Whether by air, rail or road – Hamburg has excellent transport links with all world regions. Hamburg Airport provides direct connections to Europe, North America, Africa and Asia. Along the Intercity-Express route (ICE), Berlin can be reached in 90 minutes by rail. As a major German motorway hub, Hamburg has excellent links with the whole of Central and Northern Europe.
www.mediaserver.hamburg.de/C. Spahrbier
Arrival by rail
With its four long-distance railway stations, Hauptbahnhof (centre), Dammtor (centre), Altona (west) and Harburg (south), Hamburg is perfectly embedded in the European high-speed network. This is complemented by ICE trains serving Lüneburg, Uelzen and Neumünster, and IC/EC trains serving various other towns in the region. With Hamburg as the railway hub of Northern Germany, all main cities in Germany can be reached within a few hours (e.g. Munich in 6 hours, Stuttgart in 5 hours, Cologne in 4 hours, Frankfurt/Main in 3 hours), while Northern European capitals such as Copenhagen and Stockholm can also be reached swiftly. www.bahn.com
Arrival by road
Hamburg is also the North German hub for road traffic. Southern Germany and Scandinavia are easily reached from the Hamburg Metropolitan Region by the A 7 motorway, while the A 1 (Lübeck–Bremen–Ruhr region) links Hamburg with the Baltic Sea and Western Germany, the A 24 leads to Berlin and Eastern Europe, and the A 23 (direction Heide) leads directly to the North Sea.
Arrival by air
With more than 150,000 flights and more than 13 million passengers per year, Hamburg’s state-of-the-art airport is served by 60 German and international airlines. Almost all of the German and European metropolitan regions can be reached in one to three hours. Nonstop intercontinental flights, e.g. to the Asian hub of Dubai and the US hub of New York take North Germans around the globe and bring all the world to Hamburg.
The S-Bahn rapid transit rail takes travellers from the airport to the city’s central train station in 25 minutes. The convenient, reliable trains run from the early morning hours to the late evening. www.hamburg-airport.de
Getting around Hamburg
The Hamburger Verkehrsverbund (HVV) operates an extensive S-Bahn/U-Bahn system connecting the city and the Hamburg Metropolitan Region with regular services every few minutes. Modern bus routes, port ferries and night buses complete the network. A large choice of low-cost tickets, as well as the HamburgCARD, are available for guests to the city. www.hvv.de and www.hadag.de (for port ferries).