Taxi Kellinghusen: from Neumünster over Padenstedt to the Stör

Where Kellinghusen is, and what makes the last part awkward

Kellinghusen is a small town in Schleswig-Holstein, the German state that sits between the North Sea and the Baltic. It stands on the river Stör, around twenty seven kilometres west of Neumünster, and it belongs to the Kreis Steinburg, a rural district roughly comparable to a county. Neumünster, where our cars are based, is in the neighbouring district, so the drive crosses a district boundary about two thirds of the way along. That boundary sounds like paperwork, but it is the reason we are allowed to quote you a fixed price at all, and we come back to it at the bottom of this page.

For orientation. Hamburg lies to the south, and Kellinghusen still counts as part of the Metropolregion Hamburg, the planning region drawn around the city. Hamburg Airport is roughly fifty seven kilometres away by road. The nearest motorway access points are about twenty kilometres out in either direction, the A23 near Itzehoe to the west and the A7 near Bad Bramstedt to the east. The nearest railway stations are Wrist, Itzehoe and Bad Bramstedt, because Kellinghusen itself has none. If you take only one fact from this page, take that one.

The centre is laid out around two squares, the Oberer Marktplatz and the Unterer Marktplatz, the upper and the lower market square, with the old town hall between them and the church of St. Cyriacus on the hill above, a rise the locals call the Lieth. The Stör runs along the southern edge of the town and is still under tidal influence this far inland, which is unusual for a river this far from the coast and which matters more often than you would think.

Kellinghusen has no station, and that is the whole point

Passenger trains last called here on 27 September 1975, on the line that ran from Wrist to Itzehoe. Goods trains kept going to Wrist until May 1995, after which the line was closed and taken up over most of its length. The station building has gone and a stretch of the old trackbed is now a cycle path. Reopening the section between Wrist and Kellinghusen has been talked about since the end of 2011 and the plans reached the drawing board in 2023, but to this day nothing runs on it.

So if you are coming from Neumünster without a car, you need a train and a bus together, and at least one change. The connection that works best goes over Wrist. The RE70, the regional express on that line, takes thirteen to fourteen minutes to reach it, then there is a short walk from the platform across to the bus bay, and bus line 6180 covers the last stretch to the stop called Amtsverwaltung, the offices of the local administration, in seven to eight minutes. When the connection lines up you are in Kellinghusen in a good twenty five minutes, barely slower than by car.

When it does not line up, and that is the more common case, you stand in Wrist for close to an hour, because the bus onwards from there runs only about once an hour. A trip of under half an hour becomes one hour and twenty minutes. These times are a snapshot from the September 2026 timetable, so treat them as an order of magnitude and not as a promise.

In a taxi the change in Wrist disappears, and the question of whether the connection fits never arises. That is the plain reason most of our passengers on this route book with us. It applies to somebody with a suitcase and a flight to catch just as much as to somebody coming home from hospital with a bag of medication and no wish to stand on a platform.

Where in Kellinghusen we actually drive

Kellinghusen is more than the strip between the two market squares. Nine Ortsteile belong to the town, outlying villages and hamlets that are legally part of the municipality but sit a few kilometres out along country roads: Feldhusen, Grönhude, Krim, Marienhof, Mühlenbek, Overndorf, Rensing, Schäferkathe and Vorbrügge. If you want Rensing or Schäferkathe and you type only Kellinghusen into the booking form, the car stops at the administration building in the centre and you still have the rest of the way in front of you. Put the street in as well and we stop at the right door.

Regular destinations in the town itself are the Amtsverwaltung in the Hauptstraße, which also houses the Standesamt, the registry office where marriages are held, and the Historisches Rathaus on the market square, the old town hall, with the ceramics museum and the Tourist-Info inside it. Then there is the Bürgerhaus, the community building that holds the town library and the Volkshochschule, the adult education centre that runs evening courses. The schools come up often too: the Grundschule, the primary school, in the Otto-Ralfs-Straße, and the Gemeinschaftsschule, the secondary school, on the Danziger Straße, with around eleven hundred children and young people between them.

We drive to the doctors here a lot: to the Lindenstraße, the Lornsenstraße, the Lehmbergstraße and the Hauptstraße, and to the two pharmacies, the Greif-Apotheke and the Stör-Apotheke, just as often. For shopping, EDEKA, Aldi and Lidl sit close together on the street An der Stör, Netto is in the Lindenstraße, and the hagebaucentrum Dethlefsen and Hinst Eisenwaren, the ironmonger, are a little further out towards the edge of town.

We drive into the Neuer Kamp and Kleiner Kamp business estates on the bypass, to the Störhafen at the end of the canoe route, to the Freibad, the open air swimming pool, in the Jacob-Fleischer-Straße, to the state training centre of the Schützengilde von 1762, the shooting guild that has existed since that year, in the Schützenstraße, and to the Klappstuhlkultur in the Brauerstraße, where volunteers run a cinema in an old builders merchant hall because Kellinghusen has no picture house of its own. The Residenz an der Lieth and the Pflegewohnanlage am Rosengarten, both residential care homes, and the Taba Hotel turn up in our bookings week after week. And if you are going to the St. Cyriacus church up on the Lieth, we set you down at the top and not below at the market, because that hill is no gentle stroll with a walking frame.

