Cancelling trains to preserve on-time statistics is the kind of perverse activity you get when metrics aren’t correctly setup.
A cancelled train should be counted as delayed until the next train (close to the worst-case scenario) so as to discourage it.
But the real problem with deteriorating service is that people will put up with it for a long time - as long as they get to where they’re going eventually.
But they’ll stop choosing the train, and over 20 years you’ll find that everyone has moved to private vehicles or alternate transportation methods.
And then you have no riders and trying to get back on track will take 20 years or more.
People claim that they cancel trains to try and preserve the statistics, but there's not really any evidence of it.
The actual reason is that if a train is too late, it will conflict too much with the other scheduled trains and there's simply no room for it. Keeping the delayed train will just cause more delays for other trains on the same route, because German trains are scheduled with very high frequency.
E.g. where I live in Cologne, there's typically a high speed train every 20 to 30 minutes to Frankfurt. If one train is delayed by 30 minutes, then suddenly you have two (ore more) trains right on top of eachother heading to the same destination, both on very very congested lines that theyre simultaneously trying to do repairs and expansions to.
Those are the sorts of situations where it makes sense to just cancel the train, not because of metrics but because of actual track constraints.
The main thing people dont understand about Germany's train system is the scale of it. The network is physically very large, but also very densely packed, and has very frequent trains.
It looks more like a circuit board than a traditional transit map. That's why this problem is so hard to solve and will take a long time and a lot of investment before it improves.
What they should be tracking is average delayed journeys. A train may be late by 15 minutes, but if that means I'll miss a connecting train, that might delay my journey by an hour or more. That would also take care of the issue you're describing.
Indeed, that'd be a more useful metric. Very hard to measure well though and probably actually leaves open more room for them to game the metrics than the current system does.
Keep in mind that for the majority of trains in Germany, nobody bought a specific ticket for that journey. We just use the DeutschlandTicket which is a flat subscription of 58€/month, which gives unlimited access to busses, trams, and regional trains (basically everything but high speed trains).
With the deutschalnd ticket, you typically just walk onto a train of your choice and go wherever you want. They dont actually know where all the travellers are going or even how many people there are
Yeah I know you cannot track all journeys. Deutschlandticket, BahnCard 100, and similar things will be invisible. You can track the ones booked through the app though, and with a high enough sample rate you should get sufficiently close to the truth, unless there is a bias I haven't thought of yet.
You could also select random virtual journeys, I suppose. In arbitrary units you should at least be able to measure whether DB is improving or not. You could even delegate this to an independent organization. Actually, now that I think of it, isn't the API public? I'm reminded of the talk by D. Kriesel about DB data mining.
>> The main thing people dont understand about Germany's train system is the scale of it. The network is physically very large, but also very densely packed, and has very frequent trains.
> A train may be late by 15 minutes, but if that means I'll miss a connecting train, that might delay my journey by an hour or more.
Speaking from experience taking the subway in Shanghai, if a train is 15 minutes late, and it still manages to arrive before the train that was scheduled to follow it, it cannot be true that the network is "very densely packed" or that it has "very frequent trains".
A subway is very different from an intercity railway network. For one, there's probably fewer different routes on the subway so trains conflict with each other less. Also, a subway doesn't have to accomodate freight traffic as well.
The German intercity rail network certainly identifies more lines, around 57 to Shanghai's 18, but this isn't directly related to the complexity of the topology. For example, line 14 appears to begin in Aachen and dead-end into Berlin, at which point line 95 begins in Berlin and runs out to Poland. As far as the routing is concerned, those could be the same line. But they're given different numbers. When the same thing happens (at a smaller scale) in Shanghai at the west end of line 9, the tail bit of the line going to Songjiang is still called "line 9". Note that if you want to ride out to Songjiang, at some point you're going to have to get off your "line 9" train and walk over to another station where a different "line 9" train will take you the rest of the way.
Discounting that, the two layouts appear to be roughly similar on the fundamentals, if differently scaled.
The most obvious difference is that the routes between major German cities are served by several lines. This is clearly meaningful in some cases; line 29 from Munich to Nuremberg continues north to Hamburg via Berlin while line 41 from Munich to Nuremberg continues northwest to Dortmund via Frankfurt and Cologne. On the other hand, line 8 from Munich to Nuremberg parallels line 29 for the entire length of line 8 (line 8 stops in Berlin, but line 29 doesn't).
My first guess would be that conflicts arise from the fact that the German trains are on the ground, and when their tracks cross, conflict can occur. This isn't true of a subway system; when subway tracks cross, they do it at different altitudes, allowing both tracks to be in use simultaneously.
Not only do tracks cross, trains also share tracks and platforms. In Shanghai only Line 3 and 4 share tracks and platforms.
Your map only shows ICE/IC lines, there are many more other lines which share the same tracks. This shows a more complete picture: https://www.deviantart.com/costamiri/art/Transit-diagram-of-... but it still doesn't show international trains and freight.
How does that affect the question of whether the network is densely packed or whether it has frequent trains?
Passenger trains from Frankfurt to Cologne are infrequent because there is virtually no demand to move between cities 120 miles apart. Because the trains are infrequent, they aren't dense on the tracks.
But that's the opposite of saying that they are frequent and densely packed.
Read up on what affects railway bandwidth. A densely packed 250km/h line won't appear similar to a densely packed subway line to a bystander despite of maxing out its abilities.
I agree. Funnily enough I had a journey sped up due to a delay recently. I had a change, and the train I was changing to was delayed so that I could make the earlier one which I should have missed had it been on time.
> The main thing people dont understand about Germany's train system is the scale of it. The network is physically very large, but also very densely packed, and has very frequent trains.
And that's a wonderful thing, you can reach "everywhere" with a train in Germany. That's something I wanted to say that we need to keep in mind when we see a headline like this. It's a sense in which Germany's train service is one of the best in the world.
Yeah, the dependency graph for scheduling trouble to procreate is massive. Not comparable at all to a star topology as in France, or to a two coasts topology as in Japan. Closest thing might be Switzerland, but while that network is also very dense, it's also so small it might just as well be compared to some of the larger subway networks.
And then there's a pet hypothesis of mine, that a factor in the unreliability of German rail is the famous absence of a general speed limit on the Autobahn: that this might make DB strive for fast best case connection times more than it would if driving was slower, pushing them to schedule an unrealistic house of cards with not enough slack to recover from the unexpected.
