Taxi Plön: from Neumünster to the Großer Plöner See

Why no train runs from Neumünster to Plön

The missing train is not a quirk of this year's timetable. There is a railway line and it is closed. It ran from Neumünster through Wankendorf and Ascheberg, twenty six kilometres to just short of the town, and it saw its last passenger train on 29 September 1985. On 1 November 1995 it was shut for good. People have been talking about bringing it back ever since. A study from January 2019 put forward an hourly service through to Plön with a journey time of twenty five minutes as its preferred option, and the link keeps turning up in the planning for the Deutschlandtakt, the national scheme to run German trains to one connected timetable. None of that is running. The only thing that moves on the old track is a Draisine, one of the pedal driven rail carts you can hire for an afternoon, on the stretch between Bokhorst and Wankendorf.

So anyone determined to reach Plön by rail first goes in the wrong direction. Kiel, the capital of Schleswig-Holstein and a port on the Baltic, lies north of both towns, and the rail route bends up through it. From Neumünster the RE 70 takes about eighteen minutes to Kiel and the RE 7 a good twenty (RE stands for Regional-Express, the faster of the two regional train types). From Kiel the RE 83 needs thirty minutes on to Plön and the RB 84, a Regionalbahn that stops more often, just under forty. Counting the change, you are looking at a good seventy to ninety five minutes from platform to platform, depending on how the connection in Kiel falls that day. That is a snapshot and timetables change, so check before you travel.

It is also only the part of the journey that happens on rails. It says nothing about getting yourself and your luggage to the Hauptbahnhof (the main station) in Neumünster, nothing about the wait on the platform in Kiel, and nothing about the last stretch from the station in Plön to the address you actually booked.

The one direct public link is bus 360, run by the Verkehrsbetriebe Kreis Plön, the district's own bus company. It takes every village with it: Dörnick, Ascheberg, Dersau, Kalübbe, Perdoel, Wankendorf, Schillsdorf, Bokhorst and Bönebüttel. Thirty eight kilometres, around an hour, and that hour is an hour of stopping and pulling away again rather than an hour of driving. On working days it runs hourly, on Saturdays roughly every two hours, and on Sundays with gaps of two to three hours. It also finishes early. The last bus leaves Plön at 20.35, and that is the same on a Saturday and a Sunday as on a Tuesday.

Where Plön is, and why the water decides everything

Plön sits in the eastern half of Schleswig-Holstein, the German state that lies between the North Sea and the Baltic with Denmark on top of it. Neumünster is to the west, Kiel to the north, Lübeck away to the southeast, and the road down to Hamburg and its airport runs south past us here in Neumünster. The lake country around the town is called the Holsteinische Schweiz, Holstein Switzerland, a name that describes the number of lakes and low hills rather than the height of anything in it.

The town is the Kreisstadt, the seat of the Kreis Plön (a Kreis is a rural district, the layer of government that sits between a town and the state). That makes it the address for a great deal of paperwork in this corner of the country, which is why the Kreisverwaltung, the district administration, generates traffic all by itself.

For all that, only a little over nine thousand four hundred people live here. The reason is the water. Of the nearly thirty seven square kilometres inside the town boundary, only about eight square kilometres are dry land. Eleven lakes lie entirely within the municipal area and the town has a share in five more. The largest of them, the Großer Plöner See, is the one the castle looks out over and the one most visitors have come to see.

That geography changes how the place is built. The Ortsteile, the named parts of the municipality, are not gathered around one centre. They are threaded along two Bundesstraßen, federal trunk roads that carry long distance traffic on a single carriageway without being motorways. Two addresses can look close together on a map and still have a lake between them, which means a detour of several kilometres by road.

The practical upshot for a booking is simple. Give us the street, the building or the Ortsteil, not just the town name. Someone who books a taxi to Plön and nothing more can easily be set down on the wrong side of the water, with a walk around a lake in front of them.

Where we drop you in Plön

In the Altstadt, the old town, we drive to the Markt with the Nikolaikirche, and to the Lange Straße, which is the pedestrian shopping street. We also drive to the Rathaus (the town hall) am Schloßberg and to the Bürgerbüro, the citizens' office where residents register an address or collect their papers.

Up on the Schlossberg stands the Schloss, the white castle above the lake, which now houses the Fielmann Akademie, the training academy of one of Germany's largest optician chains. Around it are the Schlossgarten with the Siebenstern, the Prinzenhaus with the Kreismusikschule (the district music school), the Uhrenhaus with the Naturpark-Haus, which is the visitor centre for the nature park, and the old swimming hall that is used today as the Kulturforum. Down in the Neustadt, the new town laid out in 1685 and by now old itself, are the Johanniskirche and the Kreismuseum, the district museum, in the building of the former pharmacy.

East of the centre, along the B 76, come Fegetasche with its Badestelle, an established public bathing spot on the lake shore, then Ruhleben with the barracks, then the Stadtheide, a residential quarter that grew up on the ground of the former Fünf-Seen-Kaserne. West of the centre, along the B 430, lie the Kreisverwaltung on the Hamburger Straße, Spitzenort and the Koppelsberg.

Then there are the everyday addresses, the ones that fill most of our bookings. The Schulzentrum am Schiffsthal, the Gymnasium Schloss Plön in the Prinzenstraße, the Berufsbildungszentrum on the Heinrich-Rieper-Straße, the Breitenauschule and the Rodomstorschule. The Max-Planck-Institut in the August-Thienemann-Straße, one of the federally funded research institutes that bring scientists to the town from abroad. The PlönBad, the Stadtbücherei an der Krabbe, the Astra Filmtheater, and the railway station with the ZOB beside it (Zentraler Omnibusbahnhof, the central bus station, where the regional buses meet).

