It took two trains to get there - an ICE train from Berlin to Erfurt via Leipzig, and then a slower local train from there to Meiningen. Both legs took about 2 hours each. Our train arrived at much the same time as Kevin"s excursion did, we caught up on the platform and got some lunch from a platform vendor before walking to the workshops.
Eventually the time came when Kevin had to re-board his excursion train and head back off to Frankfurt, with our public train leaving about 30 minutes later. I very much enjoyed the trip and was very glad we did it - and great to catch up with Kevin again. Sasha and I did agree though that 4 hours in each direction was quite a hike, and in the sweltering heat of our ICE train with broken air conditioning to Berlin we decided that exceptional circumstances we should try and avoid such long travelling times for day trips in the future. Sasha did make the comment that this trip would have fallen under the exceptional circumstances category regardless - she's been to train things with me before but I think this was the first where I had a train friend to bounce conversation off of about what we were seeing. She seemed to not mind the day"s outing which is quite something! The camera got a bit of exercise too, probably the most it had been used in Germany in a single day since we"d moved to Berlin!