German teenager travels 650,000 km living on the train

• By Sam Reeves / AFP, FRANKFURT, Germany

Lasse Stolley was looking for a change of scenery after the failure of a planned apprenticeship. Almost two years ago, the teenager began living on German trains.

The epic journey took the 17-year-old, from a small community in Germany's windswept far north, to the country's southern borders and beyond.

Departing in August 2022, he traveled 650,000 kilometers, the equivalent of more than 15 times around the Earth, while sitting on a train for more than 6,700 hours.

“Being able to decide every day where I want to go is just great, it’s freedom,” Stolley said in a cafe at Frankfurt Central Station.

“I love the fact that I can just look out the window during a trip and watch the landscape go by quickly… and the fact that I can explore all the places in Germany,” he said.

He travels with just a backpack and lives mainly on pizza and soup, which he gets for free, as a train season ticket holder, in the station lounges of the Deutsche Bahn AG railway company.

With his wide smile, the lanky teenager seems unlikely to have decided to trade the comfort of his family home for the rigors of life on the rails. Growing up, he had little interest in trains. He never owned a model train and only traveled on Germany's InterCity Express high-speed trains twice before living on the network permanently just after he turned 16.

However, after finishing high school, a planned apprenticeship in computer programming fell through. While looking for what to do next, he came across a documentary about someone who had lived on trains.

“I thought I could do this,” Stolley said. “At first it was just an idea, such an unrealistic idea, but then I kept throwing myself at it… and then I thought, 'OK, I'm actually going to do this.'”

After initially trying to dissuade him, his parents now support him.

He bought a rail card that allowed him unlimited travel on the network and set off from his home in Fockbek, in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, towards Hamburg, from where he took a train night to Munich.

The first days were difficult. Stolley couldn't sleep at night – his railcard doesn't allow him to use overnight trains with beds – and frequently returned home to see his family.

However, he quickly got used to living on trains. He bought an air mattress that he used to sleep at night in the large luggage compartments of high-speed trains.

After a year, he upgraded his travel card to a first-class card – costing 5,888 euros ($6,310) a year – allowing him access to more spacious cars and Deutsche Bahn lounges .

Now he no longer needs the air mattress and can sleep so comfortably upright in a train seat that he has difficulty sleeping in a regular bed.

“In a normal bed, I miss the rocking of the train that shakes me a little at night,” he said.

Stolley even works on the road, doing a part-time job programming applications for a startup.

He frequently travels to major cities, such as the capital, Berlin, or Frankfurt, the country's financial center. He also often visits smaller towns and travels through the Alps, and has been to Basel in Switzerland and Salzburg in Austria, just across the German border – the southernmost points covered by his rail card.

Yet living on Germany's rail network, which critics say is in a sorry state after years of underinvestment, is not without its challenges.

“Delays and other issues are certainly an everyday affair,” Stolley said.

Train staff staged regular strikes to demand better pay and conditions, crippling the network and forcing Stolley to sleep at airports.

Asked what it thought about someone choosing to live on board its train permanently, Deutsche Bahn declined to comment.

Yet while life on Germany's creaky railways can sometimes be a headache, it can also have unexpected benefits: Stolley found love during his travels, meeting his girlfriend in the central station lounge from Cologne.

He said he didn't know how long he would continue to live as a postmodern digital bum – maybe another year or five.

“Right now I’m having a lot of fun and experiencing so much every day,” he said.