Taxi Nortorf: from Neumünster over the L 328 at a fixed price

Where Nortorf is, and when the train beats us

Nortorf is a small town in the middle of Schleswig-Holstein, the German state that sits between the North Sea and the Baltic with Denmark above it. It belongs to the Kreis Rendsburg-Eckernförde (a Kreis is a rural district, the layer of government between the town and the state) and it sits on the road that runs from Neumünster up to Rendsburg. If you want a marker for how central it is: out at Thienbüttel, on the K 45 towards Brammer, there is a millstone standing by the road that marks the geographical middle of Schleswig-Holstein. Around eight thousand people live in the town and the sixteen villages that share its administration.

Nortorf has its own railway station, and nobody here is going to talk that down. The RE 7, the regional express on the Hamburg to Flensburg line, covers Neumünster to Nortorf in eleven minutes with no change, once an hour through the day. If all you want is to get from the Hauptbahnhof in Neumünster (Hauptbahnhof, the main station) to the platform in Nortorf, the train is often quicker than we are, and we would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise. The pattern barely shifts across the week: towards Neumünster and Hamburg the train leaves at roughly thirteen minutes past the hour, towards Flensburg at roughly forty three minutes past. German timetables are reworked every December, so treat those minutes as a snapshot and look them up again before you travel.

The catch is somewhere else. The station on the Bahnhofstraße is hardly ever the address anyone actually wants. If you are going to the ALDI central warehouse An der Automeile, to the Lerchenfeld riding centre, to the Netto supermarket on the Galgenbergsweg or to the Badeland swimming pool on the Seedorfer Weg, you still have a fair walk once you have got off. Add the hourly service to that. Missing a connection costs you a whole hour, and nobody wants to sit that hour out at the ZOB, the bus interchange beside the station, with a suitcase, a Rollator (a wheeled walking frame) or three bags of shopping. And anyone who lives not in the town itself but in Gnutz, in Timmaspe or in Groß Vollstedt has no station at the end of the street at all. Those are the journeys we drive: from a front door in Neumünster to a front door in Nortorf or in one of the villages, with nothing to change and no waiting on a platform.

The addresses we drive to in Nortorf

Nortorf looks compact on a map but it stretches out, and the places people are going to are by no means all in the centre. In town we pull up Am Markt, in the Poststraße, in the Niedernstraße, in the Große Mühlenstraße and in the Kirchspielstraße. For the Rathaus, the town hall of the Amt Nortorfer Land at Niedernstraße 6, we get you there so the appointment actually holds. An Amt is a shared administration: the office in Nortorf handles the paperwork for the town and for the villages around it, which is why people come in from a long way out. It is closed on Wednesdays, open until six in the evening on Thursdays, and for the Einwohnermeldeamt (residents' registration) and the Standesamt (the registry office for births, marriages and deaths) you need a booked slot anyway. The public library is in the same building.

The Deutsches Schallplattenmuseum, the German record museum, is a regular fare for us. It sits in the old Kesselhaus, the boiler house, of the former Teldec works, the factory that once pressed vinyl records in this town. It opens Tuesday to Sunday, closes on Mondays, and the last admission is at four in the afternoon. The building is step free, and being set down right at the entrance makes a real difference to a visitor in a wheelchair. From there we go on to the Stadtpark and the sculpture park in the Bellerbektal, to the Hochzeitswald (the wedding wood) on the road called Brookhorn, to the St.-Martin-Kirche on the market square, to the Kramer-Scheune on the Heinkenborsteler Weg, an old barn used for concerts and for the evening talks the locals call Scheunengespräche, and out to Thienbüttel with its millstone.

The edges of town count just as much. Lohkamp with its Lidl and Penny, the Galgenbergsweg, the industrial estate on the Gnutzer Straße, An der Automeile with the car dealerships and the ALDI warehouse, the famila supermarket on the Timmasper Weg, the Hagebaumarkt (a builders' merchant and garden centre) on the Ladestraße, and the bus stops Papenkamp and Am Schulwald. Then there are the places visitors file under Nortorf that are in fact already in the next village. The Landhotel Möllhagen is in Schülp bei Nortorf. The Badeland, the pool run by the TuS sports club on the Seedorfer Weg, is in Borgdorf-Seedorf. The Arche Warder animal park and the stone park at Gut Seehof are in Warder, a Gut being a country estate. Gut Emkendorf with its long avenue of trees is in Emkendorf, and the Celtic tree circle is in Gnutz. Give us the address and leave the rest to us. We know what is still Nortorf and what is already Schülp or Borgdorf-Seedorf, and the price does not go up because you called the village by the wrong name.

