Deutsche Bahn

It still is the main industry in many locations around that area.

for now, but it's going to be replaced in Cottbus at least by a service centre for Deutsche Bahn.

So it's a completely different model to what we saw in the UK when Thatcher closed the mines and it was like, well, the market will sort it out sort of thing.

They've actually put measures in, the government have put measures in place to replace the uh previous industry with with a new industry based around uh transport technology which i think is quite a noble thing to do um but nevertheless uh there's um people don't want to hang around and wait for that um also people don't if you're in your mid to late 50s or early 60s you think i'm not going to start to retrain to do work in that specific field so they're trying to cling on at the at the power stations and so on so you get this picture really of this aging population with not much industry going on and all the challenges that come with being in a post-industrial East German town which is now a former coal region as well so it's kind of depleted from that point of view it's also quite isolated I know it's 90 minutes from Berlin on the train which is you know reasonable if you're going to try and commute and so on and lots of people do commute from Cottbus to Berlin but it's just I can only describe it as a place like maybe and this is doing these places a little bit of a disservice really like Gainsborough or Retford or Chesterfield, those slight forgotten towns that are on the periphery of cities, but there's actually no city to be on the periphery of.

Everything.

The weather, the government, and of course the Deutsche Bahn, which is our train that's always too late.

And yes, I know it's very un-German, very inefficient, but our trains are really always late.

And as soon as you go to Austria or to Switzerland, everything works again.

So, first of all, who are you what are you doing and how do you get stuff done what's your magic secret your magic sauce so let me look at you first right if

you come to magic it's up to me to start exactly i do not know why because for magic i'm the wrong person my name is kathleen some of you already know that i'm the head of sustainability and environment at deutsche bahn so if you have a worse deutsche bahn story Please.

Wait, don't all come at once, really.

It's okay.

Wait later, give her a break.

No, but that is what I do.

And before I started in Berlin at Deutsche Bahn, I was mayor of Munich.

And I was responsible for all sustainability topics, for building, for mobility.

So all of my backup plans had to be re-backed up and redone.

But the fundamental point, if you want to try and plan something like this, plan it using the website of Deutsche Bahn, bahn.de.

So in pretty much all European countries and indeed the entire route of this journey from Finland to Portugal, except Spain, because Spain is a basket case of its own with regard to data sharing itself.

every other country along that route you can get reliable information about the trains that are running using the website of Deutsche Bahn.

So basically I start there for everything wherever I go and I start there with the planning.

The second point is how to get the tickets.

I tried doing this in a peak time in July, and I could have had trains, particularly in France and Spain, that were completely full.

So that would have posed quite some difficulties.

[Intro-Musik] Unser heutiger Gast hat bei der Deutschen Bahn ein Planungsnetz-netzwerk mitgestaltet, an dem über elftausend Menschen gleichzeitig arbeiten, von der Fernverkehrsplanung bis zum Controlling.

Und er nennt sich selbst öffentlich TM1-Fanboy.

Das ist ungewöhnlich für jemanden, der heute Geschäftsführer eines internationalen Beratungsunternehmens ist.

Machen wir besser nicht.

Äh, aber lass uns gerne 'n bisschen über deine Vergangenheit noch mal reden.

Ähm, du hast ja, ähm, Stationen davor, du hast grade schon 'n bisschen angedeutet, ähm, mit Nachhaltigkeit zu tun gehabt, nachhaltiges Datenmanagement, nämlich bei der Deutschen Bahn.

Ähm, gibt's Dinge, die du von da mitgenommen hast, die heute auch bei Intito noch helfen und, und Erfahrungen, die du gemacht hast damals?

Ja, natürlich hab ich, äh, damals bei der Bahn superviel gelernt, da drüber einfach mir sehr viel mit, ne.