We do not stop at the town boundary either. Bösdorf, which has been administered from Plön since 2014, and the neighbouring villages of Rathjensdorf, Dörnick, Wittmoldt and Grebin are all part of the same run for us. If your address is a house on a lane outside the village sign, give us the house number and we will find it.

The road from Neumünster to Plön

We drive almost the whole way on one road, the B 430. Out of Neumünster on the Plöner Straße and the Plöner Chaussee, then past Rendswühren, Schönböken and Bornhöved, past Gut Ascheberg (a Gut is a country estate with its own farm buildings and its own name on the map) and straight through Ascheberg, then into Plön on the Ascheberger Straße and the Hamburger Straße. The last piece into the centre runs on the B 76. From the Großflecken, the long market square in the middle of Neumünster, to the Markt in Plön is around thirty six kilometres, and with a clear road we need about forty minutes.

What lies between is Landstraße, open country road, and not motorway. One lane in each direction, village throughroads with the speed dropping as you enter and rising as you leave, tractors on the carriageway during the harvest, and in autumn fog sitting over the lakes early in the morning. It is a pleasant drive and a slow one to hurry, which is why we quote forty minutes as a fair figure and not as a record.

There is exactly one motorway junction on this route, Bornhöved on the A 21, roughly nineteen kilometres before Plön, and it is only of use to someone carrying on south. Plön itself is where the B 76 and the B 430 cross, and inside the town the whole of that traffic has to squeeze through the narrow strip of land between the lakes. On a summer afternoon that strip is the slowest part of the entire journey.

Work goes on somewhere on those two roads year in and year out, sometimes a single village throughroad, sometimes a longer section closed altogether. When that happens our driver takes the signed detour, usually by way of Preetz or Wankendorf, and the trip takes a few minutes longer than it should. The price you agreed does not move, because it was settled before we set off.

When we drive to Plön most often

The commonest call comes after 20.35, once bus 360 has gone for the day. Someone who has worked, shopped or visited family in Neumünster has no public way home after that, and in the other direction nothing sets out for Plön once the last bus has left us. On Friday and Saturday nights we often run the route several times over, for shift workers finishing late, for young people going home, and for the parents who would otherwise be getting into the car themselves at one in the morning.

The second reason is medical. Plön has no hospital of its own. The district clinic with its central emergency department stands in Preetz, a good eighteen kilometres away over the B 76. The Friedrich-Ebert-Krankenhaus, with the emergency department most people from here end up in, is with us in Neumünster, and the Universitätsklinikum, the university hospital, is in Kiel. We drive people to appointments, to dialysis, to chemotherapy and home again, all year round, including the ones that start at seven in the morning when neither the bus nor the change in Kiel is any use at all.

In Germany a ride like that is a Krankenfahrt, a journey to or from treatment that a doctor has prescribed and that a statutory health insurer can cover. If you are not in the German system, a visitor or someone insured abroad, just say so when you book and the driver will hand you a printed receipt you can claim on later.

The third reason is the institutions that fill Plön from outside. The barracks at Ruhleben house the Marineunteroffizierschule, the German Navy's school for its petty officers, and on Sunday evenings and Friday middays the course members are on the move with the Seesack, the navy kitbag, over one shoulder. The Fielmann Akademie in the castle puts thousands of opticians a year through its courses and has its own guest rooms on site. At the Max-Planck-Institut the visiting researchers arrive with a suitcase and leave with one. All three run to their own calendars rather than to the bus timetable.

In summer the town fills up for other reasons: the bathing places along the shore, the walk out onto the Prinzeninsel, the concerts in the castle. The Wochenmarkt, the open air market, stands by the Nikolaikirche on Tuesday and Friday mornings. And a good number of people from Plön travel in the opposite direction for a big shop, which is to say they come to us in Neumünster, and want a car with a boot rather than a bus with a bell.

A fixed price instead of the Taxameter

Inside Neumünster the Taxameter, the meter in the car, charges the official municipal tariff, and no driver is allowed to deviate from it in either direction. That tariff applies within the Pflichtfahrgebiet, the compulsory service area in which a licensed taxi has to accept the job and has to charge the set rate. The area reaches some way past the city boundary, taking in Bönebüttel, Rendswühren and Schillsdorf among others.

Look at that on a map and it is worth a second glance, because all three of those places lie in the direction of Plön. Rendswühren sits on the B 430 that we drive, and Bönebüttel and Schillsdorf are both stops on the route of bus 360. Roughly a third of the way along the journey the tariff obligation ends. Beyond it the Kreis Plön begins, and its Kreisstadt is where we are going.

Because Plön lies outside that area, we are free to agree a price with you in advance, and that is exactly what we do. You see the figure on the screen before you confirm anything, and it holds to the front door, not merely as far as the ZOB beside the station. Whether the run takes us forty minutes or fifty because of roadworks in a village throughroad makes no difference to it.

You can pay in cash or by card in the car, or online before we come. As long as the driver has not yet set off, cancelling costs you nothing. Our office in the Rendsburger Straße is staffed around the clock, so a booking made at three in the morning reaches a person and not a voicemail.

Frequently asked questions

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