The road from Neumünster to Nortorf

We leave Neumünster along the Rendsburger Straße, and that already puts us on the L 328. An L number in Germany means a Landesstraße, a state road, one step down from the federal B roads; this one carried a B number until a few years ago, so older maps and older locals still call it the B 205. Same road, different sign. It is the direct axis between Neumünster, Nortorf and Rendsburg, and the Amt Nortorfer Land describes it in exactly those terms itself. At the end the L 121 takes over, which inside Nortorf is called the Itzehoer Straße, and that brings you into the town: first the car dealerships and the kitchen showroom Küchen Rumpf, then the centre. Around sixteen kilometres, twenty to twenty five minutes in real traffic. Our office is at Rendsburger Straße 41, right on the road out of Neumünster towards Nortorf, so the car does not have to cross the whole city before it even starts.

You could also go by motorway. The A 7, the long north to south route that runs from Denmark down through Hamburg, has junctions at Neumünster-Nord, Bordesholm and Warder, and any of them would work. But it is a good five kilometres further and it buys you no time, so we only take it when something is blocked on the country road. The L 328 runs across the Geest, the higher sandy ground that gives this part of the north its wide open fields, between the Naturpark Westensee and the Naturpark Aukrug. At harvest time you can find yourself behind a tractor for a while, and in autumn the fog sits in the hollows first thing in the morning. For an appointment in Nortorf we would rather build in a few extra minutes than deliver you late, so tell us the time you need to be there rather than the time you want to leave.

The journeys we make to Nortorf most often

There is no hospital in Nortorf. Anyone with a scan, a test or a treatment travels out: to the Friedrich-Ebert-Krankenhaus on the Friesenstraße in Neumünster, which is where the emergency outpatient department is, to the DRK-Fachklinik Hahnknüll, or further afield to Rendsburg and Kiel. Coming back from the FEK to Nortorf is around seventeen kilometres over the same road, roughly twenty minutes. A large share of everything we drive in this direction is exactly that pattern: out in the morning, home again around midday.

The second steady block is shift work. At the ALDI central warehouse An der Automeile and at the Procast foundry on the Gießereiweg, days begin and end at hours when the RE 7 is either not running yet or has stopped for the night. Around those two there is a whole calendar. The weekly market on the market square on Saturday mornings. The Musiksommer concerts, the Weinfest, the Jahrmarkt, which is the travelling funfair, and the Dämmershopping, the evening when the shops stay open into the dusk. Concerts and Scheunengespräche in the Kramer-Scheune. Visits to the residential and nursing home in the Neue Straße and to Haus Simeon in the Große Mühlenstraße, where the visitor is often older than the resident's own children and would rather not change trains. And in summer, families heading for the Badeland or the Arche Warder who need to be back in Neumünster the same evening.

Krankenfahrten: getting from Nortorf to treatment elsewhere

A Krankenfahrt is the German term for a journey to medical treatment that your health insurer can pay for. It is not an ambulance and it is not an emergency service. It is an ordinary taxi, driven to a fixed appointment, on a prescription. We do a lot of them out of Nortorf, and the reason is simple arithmetic about what the town has and what it does not.

For everyday care Nortorf is decently served. The general practice shares a building in the Neue Straße. There are three pharmacies: the Brunnen-Apotheke in the Teldec-Park on the Niedernstraße, the second Brunnen-Apotheke on the Kirchhofsallee and the Stadtapotheke on the Bahnhofstraße. Add Physiofit on the Niedernstraße, the Physiotherapie am Stadtpark on the Timm-Kröger-Straße, an osteopathy practice on the Hohenwestedter Straße, occupational therapy in the Dreieinigkeit and in the Große Mühlenstraße, speech therapy on the Bahnhofstraße and the midwives' practice in the Große Mühlenstraße. For any of those you usually do not need us at all. Those are walks, not journeys.

What Nortorf does not have is the specialists and the clinic. Dialysis, chemotherapy and radiotherapy do not happen in the town. Dialysis means the PHV-Dialysezentrum on the Großflecken in Neumünster, which is run by the doctors of the MVZ für Nieren- und Hochdruckerkrankungen, a group practice for kidney and blood pressure conditions, or else the nephrology centre in Rendsburg. Anything requiring an overnight stay means the Friedrich-Ebert-Krankenhaus, the Kreiskrankenhaus on the Lilienstraße in Rendsburg, or one of the Kiel hospitals: the university hospital, the Städtisches Krankenhaus on the Chemnitzstraße and the Lubinus Clinicum on the Steenbeker Weg. For none of those destinations is there a bus or train from Nortorf that puts you at the treatment room on time, and that is exactly why people from Nortorf ring us for them.

The prescription comes from your practice in Nortorf or from the clinic, and the form is called Muster 4, which is simply form number four in the standard German set. For a series of treatments such as dialysis, chemotherapy or radiotherapy the insurer covers the journeys as a rule. For other outpatient appointments approval in advance is usually needed. Settle that with the practice in the Neue Straße or directly with your insurer before the first journey rather than after it. People in the statutory system pay the standard co-payment on approved journeys, and anyone who is exempt from co-payments pays nothing extra here either. If the insurer does not pay, which is the normal case for an ordinary specialist appointment in Neumünster, our fixed price for the route applies, and you should count it twice, out and back. If you are not in the German system at all, because you are insured abroad, say so when you book and ask for a receipt when you get out. We write those as a matter of course, and your own insurer at home will want one.