Yeah, both Switzerland and the Netherlands have distributed networks like Germany, but their relatively small size means that they don't need to design around speed, and can focus more on synchrony.
That said, this doesn't mean it's impossible the fix Germany's trains. Germany's network did work quite well before, and it can again. The fixes are happening right now, but it's going to get worse before it gets better, because all the construction that needs to be done interferes with the network.
I have been to places in Germany where it was a 45 minute drive to the nearest train station. I'm not talking about somewhere in the Black Forest but an actual village where people live. It's great for cities but for villages I typically take the car.
Yeah. While I understand why Germans are so frustrated by BD these days, as a Canadian living , the train network here blows my mind constantly. It has problems, but it's still incredible.
Those numbers are pretty much irrelevant. Canadians arent evenly distributed throughout the country (nor throughout Ontario. That province is empty other than a tiny corner of it), the overwhelming majority of them live in a few areas that are quite population dense (i.e. metro-Vancouver area, Edmonton/Calgary axis, and the corridor from Toronto to Montreal.
Besides, Canada used to have a much more extensive train network back in early 1900s when the population was a tenth of what it is now.
Canada could have functioning train networks if we wanted them.
> where I live in Cologne, there's typically a high speed train every 20 to 30 minutes to Frankfurt. If one train is delayed by 30 minutes, then suddenly you have two (ore more) trains right on top of eachother heading to the same destination, both on very very congested lines that theyre simultaneously trying to do repairs and expansions to. Those are the sorts of situations where it makes sense to just cancel the train, not because of metrics but because of actual track constraints.
Never mind congested lines, remember the trains are full of paying passengers!
(Let's assume both trains were more than half-full of passengers, which is fairly typical), what would you plan to do with the passengers on the cancelled train who can't get on the other train because there is literally no room for them?
I recently travelled on a badly-delayed ICE train (to Frankfurt Airport, as it happens) and it was running so late I ended up rebooking my flight from the stationary ICE because I lost confidence we would get to the airport in time for my flight.
I’m curious how Japan’s train network deals with these issues. That map looks like the train network in Tokyo alone. Japan’s network is also quite large, densely packed, and with very frequent trains. Despite Japan being well known for timeliness of its trains, it does have its occasional delays, but not often enough to think about.
That's always the case for through stations, I believe. However even terminus stations don't have their platforms locked to a fixed destination. Milan Central station has 24 platforms and each of them hosts multiple routes. Rome Termini has 32 platforms, same thing. You can monitor departures at this link, if you are very patient to keep track of them
Its true that the network is quite dense and used by also cargo trains, but there is no denying that things got worse and worse. I constantly experience delay to do some stuff not working. I forgot even the minute threshold when a train is still punctual according to DB. I believe it's 10min by now, which can be deadly if you need to switch trains :)
In the US I've been on a intercity Amtrak that was so late they combined it with the train ahead of it and had a massively long train (it had to stop twice at one or two shorter stations).
Re-reading up on ETCS-Level3, that would enable all of this. We're just fucking slow to implement it, while having let our infrastructure decay, and intentionally built back. Like switches to change tracks, for overtaking slower trains, if the other side is free, too expensive to maintain, da da da ah jetzt ja! Dumm gelaufen...
Selbst Schuld Ihr Arschkrampen!
ALAAF!
And finally fence all that shit in, and let the rats and crows have their fun with all the suicidals. No need to close the track. Light a candle, if you must, just another one bites the dust. Yawn.
> But they’ll stop choosing the train, and over 20 years you’ll find that everyone has moved to private vehicles or alternate transportation methods.
This is a country with a $2.68 per gallon gas tax, compared to $0.51 on average in the US (€0.60 v. €0.11 per liter). This is partly justified as nudging people to use less carbon intensive transport. That nudge works a lot less well when the lower carbon alternative is painfully worse than your car.
Car ownership is pretty expensive. But holistically speaking it's not more expensive than the Deutschland Ticket, because it gives you access to cheaper housing options that you wouldn't be able to live in if you depended solely on public transport.
Can confirm for the US too. I live in a rural county with zero public transport, but when I tell city friends what the lot cost and the property tax on it, they have to hold back tears.
There's a way to combine those, and some countries have it done well (I believe this includes Germany) - you have a rail network that is good enough that you have small stops on feeder lines in rural areas; if you want to be rural you can be a mile from a train that gets you to a moderate-sized city where you can get the fast train.
>This is a country with a $2.68 per gallon gas tax, compared to $0.51 in the US.
Irrelevant comparison since US is a widely different animal to most European countries.
It might be expensive compared to the US, but Germany is still one of the countries with the most affordable income-to-cost ratios for car ownership in the Eurozone, so car commuting is incredibly common, especially for those not living in densely populated metro areas.
Well yes, not difficult to see why. Germany is quite big and quite sprawled, and given how expensive home ownership is in big metro areas people choose commute longer in exchange for affordable housing.
And also the government gives you tax rebates for your fuel expenses the further you have to commute for work which is a double edged sword.
Not sure about Germany but in Spain tax on petrol is 44%. At current prices for petrol (1.3€/l) you need to pay around 78€ to fill a sedan (assuming 60 litre deposit) of which 34.3€ will go to the government.
> when metrics aren’t correctly setup.
All management is about massaging metrics, things are getting 'better', here, see this chart. It is going up/down.
Executive (VP+): I like to see a burndown chart (or some other format). I want a dog in a cat form factor.
One time I did a cross-country move from Germany to the NL. Booked myself a 1st class ticket, because I had a ton of luggage and wanted a chill experience. Of course-- train is canceled, which means my seat reservation is also canceled. Next train comes and it's standing room only.
So I paid 3x for comfort, only to get stuck standing in the aisle with all my luggage for 6 hours and an additional transfer. Yes, I can get the ticket refunded, but the point is not about the money. What should I expect out of a service that can so easily be completely downgraded at a moment's notice?
At least you were able to make a seat reservation. In The Netherlands I frequently had to stand in first class while paying €600+ a month for the subscription. Ended up buying a car, that way I had a guaranteed seat with climate control.
Something similar happened to me, but with Lufthansa. Canceled my flight 1 day in advance and told me to take a hike, didn't even bother to find/recommend another flight. Germany has really deteriorated, it's no longer matching its past reputation of getting things done.
