Anywhere doesn't help you much. You want to stop at a station with sufficiently good connections to continue your travels.

This situation seems pretty unusual, even for the DB. A regional express train should have many more stops than that. It sounds a bit like they switched the train to a direct connection to the final stop because they switched to the other side of the rhine (so you can't make any of the other planned stops anyway).

The major mistake here was not making the stop in Troisdorf. At the point where they missed that they should have planned the earliest usable stop for the passengers that needed to leave there.

I would also assume that there is no safe way for the conductor to halt at any earlier stop. A safe halt would need to be planned at a higher level.

My experience with these "fixes" is that they are worse than the other worst solution (in this case, step out in Köln Süd and get some other train).

There is really A LOT going on through the tracks in NRW and Düsseldorf/Köln/Bonn. It's sad people just read an article like this and just blame it on the poor guy as if he was a monkey.

The guy actually wanted to do something nice (get people closer to Bonn, so they could change a train with an easier alternative). It didn't work out, but this shows how bad the sync with these systems is, and safety is and must be prioritized.

People don't understand how many freight trains travel on those tracks.

I mean, to an extent... like it would still give passengers an earlier opportunity to correct course.

If they got off at the next stop after troisdorf they could take the local bus back to Troisdorf (ten minute wait worst-case).

At later stations they could get on the train in the opposite direction (30 min wait worst-case).

Not if you live near the tracks! Obviously that’s a bit of a safety issue, though, not to mention taking a few minutes time from (potentially) hundreds of people to gain a few tens of minutes for yourself.