The road from Neumünster to Kellinghusen

We drive across country, without touching the motorway. Out of Neumünster it goes along the Wasbeker Straße and through Ehndorf to Padenstedt, then on the K 12 to Willenscharen, over the L 122 Am Wallberg and the Rensinger Chaussee onto the L 123, and finally along the Brauerstraße and the L 115 An der Stör into the town. That is around twenty seven kilometres, and with a clear road we need about half an hour for it. From the FEK, the hospital in the Friesenstraße in Neumünster, we take the Wittorfer Straße and come out through Padenstedt at roughly twenty six kilometres.

The alternative over the A7, leaving at the Bad Bramstedt exit and then heading west on the B 206, is a good thirty four kilometres. It only pays off when there are roadworks on the country road. Since the bypass was built in 1978 the B 206 runs past the centre instead of through it, westwards towards Itzehoe and eastwards towards Bad Bramstedt and Bad Segeberg.

On the way you go through Padenstedt and Willenscharen, cross the Stör at Grönhude and run for a long while alongside fields and Knicks, the earth banks topped with hedge that divide the fields all over this part of Schleswig-Holstein and that are protected by law. Those are the stretches where we ease off in icy weather, and in late summer they are where the tractors and harvest trailers are, moving at walking pace with a queue behind them. Seen from Kellinghusen, the nearest motorway access points are each about twenty kilometres away, the A23 near Itzehoe and the A7 near Bad Bramstedt.

When we drive to Kellinghusen most often

Kellinghusen has no hospital, and the town itself points at two in the surrounding area: the Klinikum Itzehoe in the Robert-Koch-Straße and the Klinikum Bad Bramstedt. Both are around sixteen kilometres away and both are reached on the B 206, only in opposite directions, so the choice of hospital decides which way you leave town. In the other direction, patients from the Amt Kellinghusen come to us at the FEK in Neumünster. Being discharged after an operation does not arrange itself around the timetable of bus line 6180, and that is the most common single reason we are called out here.

Then there are the evenings. The last quick connection from Neumünster leaves shortly before nine. Set off later than that and you will still arrive, but you will sit in Wrist waiting for a bus and reach Kellinghusen at around eleven. Going the other way it is much the same story: the last bus towards Wrist leaves late in the evening and the train onwards goes about an hour after it, so you land in Neumünster shortly after midnight. On Sundays line 6180 runs only about every two hours, and line 6191 to Hohenwestedt becomes a Rufbus at the weekend, a bus that only turns up if you telephone in advance to order it.

The Töpfermarkt, the pottery market, fills both market squares. In 2026 it is being held for the thirty eighth time, with sixty eight potters. Ceramics are the trade this town is known for, which is also why the historic town hall houses a ceramics museum rather than a local history collection. On Wednesday mornings there is a weekly market on the Unterer Marktplatz, the smaller and lower of the two squares.

In summer we drive to the open air pool by the Stadtpark, to canoeists who have paddled down from Arpsdorf by way of Willenscharen to the Störhafen, and to cyclists on the Mönchsweg, the long distance cycle route that crosses Schleswig-Holstein, for whom Kellinghusen is the first overnight stop after Glückstadt. And on working days people commute between Neumünster and the firms on the Neuer Kamp, for whom at six in the morning there is simply no bus at all.

The doctor, dialysis and follow-up care

For a town of this size Kellinghusen is decently covered. The town keeps its own directory of practices, and it lists general practitioners in the Hauptstraße, the Lindenstraße and the Lornsenstraße, gynaecology and ear, nose and throat medicine in the Hauptstraße, ophthalmology in the Lehmbergstraße, internal medicine in the Lornsenstraße, orthopaedics Am Wasserwerk, psychotherapy in the Friedrichstraße, osteopathy in the Hauptstraße, and five dental practices spread over Am Markt, An der Stör, the Hauptstraße, the Lindenstraße and the Lornsenstraße. Hardly anybody needs a taxi for appointments like those. You walk, you cycle, or the Bürgerbus drops you off in the town.

What is interesting for us is what the same overview leaves out. There is no hospital in it. There is no dialysis centre in it either, and no radiology, no radiotherapy and no oncology day clinic anywhere in the town. Under the heading for hospitals and clinics, the town names exactly two addresses, and both of them are somewhere else.

The dialysis unit for the Kreis Steinburg is in the Lise-Meitner-Straße in Itzehoe. Treatment runs there on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from early in the morning until well into the night, and on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays in the morning only. Somebody who has to travel there and back three times a week ends up making more than three hundred separate journeys in a year, and not one of them lays neatly over a bus timetable. A treatment ends when it ends, and the late shift ends at an hour when nothing has been running between Itzehoe and Kellinghusen for a long time.