With a flight, an airline that cancels a flight with less than two weeks notice owes you cash compensation of 250, 400, or 600 Euros depending on the length of the flight. The airline can only avoid this obligation if the cancellation was due to extraordinary circumstances outside their control.
A similar regulation for trains would likely tighten up reliability, though it could also raise ticket prices.
I think the time limit to request compensation under EU261/2004 in Germany is 3 years. If this happened within the past 3 years, you can demand that they pay you.
This summer I took a DB train from Amsterdam to Berlin. Being from the midwest USA, I didn't have a lot of experience with trains so I bought a first class ticket. The air and power in my car weren't working. There was no beverage car or service so we sat sweating to death. After a couple hours they gave in and told us to go to another car. Then at the next stop someone got on and yelled at me because I was in his assigned seat.
I record my travels using travelynx and this is how Deutsche Bahn has been faring:
- 2022: 15512 km travelled, spent 150:23 in trains, timetable: 148:42
- 2023: 9818 km travelled, spent 121:01 in trains, timetable: 118:39
- 2024: 11614 km travelled, spent 129:28 in trains, timetable: 127:48
- 2025: 10636 km travelled, spent 116:21 in trains, timetable: 109:58
This year was skewed upwards by a 3 hour delay because some teenagers managed to get into a railway tunnel causing a track closure for multiple hours...
A lot of times the time you save by going for high speed rail is still worth it.
Two people from my team (French) went to Munich from Paris by train. They wanted to be climate conscious.
After they spend untold hours waiting for trains that were late or cancelled, they told me that this is the last time they care for pollution in Germany. Will fly and drive and show the midfle finger everytime they see a railway.
As you can imagine they were pretty heated up after this journey.
Then they took the plane to Munich last year and got stuck with a massive snow fall, there were pictures of planes tilting when parking because of the snow.
Last time I had to go somewhere in Germany I used a Flixbus instead of their "high-speed" trains. The fact that I was willingly subjecting myself to a Flixbus, not because of price but because of reliability, really tells you something about the state of trains in Germany.
For Americans: Flixbus a cheap bus service which is often used by people who are not really bothered by social norms.
I've tried them once, and my experience with Flixbus was a disaster. They optimize for cheapness above everything else.
Their drivers can't do anything except scan your ticket and deny entrance if the computer says no. They don't speak any local language or English. Any minor problem cascades in delays of half a day. Their bus stops were druggie/thief zones where I felt really unsafe. After their train was 2 hours late, I was a minute late for my connection. The bus driver saw us running to his bus, smiled, waved at us, closed his door and drove away, showing his middle finger out of the window.
Do people on Grayhound busses clip their toenails in sight of everyone? Is there open drug use? Do people bring bluetooth speakers and party in the back?
In that case, yes, Flixbus is similar to Grayhound.
> Waning reliability is but one of many problems for state-owned Deutsche Bahn, which is operating at a loss and regularly subjects its passengers to poor or no Wi-Fi access, seat reservation mix-ups, missing train cars and "technical problems" — a catch-all reason commonly cited by conductors over the train intercom.
As someone who fairly often travels by German ICE (not their regional trains), I've only ever experienced the timetable unreliability.
WiFi is fairly reliable and much much better than for example the Dutch railway (NS) WiFi which never seems to work, and I can't remember the last time it didn't work on an ICE. I've never had any seat reservation mix ups or (knowingly) missing train cars; the last two I've experienced only once in Europe, on a cross border train from Slovenia to Austria, with the seat booked via the ÖBB on a Slovenian train.
When these ICE's are on time and show up, I like them a lot. The seats are very comfortable, there's food service in the train, the seat reservations aren't thát high, and are optional (unlike say high speed rail in Italy, where there's a 15 euro required seat reservation on top of the ticket price), the staff is consistently friendly and so far (I think) they haven't joined the annoying recent trend to put digital ads on the same monitor as the in train timetable.
More so, I really really like the Deutsche Bahn app and use it for trains all over Europe.
Reading this article makes me ask myself if the route and type of train matters, but also that the article didn't really add anything new from what wasn't already known. With their ongoing frequent delays DB made them an easy target for anything under the sun, but comparatively to other trains in Europe, at least for DB ICE's, delays aside, I feel they're doing quite alright.
As an occasional ICE traveler, I can confirm the Wifi, I'm at the point where I don't even bother logging on to the free wifi but just use my phone hotspot. I'd guess it's dependent on the route; Berlin-Munich definitely has dropouts.
It's really a pity for a large part of international train travel too, given Germany's central position in Europe. Many people I know (moi incluis) would really like to take the train for holiday or work travel (instead of airplane) but it's just not worth the risk of having to deal with Deutsche Bahn. Holland to Denmark by train, tried it once, never again.
I've been told that since the privatization, the funding was split between DB paying for maintenance while the state provided funds for replacement and new lines. Allegedly this provided an incentive to let things deteriorate until they needed replacement.
Projects are planned, coordinated and funds allocated far in advance, so if the government can't agree on a budget and projects are shelved or canned, restarting the process causes a significant delay.
To clarify: Deutsche Bahn is still 100% government owned. It operates both its train service and the railroad infrastructure in fully owned subsidiaries.
And that's exactly what's not reflected in management success metrics. They are basically incentivized to steal from their owners through systematic neglect, what could possibly go wrong.
I think it's only possible to understand German politics in two ways: either nobody in politics understands incentives, or they understand incentives much better than the voters and are fully exploiting this fact.
If you lookup the details about the decision to build and construction of Stuttgart 21[1] it's an insane mix of corruption, nepotism and incompetence. Partially also a result of laws changing and allowing privatisation of public infrastructure.
This satire [2] about it on German TV is 6 years old now and the project is still increasing in cost and being delayed. It's a pit without a bottom now.
I moved to Germany from Southern California in 2002 and as a conscientious objector to gridlock and indeed any grid whatsoever, I experienced very distinct happiness at the change of transportation paces between those two worlds, and the very first thing I did was get myself a DB (Deutsche Bahn) membership, which gave me so many nice memories.
I'm very fond of those years of easy train rides all over that part of Europe, and indeed internally within Germany, too. The overnight trains to Munich and Hamburg, Berlin and Vienna (ÖBB membership too), the easy rides between towns all over the Rührgebiet and NRW, the delightful weekend trips to Wuppertal and Bonn and so on. The sleeper cabins, the disco car, the wonderful cold beers served during a summer sojourn to The Hague, and so on. Yes, German trains could get you around, and connected, and after all - the rail systems of Europe are a reason to live there.
