The Seniorenzentrum Olendeel and several Medizinische Versorgungszentren, outpatient clinics run by the hospital, belong to the same organisation, one of them at the Prinzesshofpark. So tell us the clinic, the ward or the name of the centre and not just the street, and we will stop at the right entrance rather than at the main gate.

The second large reason is dialysis. The practice for kidney and blood pressure disorders serving the Kreis Steinburg is not in the centre of town at all. It sits on the Lise-Meitner-Straße in the north, among light industry and car dealerships, reached from the Itzehoe-Nord junction. Dialysis runs there on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 7 in the morning until 6 in the evening, followed by a Limited Care shift until midnight, and on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays from 7 until 1, as things stood at the start of September 2026. Both ends of that plan sit badly against the timetable. Anyone due on the first shift has to be there before the first workable connection exists, and anyone on the late shift comes out at a time when almost nothing runs between Itzehoe and Neumünster. Dialysis is also not one journey. It is three times a week, there and back, for months on end.

When a health insurer pays for the journey, the fixed price on this page does not apply, and it is worth being clear about what that means. This is a feature of the German statutory health insurance system, so it applies if you are insured in that system. A private travel insurance policy from another country is a different thing and works differently. What we need in advance is a Verordnung einer Krankenbeförderung, the doctor's prescription for patient transport, with the box for a taxi ticked on it. For outpatient journeys the insurer normally has to approve it beforehand. For dialysis and for cancer treatment that approval is usually a formality, because the whole point is a long series of journeys over a long period. A Pflegegrad, which is an assessed level of care need, or one of the Merkzeichen codes on a German severe disability pass can shorten the route to that approval. What applies in your case is something only your insurer can tell you. Once the prescription exists we settle directly with the insurer and all that is left for you is the statutory co-payment. We carry people seated, and a walking frame or a wheelchair comes along. A stretcher journey, or one that needs medical supervision on board, is a different service called Krankentransport and does not belong in a taxi.

Not every trip to the Klinikum is a prescribed medical journey. Visiting somebody, taking a child to an appointment at the Sozialpädiatrisches Zentrum, or going to the ASB hospice St. Klemens on the Albert-Schweitzer-Ring is an ordinary ride at the fixed price. For those it is worth booking the return leg at the same time, because after an evening visit you are standing in Itzehoe facing exactly the same thin timetable as everybody else, and the walk from the hospital to the station is not one you want to make in the dark with a tired child.

Company journeys to the Itzehoe business parks

Itzehoe has a little over 32,000 inhabitants and just under 20,000 jobs that carry social insurance, which is the German measure for regular employment. The town therefore pulls people in from outside every working day, and some of them come from the east, from the Neumünster area. The difficulty is that the work is rarely where the train stops. The station is on the Adenauerallee, and the large sites are in the north: the Innovationsraum Itzehoe-Nord at the motorway junction, with the Fraunhofer institute ISIT and the IZET on the Fraunhoferstraße, plus the Lise-Meitner-Straße, the Gewerbegebiet Wellenkamp and the newer Dwerweg-Nord area in Edendorf, where the town still has plots to allocate. The A23 makes all of those addresses easy for anyone coming from Hamburg or up from the coast. From Neumünster it does not help at all, because there is no motorway in that direction, and from the station the north of the town is a separate journey again.

The people we set down there work in very different trades. Vishay Siliconix manufactures power semiconductors in Itzehoe and has extended the site with a plant for 300 millimetre wafers, with further jobs announced alongside it. Sander Logistics moves palletised freight in the CargoLine network, PANO-Verschluß makes the metal lids for preserving jars, ISR recycles scrap metal, and May und Olde and Eskildsen are two of the largest car dealership groups in the region. On top of that there are appointments with officials: the Rathaus, the town hall on the Reichenstraße, the district administration, and the Wirtschaftsförderung, the economic development office where questions about setting up a business and about land come together.

For companies we mainly drive three things. First the journey to a shift that starts before, or ends after, the first and last workable connection through Elmshorn. Second the collection of visitors and customers, usually from Bahnhof Itzehoe or from Flughafen Hamburg, with the run on to the company address afterwards. Third the engineer or technician with tools and spare parts, for which a Großraumtaxi, a van sized taxi with proper load space, is often more sensible than a saloon car. Give us the firm and the gate or the entrance you need, and we will stop there rather than on the main road. On the bigger works sites in the north that is a difference of several hundred metres and, in the rain at six in the morning, it matters.

Anyone who needs journeys like this regularly puts them on a company account. Then nobody pays cash in the car, the journeys collect on a single invoice, and each one appears on it with its date and its route, which keeps an expenses claim easy to follow afterwards. Repeating trips, say every Tuesday at the same time to Itzehoe-Nord, are set up once and we only get in touch if something changes. And because the price for the route is fixed at the moment of booking, the accounts department knows in advance what it is dealing with, even on a day when the B206 is running slowly.

A fixed price instead of the Taxameter

German taxi law works with a Pflichtfahrgebiet, the compulsory service area around a town, and inside that area the fare is set by the local authority and charged on a calibrated meter called the Taxameter. Nobody may agree a different price, upwards or downwards. The Pflichtfahrgebiet of Neumünster ends at the city boundary and reaches beyond it only as far as Tasdorf, Bönebüttel, Padenstedt, Ehndorf, Wasbek, Großharrie, Rendswühren and Schillsdorf. Itzehoe is forty kilometres past that, in a different Kreis, and so it is clearly outside. That is exactly why we are allowed to agree a price with you in advance for this journey rather than run the meter.

The price stands on your screen before you confirm, and it stays the same whether the B206 is clear or whether you spend ten minutes behind a combine harvester near Hohenlockstedt. A diversion in the town traffic in Itzehoe, or at the bridges over the Stör, changes nothing about it either. Up to four passengers travel in a saloon car, from five upwards a Großraumtaxi is required, and the booking form works out the right vehicle for the Itzehoe route as you fill it in. Inside Neumünster the official tariff on the calibrated meter still applies, and there nobody is permitted to agree a price of their own.

Frequently asked questions

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