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Comment by eliaspro | Hacker News Reader

You're out of luck, if none of the route segments is served by Deutsche Bahn (which is often the case for regional routes), because then you'll be unable to buy your ticket using the most common nation-wide app DB Navigator.

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That's not true, they sell tickets for many regional transport associations.

https://www.bahn.de/angebot/regio/verbuende

Not all of them, I'm sure, but all of the major ones seem to be covered.

I'm using it every day, because it's better than using the association's own app, which is not saying much. Or I used to, anyway, now I'm doing the 49 EUR thing.

There are regions where the DB app will only sell you tickets that cross the region's borders, but not tickets that are wholly inside the region. There's even at least one region I know of that straight up does not do online ticketing. You have to buy physical tickets, in person, at a machine.

DB Navigator for regional transport is hit-and-miss. I've been using it a lot around the southwest, but it's fickle and sometimes fails to offer me tickets for no clear reasons (seemingly at random; the same connections by the same companies work on other days). And don't forget that a lot of the German hinterlands has very spotty to no mobile data.

Or worse, you can still buy the ticket, but it's not valid for any trains actually in service. This stuff is really non-obvious. For example, train operators can license certain Deutsche Bahn trademarks without accepting Deutsche Bahn tickets.

Where? As far as I know, all the Deutsche Bahn Tickets for regional traffic use the Deutschlandtarif, which is accepted in all "normal" (excluding heritage trains and the likes) regional trains in all of Germany.

Is the Metronom (Hamburg-Bremen) covered by the 49€ ticket, too?

A quick Google seems to suggest that that's the case, and their website is advertising ways to buy the Deutschlandticket pretty clearly.

The example I had in mind was for an S-Bahn in Karlsruhe (operated by AVG, using the S-Bahn trademark under license, but otherwise unaffiliated with Deutsche Bahn) which was considered a tram, not a regular regional train while it traveled within city limits. This meant that DB tickets weren't necessarily valid, and AVG claimed as much. I expect AVG recognizes the bw tarif under which DB sells train tickets, so this probably is no longer an issue.

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