So I'm kind of saddened to hear of the demise of things, having left Germany for another land with well-laid rail (Austria), which I use with little sense of a lack of quality. But I do remember days of being very impressed with Germanys' transportation services .. it seems the nation of unlimited speed limits on the autobahn did, in those days, have superlative rail as well.
(Still, that was ±20 years ago. I suppose I shouldn't be that shocked to see time take its toll.)
I remember 20 years ago where you could just impromptu hop onto a train to Paris, party for the weekend and come back Sunday evening.
I just checked online with the Dutch Railways:
- Train that leaves in one hour (18:00), arrives at 21:40 just in time to party. 148 euro!
- Train that leaves 21:00, arrives at 10:35 the next morning. You'll miss the party plus you can't even book the train online for some reason. Multiple transfers and you need to sleep on a bench in Brussels between 00:15 and 07:30
Then for the train back:
- Train that leaves at 17:50, arrives at 22:30, decent times, 185 euro!
- Train that leaves at 20:50, arrives at 08:20 the next morning, right in time for work. Can't book it online. This time your are sleeping on a bench at Antwerpen between 00:25 and 05:50
If you are with four people, just drive the five hours to Paris instead. Have one person be sober. So much better than the train. I'm sure the fuel and tire wear are less than the €1332 in train tickets you would have with the four of you.
At least Germany has trains that go places. Ireland ripped most of their tracks out in the 50's and now there are two separate rail networks that are "joined" by taxi between Heuston and Connoly station in Dublin. Going from Sligo to Ballina (both on the west coast) means going through Dublin. I don't think any airport in Ireland is served by rail.
Fun fact; there used to be about _six_ terminus stations. Harcourt and Broadstone are gone, though parts of their lines have become parts of the luas system. Pearse used to be a terminus, but the loop line in the 19th century linked it in to Connolly, and it’s now a through station. Connolly used to be two separate termini for different companies, which is why it has such an anwkward internal layout.
There was supposed to be another ‘loop line’ linking Connolly to Heuston, but it never happened; DART Underground was also supposed to do that, but was cancelled. They just have a luas for now. The 2050 plan contains yet _another_ Heuston-Connolly link. Separately, Dart+ SW will provide a link from Connolly to a new station beside Heuston, which will be called Heuston West, presumably for maximum confusion of tourists. Trains from Connolly actually pass Heuston platform 10 (note that there is no platform 9 and never has been), but do not stop there.
The “loads of terminals in slightly awkward places” thing was actually a somewhat common feature of Victorian rail, but in most places they were at some point either consolidated or linked via metro. Irish Rail is simply preserving the highly inconvenient past :)
The worst bit is, it is likely that in the next couple of decades, Dublin will need a third terminus, because Connolly is more or less at capacity (and will be overcapacity after Dart+ is finished in 2030 or so) and can’t realistically be made larger.
Heh, isn't this funny? If someone I don't like wins an election, I will compare him to a dictator from another country. Using a completely unrelated thread. I am very intelligent.
With the still rising numbers for the AfD, Germany has plenty of reasons to worry about fascism without bothering to bring in American politics. Not everything is about Trump.
>
Don’t worry, at the current trajectory Germany will have a leader who “makes the trains run on time” in 10-15 years.
This historic comparison is absurd and demagogic. It is rather plausible that Germany will be ruled by some quite right-wing party or coalition with all its negative consequences.
I once had an idea to build an "probabilistic routing" system that "predicts" the likelihood of arriving at your destination. I.e. "you have a 85% likelihood of arriving in Berlin over Route Y instead of the official Route X because it uses train connection Z, which is historically always late". Obviously the bahn.de routing will only get you the "quickest calculated connection", but then during the travel I rarely have one day where there's no "your connection is not available anymore, please look for an alternative" error in the DB App. Especially if you have to change regional trains 3, 4 or 5 times.
Basically, my method of traveling with Deutsche Bahn has now gotten me back to improving my geography, because I developed an instinct of "try to get as physically close to where you want to go because as soon as you step outside the train, you have no guarantee that the next train will arrive". Rather than immediately planning the entire trip in advance, I'll say "okay I need to head roughly east and I know that larger cities have more frequent connections, so if anything happens, I prefer being stranded in a large city rather than being stuck in No Mans Land just because bahn.de says it's the fastest connection". This is very important when traveling late in the day, to not spend the night at a station.
The downside is obviously that German traveling has now degraded to a state of "medieval mode" traveling, where you have to plan your overnight stops at the local inn while fighting robbers, peasants and bicyclists for a spot in your horse carriage (sorry, I mean "RE3"). But when you are eventually stranded in Knitschendorf-Unteroblingen main station at 23:59pm because bahn.de said that there should be a train here and then staring into the night sky above you, at least you remember that traveling beyond the horizon has finally become magical again. Onto new adventures, travelers! See y'all at Mt. Doom.
As someone who travels on Deutsche Bahn regularly for work, everyone complains about the train system, but I honestly don't have a lot of issues, maybe a 20-minute delay every so often. I have spent 20 hours on the train system in the last month. I also fly a lot, especially to Germany, and this is far more unreliable and problematic. I was stranded last weekend in Paris due to delays on planes.
What's up with train services reliability in Europe? In my european corner here, I always have to give this advice to people who are new to the city: do NOT use the commute train ever if the deadline is serious and absolute (you got a work interview, a flight, a funeral). Trains get stopped in the middle of the trip, get delayed, or get cancelled all the time!
The solution is to lose even more of your time (as if public transport wasn't slow enough already) and be at the station already for the previous schedule of what you'd ideally need to take. But at that point, sometimes it's just better to go a longer route by subway, or if traffic is not bad, go ahead by car for those occasions.
I had to travel from Copenhagen to Berlin and Copenhagen to Basel several times, and I was open to choosing a train, but ended up flying to avoid dealing with DB. I really didn’t want the risk of missed connections cascading into messing up my appointments and vacation plans. And now with Fehmarn Belt link under construction, I ask myself, what’s even the point of shaving off a couple of hours from the trip duration if I can’t rely on DB for reliability anyway?
> It's not just crumbling tracks and sticky signals that need attention, he explains, but the network operator's overly bureaucratic infrastructure.
> "Every process at Deutsche Bahn is really complicated," Iffländer says. "It takes forever and that frustrates the people that actually want to do something."
