Kim and I had "couchettes," which are like bunk beds but there are 3 on top of each other instead of 2. Like this:
We had reserved the 2 bottom bunks, so we didn't have to do any climbing. When we got to our car, there was already a family of 3 there - our roommates for the night! There was a mother & 2 kids, probably about 7 and 9. The mother asked if one of us would switch beds with her because she couldn't climb the ladder- Kim agreed to. Then the mother said okay: her & her daughter would have the bottom bunks, Kim and I would have the middle bunks, and her son would have a top bunk. Kim and I corrected her - since we had reserved both bottom bunks, and only given her one, we got one bottom bunk and one middle bunk. Because of the confusion, we showed each other our reservation papers - and we had BOTH reserved the same bed! This wasn't going to work, especially if more people came to our compartment, so I went to grab a conductor. When he got to our compartment, he looked at my reservation papers and told me I was fine, then had a conversation with the woman in German, and she packed up and left!
For a glorious 5 minutes Kim and I had the compartment to ourselves. And then our roommates showed up. Four Italian eighteen-year-olds were to be sleeping above us, who immediately stripped down to their boxers and -thankfully- jumped into bed. We'd heard horror stories of overnight train-roommates who stay up all night talking and drinking, and we were relieved to find that they were not that type of roommate.
I slept pretty well for the cramped compartments, because the motion of the train lulled me to sleep, like it does on all other train rides. There was no stopping at stations, since it was a night train it only picks people up then drops them off at the end. However, the train did randomly stop a couple of times and sit on the tracks for a few minutes, which isn't unusual but did wake me up each time. One time I woke up and the train was stationary, so I tried to get back to sleep. After an hour of dozing but not really sleeping, I realized that the train was STILL stationary.
I went out into the hallway and looked out the window, and we were in what looked like a station, because there were rows and rows of tracks all next to each other, but there were no signs saying where we were. The train doors were open, and although most people were still in their compartments, some were outside the train hanging out on the platform. I went back to report my findings to Kim, and while we were wondering what was going on we heard a loudspeaker announcement from the train conductor. He introduced the message by saying he was going to say it in German, English and Swedish. We listened to the German first, and picked out the words "police" and "helicopter" and possibly "fire." The English announcement never came - just silence between the German and the Swedish!
I went to find somebody to ask, and a British man told me that from what he gathered:
1) We'd been stopped for 3 hours
2) There had been some sort of police work on the tracks
3) We were going to take a ferry to Sweden
I thought this meant that we should be prepared to pack up and get off the train, since we'd be taking a ferry instead. This was frustrating because it was already almost 8am and we didn't even know what country we were in. There was no way we'd get to Malmo by 8:30am. Kim and I waited for something to happen, and eventually the train started to move very, very slowly until we were in what looked like a tunnel.
An announcement came on, including the promised English, and it said something along the lines of, "sorry for the delay, we would like to treat you to a free breakfast on deck 7." Slowly Kim and I realized that the entire TRAIN was on the ferry (they can do that!?) and drowned our misery in tons and tons of free food.
After further discussion, we gathered that the ferry ride would take 3 hours and 45 minutes, so we would be at least 4 hours late getting to Malmo, and that the train was supposed to catch a substantially earlier ferry, around 3am, but it missed the ferry because it was delayed due to German policework on the tracks.
During breakfast, a train employee came over to talk to us about our plans - had we missed any connections? Did we need them to work out new reservations for new trains since we'd missed other ones? We told him we were headed to Malmo - AND HE SAID THE TRAIN DIDN'T GO TO MALMO. This was surprising to us, since:
1) We had asked in Berlin for tickets to Malmo
2) They had sold us tickets to Malmo
3) Our ticket said "Malmo" on it
4) The departures board at the train station had listed our train as going to Malmo
5) The platform in Berlin had announced the train as Malmo
The train employee kindly informed us that Malmo was closed due to construction, and that we should get off in Lund, and from there take a train to Copenhagen.
After eating, we headed back down to our train-on-a-ferry to sleep some more. Soon enough, our Italian roommates were back and for some reason singing "Hey Jude" repeatedly. We arrived in Lund and successfully departed to Copenhagen immediately!
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