A piece of (railway) history in Germany will be lost at the end of the year – but very few people will be really sad about it. Platform cards will also be abolished in Hamburg on January 1, 2024. These were required for decades in the Hanseatic city in order to be allowed to enter underground and S-Bahn stations if, for example, you wanted to pick someone up from the train without a valid ticket.
This means that the last bastion of a relic from the early days of the railway is falling in this country. On the former Federal Railway, the obligation to buy a platform ticket finally ended at the 1974 World Cup. In some regional transport associations, however, it remained in place for much longer. The Munich Transport and Tariff Association, for example, only abolished the ticket in 2019. The Hamburg transport association – unique in the country – stuck to the model for longer, also because it made it easier to carry out large-scale ticket checks at the exits of the subway and S-Bahn stations – the excuse that they just wanted to get someone to the train is valid not through the system.
The platform ticket was the only ticket in Hamburg that had recently become cheaper. In 2019 the price fell from 0.30 euros to 0.10 euros, which is still valid today. It entitles you to stay for up to one hour in the station where it was solved until New Year’s Eve. Last year, the Hamburg transport association sold almost 20,000 platform tickets.
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Sources: Hamburg Transport Association, DPA news agency