Liberals, please take notes. It all started with the train service being privatized to increase efficiency and decrease costs.
The truth is even worse than the article suggests. I use the train every week. Switching train once after 10 Minutes with total started travel time of 2 hours. In only 20% of the time does that actually work. I am happy with only 20 minutes delay as often it ends up 45-60 minutes. Plus the cognitive load because I have to take care to change my travel route depending on where and when I and arrive and I have to regularly check the app, switch platform and alike.
Germany ate the captialism/markets/privatization for everything bug. If one wants to be optimistics it is that we are currently figuring out how to construct competitive markets (e.g. Flixtrain/Austrian/French rail is starting to compete on the rail network managed by DB).
In the decades they converted the German rail service (DB) into a stock company (AG) that is 100% owned by the state. The plan was to make it profitable then IPO it. So DB started to stop investing in order to become profitable short term. It never became profitable, so couldn't be floated. Now it also has a large infrastructure neglect debt on top (and is still 100% owned by the state with this weird structure with a CEO).
If it were a startup, one would just let it fail (creative destruction). Since it is obviously critical infrastructure, they should really have thought of this before. But same could be said about banks before 2008.
I can confirm. While there is a fair amount of train infrastructure, it is horribly unreliable. Plan for being delayed for 30-50% of the scheduled travel time.
I work in the German healthcare sector, which is partly public and partly private, and I have been doing so for a little over a year. The level of bureaucracy is staggering. There is no shortage of good ideas or genuine innovation, but most of them drown in administrative processes long before they reach implementation and are eventually abandoned.
Deutsche Bahn is a useful parallel. It was once fully public and later privatized, yet it still carries much of the old organizational DNA. The result is a company that adapts painfully slowly to changing market needs, compounded by chronic mismanagement.
Germany’s problem is not a lack of innovation or talent. It is structural: excessive bureaucracy, risk-averse management, and incentive systems that reward process compliance over outcomes. Until those change, progress will remain slow regardless of funding or good intentions.
> Deutsche Bahn is a useful parallel. It was once fully public and later privatized
A joint stock company fully owned by the government isn’t exactly privatized either. It’s still controlled and staffed by the government and is financed by government budgets, with tons of decision making constrained by being a public interest.
In practice it just means the management and financial structure operate as a pseudo corporation.
I also work in the German healthcare sector (as a contractor) and all of my permanently employed colleagues there have at least 4h of meetings per day. Some are closer to 6 hours. I also know people who worked at DB and they report the same thing. Large automotive companies (BMW, Mercedes, VW, etc.) are not much better. External contractors are the only reason any actual work is still getting done there because we have no access to anything on account of all the security red tape and thus don't get roped into as many meetings. Right now the German government is doing its best to destroy even that last bit of efficiency because they can't accept that the self-employed are trying to escape their greedy hands and are essentially outlawing freelance software development.
I, for one, am learning Polish and will leave this shithole country as soon as I can.
How? Mama Merkel squandered a decade of budget surplus in millions of "refugees" who crossed multiple safe countries to get to Germany while neglecting all infra and agreed to close nuclear plants. So now Germany is on its way to economic collapse.
TLDR: government "savings" on rail (between quotes because the economic loss resulting from large amounts of people not being able to work punctually no doubt far exceed the savings on the rail company)
> Chronic underinvestment in Germany has derailed yet another myth about Teutonic efficiency. The German railway Deutsche Bahn's long-distance "high-speed" trains are now among the least punctual in Europe. In October, the national rail operator broke its own poor record with roughly only half of all long-distance trains arriving without delay.
Scheduling trains is a complex problem involving many parameters, but the public see only one facet of it: is my train delayed or not?
Of course delays depend on budget and investments, and bureaucracy.
But not only.
For instance, comparing high speed trains in Germany and France can give the impression that German trains are ineficient and slow, but Germany being a much less centralized country, which is good, trains have to make many more stops, oftentimes leading to more complex scheduling and not being able to reach the top speed between stops, and thus less time to catch up on small delays.
Similarly, there are different policies regarding international trains vs national trains, or freight vs passenger, and also different variables they can optimize for: number of delays, total duration of delays, availability of emergency paths, etc, and various policies will yield different sentiment regarding "is my train on time".
You are trying to add a lot of nuance to a topic which is just not very nuanced. Trains in germany are a nightmare because of decades of mismanagement. All the rest is copium, as the kids say.
Maybe, but there are some things that, when they do not work, easily give the impression that someone somewhere hasn't done his job properly, because it looks simple and easy from the point of view of the user but in reality are quite complex. Having met a few people working in this field in the past, I have the impression train networks are like that.
Same as buggy front-end dev for non-technical people, for instance. :)
Or maybe they didn't do their job properly. I remember a few years ago when new train cars were introduced in Hamburg the new models broke down constantly because of problems with software and broken springs. Supposedly because the designers forgot to account for the weight of passengers.
Cancelling trains to preserve on-time statistics is the kind of perverse activity you get when metrics aren’t correctly setup.
A cancelled train should be counted as delayed until the next train (close to the worst-case scenario) so as to discourage it.
But the real problem with deteriorating service is that people will put up with it for a long time - as long as they get to where they’re going eventually.
But they’ll stop choosing the train, and over 20 years you’ll find that everyone has moved to private vehicles or alternate transportation methods.
And then you have no riders and trying to get back on track will take 20 years or more.
People claim that they cancel trains to try and preserve the statistics, but there's not really any evidence of it.
The actual reason is that if a train is too late, it will conflict too much with the other scheduled trains and there's simply no room for it. Keeping the delayed train will just cause more delays for other trains on the same route, because German trains are scheduled with very high frequency.
E.g. where I live in Cologne, there's typically a high speed train every 20 to 30 minutes to Frankfurt. If one train is delayed by 30 minutes, then suddenly you have two (ore more) trains right on top of eachother heading to the same destination, both on very very congested lines that theyre simultaneously trying to do repairs and expansions to.
Those are the sorts of situations where it makes sense to just cancel the train, not because of metrics but because of actual track constraints.
The main thing people dont understand about Germany's train system is the scale of it. The network is physically very large, but also very densely packed, and has very frequent trains.
For instance, here is the map just of the regional (non-high-speed) trains between cities in my state of Nordrhein-Westfalen: https://karteplan.com/deutschland/land/nordrhein-westfalen/s...
