CEII General Travel Help

I thought it might be useful to gather some general travel information about the Ruhr-area and Essen. A big caution though, I'm not a local and I'm going to travel there as a tourist, but I have at least picked up on things that can be helpful.

First of all some travel sites that I'm using a lot:
Wikitravel - Ruhr area
Trivago.com - hotel finder
Verkehrsverbund Rhein-Ruhr - public transportation (in English)

Airport - the closest airport is Düsseldorf. From there you can take both train and tram to Essen. It's not a very big airport though so it might be cheaper to fly elsewhere, but of course then you need to add transportation from that airport.

Car - if you are going to drive in the city of Essen, and most cities in the Ruhr area, you need an environmental sticker on your car. More information about that can be found here.

Electricity - if you are coming from the UK or US remember to pack an adaptor for your electrial charges. From the UK it should be enough with a socket adaptor, but from the US you might also need a voltage converter, since the German electrical sytem is packing 230 V compared to the US 120 V.

Geography - Essen is located in the Ruhr (German Ruhrgebiet) this area used to be Germany's industrial heart and most of the towns and cities have grown together. This makes the Ruhr considered the third largest Metropolitan area in Europe, after Paris and London.

Public transportation - public transportation within Ruhr is well established. There are loads of trains, trams, busses and subways. They are interconnected so that you can buy tickets that cover more than just one town. You can search for travel info and ticket information at Verkehrsverbund Rhein-Ruhr

 

It's 20-25 minutes by the local train.

 

In addition, Airport Cologne wouldn't be the worst choice as well. It's not so comfortable as Düsseldorf, but there's a train (called S6) that leaves for Essen from the main station. This means, one has to change train once (airport - main station - Essen), but there are faster connections as I just found out.

I suggest to visit www.bahn.de for more details for travelling between cities.

 

So after having gotten myself from Düsseldorf Airport to my hotel in Essen I've picked up a few things about the public transportation. So I thought I'd post them here and hopefully they can be of some help.

The main site for planning your travel is the Verkehrsverbund Rhein-Ruhr for trips in the whole region, if you only want to go inside Essen there is the EVAG site. If you fly into Düsseldorf you need to buy a ticket with tariff C to get to Essen on the regional train.

I got quite confused by the different trains, but I think these were the options:
RE 1, direction Hamm (Westf), 25 min journey time
RE6, direction Minden (Westf), 25 min journey time
S1, direction Essen, or Bochum, or Dortmund, 40 min journey time (this is more of a tram than a train so more stops)

All of these trains departed from platform 5.
A ticket from the airport to Essen costs €10.50. You can buy the tickets already at the airport, but then you need to time stamp them at the airport train station. Those little time stamp machines are not down on the platforms, I had to run down and up a few times to find one right next to the main ticket machines. They are small and yellow.

If you use the subway in Essen (U-bahn) and doesn't go further than 1,5 km you can use a ticket called "Kurzstrecke" which is cheaper, €1,50 vs. normal A tariff €2,50. If you are going to do three or more journeys in a day the cheapest thing is to buy a day ticket. The time stamp machines can be found on the trains themselves.