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Can you guess which countries use each of the three guardrail types?
Can you guess which countries use each of the different bollard types?
Which countries use the different chevron types?
Have you committed the pedestrian crossing sign stripe counts to memory?
Germany never picked one guardrail. Two profiles are pressed into the steel on German roads, the A and the B, and which one you are looking at depends on which state paid for the road. That makes the crash barrier one of the few clues that splits Germany from the inside, and this page is the full list of who builds with what.
A German guardrail is a Schutzplanke, or Leitplanke in everyday speech: a
steel beam bolted to posts along the edge of the carriageway, shaped so that it
bends and absorbs a hit rather than snapping. The shape doing that work is
rolled into the beam, and the two shapes Germany rolls are called Profil A and
Profil B.
They are not interchangeable. Bolting a length of A to a length of B needs a purpose-made adapter, so a road authority that starts with one stays with it, and a state's choice outlives whoever made it. That is why this is a clue at all: it is a decision from decades ago that is still standing by the side of the road today.
Roughly four fifths of Germany's barrier by length is B, which is what makes the A profile worth spotting. The barrier is on every Autobahn, most Bundesstraßen and plenty of ordinary rural roads, it is large, and it sits at exactly the height a car-mounted camera looks at.
The failure modes are all about light. Flat overcast light and a rail seen straight on will hide the shadow that separates the two bands of a B profile and leave it looking like an A. Fresh snow, road grime and a rail replaced after a crash all do the same thing. When in doubt, find a second stretch of barrier further down the road rather than trusting the first one.
One more trap: a state that appears on both lists below is not a state where you picked the wrong profile. Three of them genuinely run both, usually because the motorway network and the state's own roads were built to different habits.
| Profile | Where you see it |
|---|---|
| Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Berlin, Brandenburg, Hesse, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, North Rhine-Westphalia, Saarland, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia11 states | |
| Bavaria, Berlin, Bremen, Hamburg, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, Schleswig-Holstein8 states |
In these three either picture is a correct answer, so the rail narrows Germany down without settling it. Read something else here: the plate, the street sign font, the bollard.
The useful half of this game. A single-band rail is a minority of Germany's barrier, and the states that build with nothing else form one block in the north west, from the Dutch border up to Denmark, plus Rhineland-Palatinate on the middle Rhine. The rest of this list is the states that run both profiles, where an A rail is possible rather than expected.
The German default, and a clue before you even get to Germany: most of Europe builds with the A profile and nothing else, so a two-band rail puts you on a short list of countries with Germany at the top of it. Inside the country it rules out the north west block and little else, which is why the picture above is the one worth chasing.
The shape rolled into the steel beam. The A profile reads as a single band with one rib through the middle. The B profile reads as two bands stacked one above the other, on a rail of the same depth. The two are not compatible, so joining a run of A to a run of B needs a special adapter piece, and that incompatibility is why German states have never converged on one.
Rhineland-Palatinate, Schleswig-Holstein, Bremen, Lower Saxony and Hamburg build with the A profile, and it is also in service alongside the B profile in North Rhine-Westphalia, Berlin and Bavaria. Every other state is B only, which works out at roughly four fifths of Germany's barrier by length.
Yes, in two steps. The two-band B profile is rare across most of Europe, so seeing one is already a hint that you are in Germany. Once you are in Germany the profile splits the country roughly north west against the rest, which is a genuine region clue in a country where most of the usual clues are national.
Because road authorities in Germany are run by the states, and each buys the barrier its own standard specifies. Nobody has managed a national agreement, and the cost of adapters between the two profiles means it is cheaper for a state to keep installing whatever it already has than to switch.
Schutzplanke is the German technical term for a crash barrier, and Leitplanke is the everyday word for the same thing. Both refer to the steel beam and post system along the side of a road, which is the object this game asks about.
The profile is also a country clue one level up, in European Guardrails. The other roadside trainers are European Bollards, European Chevrons and European Pedestrian Signs.