It looks more like a circuit board than a traditional transit map. That's why this problem is so hard to solve and will take a long time and a lot of investment before it improves.
What they should be tracking is average delayed journeys. A train may be late by 15 minutes, but if that means I'll miss a connecting train, that might delay my journey by an hour or more. That would also take care of the issue you're describing.
Indeed, that'd be a more useful metric. Very hard to measure well though and probably actually leaves open more room for them to game the metrics than the current system does.
Keep in mind that for the majority of trains in Germany, nobody bought a specific ticket for that journey. We just use the DeutschlandTicket which is a flat subscription of 58€/month, which gives unlimited access to busses, trams, and regional trains (basically everything but high speed trains).
With the deutschalnd ticket, you typically just walk onto a train of your choice and go wherever you want. They dont actually know where all the travellers are going or even how many people there are
Yeah I know you cannot track all journeys. Deutschlandticket, BahnCard 100, and similar things will be invisible. You can track the ones booked through the app though, and with a high enough sample rate you should get sufficiently close to the truth, unless there is a bias I haven't thought of yet.
You could also select random virtual journeys, I suppose. In arbitrary units you should at least be able to measure whether DB is improving or not. You could even delegate this to an independent organization. Actually, now that I think of it, isn't the API public? I'm reminded of the talk by D. Kriesel about DB data mining.
>> The main thing people dont understand about Germany's train system is the scale of it. The network is physically very large, but also very densely packed, and has very frequent trains.
> A train may be late by 15 minutes, but if that means I'll miss a connecting train, that might delay my journey by an hour or more.
Speaking from experience taking the subway in Shanghai, if a train is 15 minutes late, and it still manages to arrive before the train that was scheduled to follow it, it cannot be true that the network is "very densely packed" or that it has "very frequent trains".
A subway is very different from an intercity railway network. For one, there's probably fewer different routes on the subway so trains conflict with each other less. Also, a subway doesn't have to accomodate freight traffic as well.
> there's probably fewer different routes on the subway so trains conflict with each other less
This isn't obvious to me. Here's Deutsche Bahn's map of the system: https://cms.static-bahn.de/wmedia/redaktion/aushaenge/streck...
Here's a map of Shanghai's subway system: https://www.travelchinaguide.com/images/map/shanghai/subway-...
The German intercity rail network certainly identifies more lines, around 57 to Shanghai's 18, but this isn't directly related to the complexity of the topology. For example, line 14 appears to begin in Aachen and dead-end into Berlin, at which point line 95 begins in Berlin and runs out to Poland. As far as the routing is concerned, those could be the same line. But they're given different numbers. When the same thing happens (at a smaller scale) in Shanghai at the west end of line 9, the tail bit of the line going to Songjiang is still called "line 9". Note that if you want to ride out to Songjiang, at some point you're going to have to get off your "line 9" train and walk over to another station where a different "line 9" train will take you the rest of the way.
Discounting that, the two layouts appear to be roughly similar on the fundamentals, if differently scaled.
The most obvious difference is that the routes between major German cities are served by several lines. This is clearly meaningful in some cases; line 29 from Munich to Nuremberg continues north to Hamburg via Berlin while line 41 from Munich to Nuremberg continues northwest to Dortmund via Frankfurt and Cologne. On the other hand, line 8 from Munich to Nuremberg parallels line 29 for the entire length of line 8 (line 8 stops in Berlin, but line 29 doesn't).
My first guess would be that conflicts arise from the fact that the German trains are on the ground, and when their tracks cross, conflict can occur. This isn't true of a subway system; when subway tracks cross, they do it at different altitudes, allowing both tracks to be in use simultaneously.
Not only do tracks cross, trains also share tracks and platforms. In Shanghai only Line 3 and 4 share tracks and platforms.
Your map only shows ICE/IC lines, there are many more other lines which share the same tracks. This shows a more complete picture: https://www.deviantart.com/costamiri/art/Transit-diagram-of-... but it still doesn't show international trains and freight.
Im talking about trains between cities. Frankfurt is 190km from Cologne for instance.
Trains inside cities (i.e. trams and subways) are much much more frequent because they have fewer constraints and lower speeds.
How does that affect the question of whether the network is densely packed or whether it has frequent trains?
Passenger trains from Frankfurt to Cologne are infrequent because there is virtually no demand to move between cities 120 miles apart. Because the trains are infrequent, they aren't dense on the tracks.
But that's the opposite of saying that they are frequent and densely packed.
Read up on what affects railway bandwidth. A densely packed 250km/h line won't appear similar to a densely packed subway line to a bystander despite of maxing out its abilities.
Connecting train doesn't mean that it runs on the same tracks. The train stations where you would switch tend to have ~6 to ~20 different platforms.
I agree. Funnily enough I had a journey sped up due to a delay recently. I had a change, and the train I was changing to was delayed so that I could make the earlier one which I should have missed had it been on time.
> The main thing people dont understand about Germany's train system is the scale of it. The network is physically very large, but also very densely packed, and has very frequent trains.
And that's a wonderful thing, you can reach "everywhere" with a train in Germany. That's something I wanted to say that we need to keep in mind when we see a headline like this. It's a sense in which Germany's train service is one of the best in the world.
Yeah, the dependency graph for scheduling trouble to procreate is massive. Not comparable at all to a star topology as in France, or to a two coasts topology as in Japan. Closest thing might be Switzerland, but while that network is also very dense, it's also so small it might just as well be compared to some of the larger subway networks.
And then there's a pet hypothesis of mine, that a factor in the unreliability of German rail is the famous absence of a general speed limit on the Autobahn: that this might make DB strive for fast best case connection times more than it would if driving was slower, pushing them to schedule an unrealistic house of cards with not enough slack to recover from the unexpected.
Yeah, both Switzerland and the Netherlands have distributed networks like Germany, but their relatively small size means that they don't need to design around speed, and can focus more on synchrony.
That said, this doesn't mean it's impossible the fix Germany's trains. Germany's network did work quite well before, and it can again. The fixes are happening right now, but it's going to get worse before it gets better, because all the construction that needs to be done interferes with the network.
I have been to places in Germany where it was a 45 minute drive to the nearest train station. I'm not talking about somewhere in the Black Forest but an actual village where people live. It's great for cities but for villages I typically take the car.
