Fotoeins Fotografie

location bifurcation, place vs. home

Posts tagged ‘Deutschland Ticket’

25T06 Day trip to DU with DE-Ticket

E05, C02.

Gerhard Mercator was a 16th-century geographer and cartographer whose techniques of the time revolutionized map-making. Named after him is the Mercator projection which he created for a world map in 1569. The Mercator is one of the most widely used projections to map the entire world.

Gerhard Mercator. Duisburg, Germany. I wanted to go and find out.

I purchased a new Deutschland-Ticket (DE-Ticket) for 58€ which allows for travel on all modes of city and regional transport. With the ticket “embedded” in the iOS app, it is a simple matter of displaying the ticket’s digital QR-code for the inevitable on-board fare inspection.

From Köln, I travelled first on one of the city’s trams from my hotel to the nearest train station Messe-Deutz, where I caught a RE regional-express train northbound to the central station in Duisburg (DU). Upon arrival, I got onto the city’s 901 tram for the short ride to the stop at Rathaus. All of this multimodal travel is included in the DE-Ticket, as well as my return to Köln.

Born in Flanders in 1512, Gerhard Mercator eventually moved to the vital imperial trade port of Duisburg in 1552, where he lived until his death in 1594. He was buried in Duisburg’s oldest house of worship, Salvatorkirche (Church of Our Saviour), located next to the Rathaus (city hall). Although bombing in World War 2 brought severe damage, the grave plate remained relatively intact, and subsequently repaired and restored. The epitaph is presently mounted inside on the church’s south wall to the right of the main altar.

I include additional images of the Mercatorbrunnen (Mercator memorial fountain) in front of the Rathaus, and the sculpture “Hommage À Mercator” (homage to Mercator) about 0.5 km walk to the east and near the location where the house in which Mercator lived is now an archaeological site.

In the Mercator projection shown below, the map is centred so that the central line of north-south meridian at 0 degrees longitude goes through Greenwich, England. The ArcGIS also describes:

Mercator is a cylindrical projection. The meridians are vertical lines, parallel to each other, and equally spaced, and they extend to infinity when approaching the poles. The lines of (east-west) latitude are horizontal straight lines, perpendicular to the meridians and the same length as the equator, but they become farther apart toward the poles. The poles project to infinity and cannot be shown on the map.

World map in Mercator-style projection, by Miaow Miaow for Wikipedia (CC3.0). Note the exaggerated projection-sizes for Canada’s Ellesmere Island, Greenland, and the grand apparent whopper that is Antarctica. It’s also the “classic” problem of mapping a 3-dimensional sphere that is our world onto a 2-dimensional plane that is the common map.
Epitaph (grave plate) for Gerhard Mercator, inside Salvatorkirche. The German translation to the original Latin inscription can be found here.
Closeup view of Mercator’s epitaph.
Mercator memorial fountain, in front of Duisburg city hall.
Mercatorbrunnen (Mercator memorial fountain).
“Hommage à Mercator”, by Friedrich Werthmann, 1963. Across the street in the background is an archaeological site including the location of Mercator’s house.
Duisburg Rathaus & Salvatorkirche at left & right, respectively, as viewed from Alte Post. The Salvatorkirche is the city’s oldest building of worship with a temple first established at the site in the late 9th-century CE. The roots of the present-day church go back to the 14th-15th century CE.
The city’s central station is presently undergoing massive construction. The signage shown here used to hang above tracks 12 & 13.
Deutschland-Ticket for May 2025, purchased on the mobile iOS MVV-App the day before my scheduled flight to Europe. The purchase details ran almost identical to 2024.

Except the first Wiki image, I made all remaining images above with an iPhone15 on 13 May 2025. This post composed within Jetpack for iOS appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com.

Deutschland Ticket, for Canadian visitors (2024)

How-to buy guide, effective May to August 2024.

( 2025 note: On 18 September 2025, Bavarian state broadcaster BR24 reported the monthly price for the Deutschland-Ticket will go up by 5€ to 63€ , starting 1 January 2026. The price had already gone from 49€ to 58€ for the 2025 calendar year. My summer 2025 purchase went the same way as in 2024, whose details are described below. )

89 days within Europe includes by necessity substantial travel by train within Germany. I’ve already booked in advance a number of intercity express segments, but what about local transport and regional trains?

The “Deutschland Ticket” (D-Ticket) is a rail ticket for one person and costs 49€ per month on a rolling subscription. The ticket is generally valid for local transport (bus, tram, U-Bahn, S-Bahn, intracity ferry) and regional rail (RB, most RE, IRE), but not for long-distance IC and ICE routes. Intended primarily for commuters, visitors to Germany can also purchase these tickets.

It’s early-April 2024, and I’m about to buy the D-Ticket for 49€ for the entire month of May. The ticket’s “rolling subscription” means if I do nothing else before 10 May, I’ll also automatically purchase a D-Ticket for the month of June for 49€. I’ll need the D-Ticket for May, June, July, and August; but I can only buy one month at a time.

I choose Munich’s MVV-App, based on successes reported by other travellers. I’m only using the Munich app for ticket purchase, and I’m not planning to use public transport within Munich. To buy a D-Ticket, customers are neither limited by their choice of app/method, nor by the base/location where the app is based. My question is whether a Canadian-based credit card is an acceptable form of payment by the processing company in Germany for a German-based app.

Read more