We collect at the front door, and equally at the addresses in Nortorf and the surrounding villages where care is given: the Tagespflege day centre on the Bahnhofstraße, the shared house for people living with dementia on Am Markt, the Alten- und Pflegezentrum am Wardersee in Warder and the Pflegepension in Timmaspe. A Rollator or a folding wheelchair comes with you; just say so when you book so the right car turns up. We carry people seated. Anyone who has to travel lying down needs a Krankentransportwagen, a proper patient transport ambulance, and that is a decision the doctor makes on the prescription, not one we can make at the door. For the way back we plan backwards: you give us the time of the treatment, we add the driving time and a buffer. If the finishing time is not fixed yet, and with dialysis it often is not, just ring when you know. One local detail worth having: the group practice closes after midday on Wednesdays and Fridays, and for the rest of those days the out of hours medical service on 116 117 takes over. Which pharmacy is on emergency duty rotates around the whole Kreis Rendsburg-Eckernförde, so it is regularly not one of the three in Nortorf. When that happens we drive you there and back.

Business journeys: shifts, engineers and the company account

Nortorf does not do its working day in the middle of town. It does it around the edges. The foundry on the Gießereiweg. The Aldi site between An der Automeile and the Timmasper Weg. The steel and metal fabricators on the Gnutzer Straße. The technical firms on the Eichenallee. Trades and storage on the Industriestraße and the Ladestraße. The car dealerships and Küchen Rumpf on the Itzehoer Straße. Those are the addresses where the cars are parked at seven in the morning, and from the station on the Bahnhofstraße every one of them is still a solid walk, straight across the town and out the other side.

The bus only helps up to a point. The Amt Nortorfer Land describes its own network as one where the old school transport has largely been folded into the public bus service. The Autokraft lines tie Nortorf and the villages to Kiel, Neumünster, Rendsburg and Itzehoe, which sounds better than it feels, because the frequency follows the school day. The train keeps to the hour: a Regionalbahn between Neumünster and Flensburg and the Schleswig-Holstein-Express from Hamburg up to Padborg just over the Danish border take turns, so each of them comes every two hours. Seven times a day you can reach Hamburg without changing, a good hour in each direction. For an early shift that starts before the first train and a late shift that ends after the last one, none of that helps. That too is a snapshot; timetables change.

For companies there is the Firmenkonto, the account we invoice rather than the passenger. You lodge the billing details once and set out who in your organisation is allowed to order. After that the driver books the journey straight to the account: nothing is paid in the car and nobody is left out of pocket waiting to claim it back. At the end of the month every journey appears separately on one collective invoice, with date, time and route, and if the person ordering quotes a cost centre we carry it through to that line. Journeys that repeat at the same shift times we set up once and schedule permanently, up to ninety days ahead, so nobody has to place the same order every evening.

The second case is visitors. Engineers, inspectors and customers arrive by train in Neumünster or in Nortorf, and the run to the plant or to the hotel goes on your account, so the guest pays nothing and has nothing to claim. People stay in Nortorf at the Alter Landkrug and the Kirchspiels Gasthaus, both in the Große Mühlenstraße, at the Gasthof Ritzebüttel on the Rendsburger Straße, or at the Landhotel Möllhagen over in Schülp. The way back belongs to the job: after the meeting, back to Nortorf station, on to Neumünster for a connection, or through to Hamburg Airport. Give us the guest's name when you order and the driver will approach them by name rather than leaving a stranger to work out which car is theirs, which matters when the visitor speaks no German. The same applies to appointments at the Sparkasse Mittelholstein in the Große Mühlenstraße, at the VR Bank in the Poststraße or at one of the tax advisers in town: the car is there when the appointment needs it, not an hour later because that was when the bus went.

A fixed price instead of the Taxameter

German taxis normally charge on a Taxameter, the calibrated meter on the dashboard, and within a city the council sets the tariff that meter runs on. The area where that tariff is compulsory is called the Pflichtfahrgebiet, and the one for Neumünster stops short of Nortorf. It covers the city itself plus journeys to and from Tasdorf, Bönebüttel, Padenstedt, Ehndorf, Wasbek, Großharrie, Rendswühren and Schillsdorf, and nothing beyond that. Nortorf belongs to the Kreis Rendsburg-Eckernförde and lies outside it. That is precisely why we are permitted to agree a price for this journey in advance, and why we do. The price for Nortorf is on the screen before you confirm anything.

What happens on the road afterwards does not change it. Whether we end up behind a tractor, whether roadworks on the Itzehoer Straße send us the long way round, whether the evening traffic on the Rendsburger Straße is standing still: that is our risk to carry, not yours. Driving to your address is not charged; the price runs from the moment you get in. You can pay cash or by card in the car, or online beforehand, before we have even turned onto the L 328. As long as we have not set off for your journey to Nortorf, cancelling costs you nothing. Inside Neumünster the official municipal tariff on the calibrated Taxameter still applies, and there we are not allowed to quote a price of our own, not even a lower one.

Frequently asked questions

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