Yeah. While I understand why Germans are so frustrated by BD these days, as a Canadian living , the train network here blows my mind constantly. It has problems, but it's still incredible.
Population density of 4 versus 240 people per square kilometer. NRW has 528 ppsk. Ontario has 15 ppsk.
Not surprising that Germany has a better train network.
Those numbers are pretty much irrelevant. Canadians arent evenly distributed throughout the country (nor throughout Ontario. That province is empty other than a tiny corner of it), the overwhelming majority of them live in a few areas that are quite population dense (i.e. metro-Vancouver area, Edmonton/Calgary axis, and the corridor from Toronto to Montreal.
Besides, Canada used to have a much more extensive train network back in early 1900s when the population was a tenth of what it is now.
Canada could have functioning train networks if we wanted them.
> where I live in Cologne, there's typically a high speed train every 20 to 30 minutes to Frankfurt. If one train is delayed by 30 minutes, then suddenly you have two (ore more) trains right on top of eachother heading to the same destination, both on very very congested lines that theyre simultaneously trying to do repairs and expansions to. Those are the sorts of situations where it makes sense to just cancel the train, not because of metrics but because of actual track constraints.
Never mind congested lines, remember the trains are full of paying passengers!
(Let's assume both trains were more than half-full of passengers, which is fairly typical), what would you plan to do with the passengers on the cancelled train who can't get on the other train because there is literally no room for them?
I recently travelled on a badly-delayed ICE train (to Frankfurt Airport, as it happens) and it was running so late I ended up rebooking my flight from the stationary ICE because I lost confidence we would get to the airport in time for my flight.
I’m curious how Japan’s train network deals with these issues. That map looks like the train network in Tokyo alone. Japan’s network is also quite large, densely packed, and with very frequent trains. Despite Japan being well known for timeliness of its trains, it does have its occasional delays, but not often enough to think about.
Japan has mostly purpose built tracks which makes it a lot easier. Still impressive though
Major Japanese train stations have so many platforms (Tokyo have 22), 1 platform for each route or destination.
In Germany train station a platform can host multiple route.
That's always the case for through stations, I believe. However even terminus stations don't have their platforms locked to a fixed destination. Milan Central station has 24 platforms and each of them hosts multiple routes. Rome Termini has 32 platforms, same thing. You can monitor departures at this link, if you are very patient to keep track of them
https://iechub.rfi.it/ArriviPartenze/en/ArrivalsDepartures/M...
Of course usually the same train departs every time from the same platform. I think that it helps everybody.
Quite some years ago there was some data backed evidence of this I would say. https://www.dkriesel.com/blog/2019/1229_video_und_folien_mei...
Here is the link to his talk directly https://youtu.be/0rb9CfOvojk?si=7EImZU9x4zFb6LSf
Its true that the network is quite dense and used by also cargo trains, but there is no denying that things got worse and worse. I constantly experience delay to do some stuff not working. I forgot even the minute threshold when a train is still punctual according to DB. I believe it's 10min by now, which can be deadly if you need to switch trains :)
Do they run maximum-length consists?
In the US I've been on a intercity Amtrak that was so late they combined it with the train ahead of it and had a massively long train (it had to stop twice at one or two shorter stations).
If you do this too many times, you end up with a train that never stops and rides along the world until the world is habitable again.
Sounds like an update to this old chestnut is needed: https://youtu.be/XM2JpZ8Hu3E
Let them ride "buffer to buffer" in a convoy instead of this miles long "reserved block" thing from the last century ( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrdienstvorschrift / https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalbuch_(Eisenbahn / https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betriebsverfahren ). Maybe with 100 to 200 meters distance between them, to compensate for any latencies the electronics, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETCS_Level_3 , whatever may have. As capabilities(top-speed/acceleration/lenght/breaking distances( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremszettel ) permit. Transmit these capabilities autmagically between the trains and the control centers (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befehl_(Eisenbahn). OFC it makes no sense to have an ICE running behind the S-Bahn, but they mostly have their own tracks anyway.
Re-reading up on ETCS-Level3, that would enable all of this. We're just fucking slow to implement it, while having let our infrastructure decay, and intentionally built back. Like switches to change tracks, for overtaking slower trains, if the other side is free, too expensive to maintain, da da da ah jetzt ja! Dumm gelaufen...
Selbst Schuld Ihr Arschkrampen!
ALAAF!
And finally fence all that shit in, and let the rats and crows have their fun with all the suicidals. No need to close the track. Light a candle, if you must, just another one bites the dust. Yawn.
> But they’ll stop choosing the train, and over 20 years you’ll find that everyone has moved to private vehicles or alternate transportation methods.
This is a country with a $2.68 per gallon gas tax, compared to $0.51 on average in the US (€0.60 v. €0.11 per liter). This is partly justified as nudging people to use less carbon intensive transport. That nudge works a lot less well when the lower carbon alternative is painfully worse than your car.
https://brilliantmaps.com/gas-petrol-taxes-us-ca-eu/
Car ownership is pretty expensive. But holistically speaking it's not more expensive than the Deutschland Ticket, because it gives you access to cheaper housing options that you wouldn't be able to live in if you depended solely on public transport.
Can confirm for the US too. I live in a rural county with zero public transport, but when I tell city friends what the lot cost and the property tax on it, they have to hold back tears.
There's a way to combine those, and some countries have it done well (I believe this includes Germany) - you have a rail network that is good enough that you have small stops on feeder lines in rural areas; if you want to be rural you can be a mile from a train that gets you to a moderate-sized city where you can get the fast train.
You should rather compare with rural friends with access to public transport.
>This is a country with a $2.68 per gallon gas tax, compared to $0.51 in the US.
Irrelevant comparison since US is a widely different animal to most European countries.
It might be expensive compared to the US, but Germany is still one of the countries with the most affordable income-to-cost ratios for car ownership in the Eurozone, so car commuting is incredibly common, especially for those not living in densely populated metro areas.
From what I can see online, two-thirds of Germans use a car to commute to work.
Well yes, not difficult to see why. Germany is quite big and quite sprawled, and given how expensive home ownership is in big metro areas people choose commute longer in exchange for affordable housing.
And also the government gives you tax rebates for your fuel expenses the further you have to commute for work which is a double edged sword.
So you’d pay roughly $40 in tax to fill a sedan in Germany vs $7 in America at 15 gallons?
