Originally Posted by
bruce80
Ah, and something more: If you are on tight connections and need to buy a ticket at the train station, be sure to be one of the first people (no - be the first) to get off the Skytrain and hurry - I mean it, hurry - towards the station, as there are only 4 ticketing machines available for the whole bunch of people getting off the Skytrain - and expect a majority to need more than 10 minutes to get their tickets out of the machines, as most people there don't know how to handle them.
Useful to know (although I think the OP is travelling in the other direction - arriving at DUS by train). Also, these days you can buy virtually all DB tickets online at bahn.de, and print them out yourself in advance - which can save precious minutes spent queuing at a ticket machine when trying to make a tight connection. (This is also useful at NUE, and perhaps other airports, where there's no DB ticket machine at the airport, but (some) DB tickets are valid on the U-bahn into town - so you don't need to buy a separate ticket for the U-bahn if you have a self-print DB ticket).
Slightly OT: I wish airports would put railway ticket machines
inside the baggage hall. That way, you could easily buy your train tickets while waiting for baggage to arrive. A few airports seem to do this for car park tickets, but I don't think I've seen any that do it for train services.
My night-train memory, 2011 timetable:
Europe: R440, R441, CNL456, EN477, 60477, D347, D498, 435, 824
SE Asia: 69, SE3