First of all, I'm happy to enjoy a long weekend. I used the official holiday yesterday together with an additional day of vacation to celebrate a 4-day weekend. Pretty neat, some of the addition time I used today to an in-depth lecture of our weekly newspaper 'Die Zeit' - something I normally try to accomplish over the weekend. During the lecture I learned about RIC - Regolamento Internazionale Carozze, beside the strange name - why do I care?

With my changed job in August I have to do some more travel, some of it is done by train. I actually enjoy train travel, much more relaxing then plane travel, more room, quieter, and you end in the center of towns normally, instead at some airport at the outskirt of towns. Since I can normally plan ahead I use the online booking system of 'Die Bahn' which works remarkable well, allows you to print your tickets on your local printer, and even does reserve seats in the trains. Finding your assigned wagon in a train is easy, but I'm was always wondering why it is so damn hard to find your actual seat. I thought it is my one stupidity - but today I was confincent that it is actually a plot by burocrats. This article in Die Zeit explains it - trains have a rather interesting numbering scheme, something like this:

Why would anyone in his sane mind number seats this way?? Part of the answer is: RIC - Regolamento Internazionale Carozze, this paper regulates everything one could imagine to allow trains to work (standardized) and travel between different European countries. I know that cooperation in Europe is difficult, but does it need to be that difficult?

The numbering scheme still looks arbitrary to me, I think the rule is simple - look for your assigned seat number where you wouldn't expect it to be - and remember, there is a reason behind it, somewhere .... perhaps ....