City ticket included for German IC trains validity

Question

I've bought a train ticket from Bremen to Juerich city without any BahnCard. On the ticket, it says "Bremen+City Jülich-Forschungsz., mit IC/EC"

Does it mean, I can take any train from my home (in Bremen North) to Bremen HBF (in Bremen center) and then starts my journey here?

Answer 1

The 'City-Ticket' in Bremen covers public transport in fare zones 100 and 101.

If you live within one of those zones, the ticket will cover the trip from your home to Bremen main station.

Answer 2

Yes, because "tarifliche Gleichstellung" (station grouping) applies. In such a case, you get a ticket that does not have the name of a specific station as start or endpoint, but the name of a station group. You can see that this applies to your case because the startpoint is listed as "Bremen" (the name of a station group) instead of "Bremen Hbf" (the name of a specific station). So you can start your trip at all stations in the station group of Bremen, which you can find on page 7 and 8 of this list in the second-to-last column. In the case of Bremen, the station group goes as far north as Bremen-Farge.

Explained differently, station grouping means that for long-distance tickets (> 100km) all stations in certain sets of stations are treated as if they were identical. The regulations for station groups are in this PDF in Section 3.7.

As mentioned by Tor-Einar, the City-Ticket option often also allows traveling to your startpoint. There are some important differences though:

• City-Ticket is valid for all public transport, with station grouping you must use trains only.
• City-Ticket is not included in super saving fares (Super Sparpreis), station grouping is.
• City-Ticket is available only in about 130 cities, station grouping also exists in many other smaller cities and towns, some of which have only a few thousand inhabitants.
• The covered area can be different. City-Ticket is usually valid in some specific zones of local public transport (current list), whereas for station grouping a different list of stations applies.
• City-Ticket is indicated by the explicit "+City" marker, station grouping is visible through the use of a name of a station group. However, the latter can be difficult to notice because there exists cases where the name of a station group is the same as the name of an existing station (e.g., "Hamburg-Harburg"), in which case you would need to check the trip distance to find out whether station grouping applies to your ticket.