A city by any other name would smell as sweet

[pne]

So I wanted to go to Tønder in October to stock up on Danish goodies, since I had found out that the regional German tariff is valid as far as Tønder (the first station on the other side of the border) and so a day return is fairly cheap.

I had inquired whether it’s possible to buy a ticket in advance; group tickets (which, inexplicably, cost only €0.60 more compared to a single day return ticket, at least for that distance: €34.60 compared to €34.00) are only valid after 9 o’clock and I wanted to take a train that leaves at 9:01 and didn’t want to have to hurry to buy a ticket from a machine on that day, and had been told that you could do that four weeks in advance.

That meant this week, so I went to the local train company’s travel office in the station and tried to buy a ticket to “Tondern” (the German name). This apparently got turned into “Tøndern st (TCV)”, and the system refused to sell me a ticket to there. A colleague whom the lady asked for advice suggested selling me a ticket to Süderlügum, the last station on the German side of the border, but I was worried that the conductor wouldn’t accept that, even though the fare was the same.

So I didn’t buy the ticket and walked outside. I decided to try the ticket machine to see what it said. It didn’t offer “Tondern” (when I entered “Ton”, the only option was “Tonndorf”), so I wondered whether it might be “Tönder”. After trying a bit more, I found that the magic word was “Toender (DK)”. That gave me the option to buy a group day return ticket, but only for today.

But armed with that knowledge, I went back inside the travel office and asked the lady to try “Toender”; that gave her the same two options the ticket machine had given me, “Toender (DK)” and “Toender Nord (DK)”. The second one is closer to the shops but the German tickets aren’t valid that far, so I asked her to select the first one.

This time, the machine seemed happy to calculate a ticket and sell me a group day return ticket at the fare I expected.

So, yay!

(And boo for the system for having the same station under two different names. Though I suppose it’s not German Rail’s fault: I imagine that one spelling comes from their system and the other from the local fare cooperation organisation, and those two should get their act together and settle on one spelling.)

Comments

[pseudomonas]

I was looking for fares on DB a while back, using their site in English. It took me quite a lot of puzzling to realise that their site translation didn't extend to their place-name menus. I eventually found Copenhagen listed under "K". I'd not previously been aware that the Danish version was so spelt.

[xaea]

yay!!

[pauamma]

I had the opposite problem once, when searching for a train route (and times) from Paris to Braunsweigh (IIRC the spelling) - and couldn't get the app to accept that there was any city by that name. (The autocomplete thingy would only list French destinations, which didn't help.)

[pne]

Presumably you mean Brunswick, aka Braunschweig in German.

Now I’m reminded of the time we drove to Calais by car to take the ferry to England: for nearly all of the time in Belgium, the motorway listed the destination “Rijsel”, which wasn’t a place I had ever heard of.

Only the last one or two signs before the French border included the French name of the place, in parentheses: Lille.

[pauamma]

Yes, Braunschweig (lame - misspelled it *after* I checked the spelling...) I found out later that Brunswick was one version, yes. (No idea which one is official, or if both are. It's just that Braunschweig was the way the person I would've been visiting always spelled it.)

[pne]

"Brunswick" is about as official as "Londres" is, I'd say - the traditional name, in a foreign language, of the city. So, not official at all in the language of the country that the city is in.

But not quite comparable, since exonyms for smaller places have dropped out of favour compared to, say, the 19th century; I don't think you'd find many Englishmen who talk about "Lyons" or "Leghorn" any more, for example, and "Brunswick" might similarly be a bit dated, with people tending to use the local name even in English, and only continuing to use exonyms for the largest cities, such as Munich.