For journeys of that kind there is a prescription for patient transport, the Muster 4. Your doctor issues it, and for a course of treatment one prescription often covers several journeys. Whether the health insurer pays is decided by the insurer and not by us. For outpatient treatment an approval is often needed before the first journey runs, so it is best to settle that with the practice while there is still time to do it calmly. We take you seated, with a walking frame or a folding wheelchair in the boot. Anybody who has to be transported lying down needs a Krankentransportwagen, a vehicle fitted with a stretcher, and it is the doctor who determines that on the prescription. If you are not insured with a German statutory health fund, none of this paperwork touches you and you simply book the journey the ordinary way.

If a course of treatment is coming up, we set the appointments up once and keep them in the schedule, with the same driver wherever we can manage it. We collect at the front door, including at the Residenz an der Lieth up by the edge of the woods and at the Pflegewohnanlage am Rosengarten, and after the treatment we wait rather than leaving somebody standing at the clinic entrance in the dark.

Kellinghusen as a place of work: Neuer Kamp, the trades and the old barracks

Kellinghusen is what German regional planning calls an Unterzentrum in the eastern Kreis Steinburg, a smaller town that supplies the villages around it with shops, schools and doctors, and it still belongs to the Hamburg metropolitan region. The town counts over seven hundred businesses, mostly crafts, retail and services. What it does not have is the one big works where a thousand people clock on at the same moment in the morning. The Kaufmännischer Verein Kellinghusen, the local traders association, brings together more than a hundred members from the town.

That the trades sit here has a history. Kellinghusen had a brewery, leather factories and tanneries, a printing works and a dye works, and it had its own local newspaper, the Stör-Bote. Part of that craft base has held on to this day. The Neuer Kamp business estate and the adjoining Kleiner Kamp lie south of the centre, right on the B 206 bypass, together a good two hectares, and the town writes itself that there are currently no plots left to sell there. New commercial land is now being planned by the Amt together with Wrist, which is to say in the place where the railway station is.

Two things follow from that for us. First, the journeys to work are spread over a great many small addresses rather than one factory gate, and anybody who works in Kellinghusen and lives in Neumünster will simply find no bus for a shift that starts at six. The Bürgerbus does not set off before eight and runs only inside the Amt Kellinghusen; line 6180 depends on a train at Wrist that is no help at that hour. Second, business visitors nearly always come from outside: by train to Wrist, Itzehoe or Neumünster, by air to Hamburg, and from any of those points onwards without a through connection. If you have an afternoon appointment on the Neuer Kamp and a flight home in the evening, do not cut the connecting times fine.

That is why a good share of this traffic runs with us on a Firmenkonto, a company account. The firm lodges its invoicing details once and says who is allowed to order a car. After that the member of staff or the visiting guest gets in and pays nothing in the vehicle; at the end of the month every journey stands separately with date, time and route on one collected invoice, sorted by cost centre if you want it that way. Recurring shift journeys we set up once and leave running, and fixed appointments we schedule up to ninety days ahead.

A case of its own is the site on the Lockstedter Weg. From 1964 until the end of 2008 the barracks named after the writer Detlev von Liliencron stood there, thirty two hectares in size and occupied for decades by artillery units. Since the closure the ground has turned into something else in stages: plans for a sport and tourism park foundered on the insolvency of the investor, a clinic project got only part of the way, and in 2015 and 2016 some of the buildings served as emergency accommodation. What has stayed is a hotel and a restaurant on the Lockstedter Weg. If you are staying there you are a good kilometre from the market square, and the Bürgerbus finishes for the day at six in the evening.

A fixed price instead of the Taxameter

The Pflichtfahrgebiet of Neumünster, the compulsory operating area in which a taxi has to accept every fare and charge the tariff set by the town, reaches beyond the town boundary and still takes in Ehndorf and Padenstedt, which is exactly the first few kilometres of our route. Inside it the calibrated Taxameter, the taxi meter in the dashboard, runs on the official tariff, and we are not even permitted to name a price of our own. A little further on, past Willenscharen, that stops: Kellinghusen belongs to the Kreis Steinburg and lies outside the area. For this journey we are therefore allowed to agree the price with you beforehand, and that is what we do.

In practice that means you see the amount for Kellinghusen on your screen before you confirm, and between Ehndorf and the Stör it does not move again. Not when we end up behind a harvest trailer past Padenstedt, and not when the L 115 An der Stör is shut because the water has come over the banks. That happens here once or twice a year: the Stör is still under tidal influence at Kellinghusen and rises and falls by around one and a half metres. If the diversion then sends us the long way round over Wrist or the B 206, the price stays where it stood.

The drive out to your address and your luggage are inside that price. You pay in the car or online in advance, and you can cancel free of charge for as long as nobody has set off towards Padenstedt yet.

Frequently asked questions

You might also like

• Taxi to Itzehoe
• Medical transport
• Large-capacity taxi
• All fixed prices at a glance