Not sure about Germany but in Spain tax on petrol is 44%. At current prices for petrol (1.3€/l) you need to pay around 78€ to fill a sedan (assuming 60 litre deposit) of which 34.3€ will go to the government.
Damn. We're at 1.80 here and I just spent 105 eur. Now, that did go 800km in a 7 seat people mover...
Cars and minivans get very very competitive if you are running them full most of the time.
(*) certain two seater cars not included
> when metrics aren’t correctly setup. All management is about massaging metrics, things are getting 'better', here, see this chart. It is going up/down.
Executive (VP+): I like to see a burndown chart (or some other format). I want a dog in a cat form factor.
Next meeting: Burndown chart
One time I did a cross-country move from Germany to the NL. Booked myself a 1st class ticket, because I had a ton of luggage and wanted a chill experience. Of course-- train is canceled, which means my seat reservation is also canceled. Next train comes and it's standing room only.
So I paid 3x for comfort, only to get stuck standing in the aisle with all my luggage for 6 hours and an additional transfer. Yes, I can get the ticket refunded, but the point is not about the money. What should I expect out of a service that can so easily be completely downgraded at a moment's notice?
At least you were able to make a seat reservation. In The Netherlands I frequently had to stand in first class while paying €600+ a month for the subscription. Ended up buying a car, that way I had a guaranteed seat with climate control.
Something similar happened to me, but with Lufthansa. Canceled my flight 1 day in advance and told me to take a hike, didn't even bother to find/recommend another flight. Germany has really deteriorated, it's no longer matching its past reputation of getting things done.
With a flight, an airline that cancels a flight with less than two weeks notice owes you cash compensation of 250, 400, or 600 Euros depending on the length of the flight. The airline can only avoid this obligation if the cancellation was due to extraordinary circumstances outside their control.
A similar regulation for trains would likely tighten up reliability, though it could also raise ticket prices.
They returned me the money but didn't pay anything extra. So my hotel cancellation fees were paid from my own pocket.
I think the time limit to request compensation under EU261/2004 in Germany is 3 years. If this happened within the past 3 years, you can demand that they pay you.
Their claim form is here: https://www.lufthansa.com/us/en/fast-compensation
An overview of the regulation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Passengers_Rights_Regulati...
This summer I took a DB train from Amsterdam to Berlin. Being from the midwest USA, I didn't have a lot of experience with trains so I bought a first class ticket. The air and power in my car weren't working. There was no beverage car or service so we sat sweating to death. After a couple hours they gave in and told us to go to another car. Then at the next stop someone got on and yelled at me because I was in his assigned seat.
Amsterdam to Berlin is probably cheaper and faster by airplane. Even a car is sometimes faster if you count for delays.
It really should be a three hour train ride but due to incompetence it takes over six hours.
I record my travels using travelynx and this is how Deutsche Bahn has been faring:
- 2022: 15512 km travelled, spent 150:23 in trains, timetable: 148:42
- 2023: 9818 km travelled, spent 121:01 in trains, timetable: 118:39
- 2024: 11614 km travelled, spent 129:28 in trains, timetable: 127:48
- 2025: 10636 km travelled, spent 116:21 in trains, timetable: 109:58
This year was skewed upwards by a 3 hour delay because some teenagers managed to get into a railway tunnel causing a track closure for multiple hours...
A lot of times the time you save by going for high speed rail is still worth it.
Two people from my team (French) went to Munich from Paris by train. They wanted to be climate conscious.
After they spend untold hours waiting for trains that were late or cancelled, they told me that this is the last time they care for pollution in Germany. Will fly and drive and show the midfle finger everytime they see a railway.
As you can imagine they were pretty heated up after this journey.
Then they took the plane to Munich last year and got stuck with a massive snow fall, there were pictures of planes tilting when parking because of the snow.
They refuse to travel to Germany now :)
Last time I had to go somewhere in Germany I used a Flixbus instead of their "high-speed" trains. The fact that I was willingly subjecting myself to a Flixbus, not because of price but because of reliability, really tells you something about the state of trains in Germany.
For Americans: Flixbus a cheap bus service which is often used by people who are not really bothered by social norms.
I've tried them once, and my experience with Flixbus was a disaster. They optimize for cheapness above everything else.
Their drivers can't do anything except scan your ticket and deny entrance if the computer says no. They don't speak any local language or English. Any minor problem cascades in delays of half a day. Their bus stops were druggie/thief zones where I felt really unsafe. After their train was 2 hours late, I was a minute late for my connection. The bus driver saw us running to his bus, smiled, waved at us, closed his door and drove away, showing his middle finger out of the window.
Similar to a U.S. Grayhound service?
Do people on Grayhound busses clip their toenails in sight of everyone? Is there open drug use? Do people bring bluetooth speakers and party in the back?
In that case, yes, Flixbus is similar to Grayhound.
Did this happen on Flixbus yet?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Tim_McLean
We have plenty of beheadings in Europe but not on a Flixbus.
Flixbus owns Greyhound now
> Waning reliability is but one of many problems for state-owned Deutsche Bahn, which is operating at a loss and regularly subjects its passengers to poor or no Wi-Fi access, seat reservation mix-ups, missing train cars and "technical problems" — a catch-all reason commonly cited by conductors over the train intercom.
As someone who fairly often travels by German ICE (not their regional trains), I've only ever experienced the timetable unreliability.
WiFi is fairly reliable and much much better than for example the Dutch railway (NS) WiFi which never seems to work, and I can't remember the last time it didn't work on an ICE. I've never had any seat reservation mix ups or (knowingly) missing train cars; the last two I've experienced only once in Europe, on a cross border train from Slovenia to Austria, with the seat booked via the ÖBB on a Slovenian train.
When these ICE's are on time and show up, I like them a lot. The seats are very comfortable, there's food service in the train, the seat reservations aren't thát high, and are optional (unlike say high speed rail in Italy, where there's a 15 euro required seat reservation on top of the ticket price), the staff is consistently friendly and so far (I think) they haven't joined the annoying recent trend to put digital ads on the same monitor as the in train timetable.
More so, I really really like the Deutsche Bahn app and use it for trains all over Europe.
Reading this article makes me ask myself if the route and type of train matters, but also that the article didn't really add anything new from what wasn't already known. With their ongoing frequent delays DB made them an easy target for anything under the sun, but comparatively to other trains in Europe, at least for DB ICE's, delays aside, I feel they're doing quite alright.
As an occasional ICE traveler, I can confirm the Wifi, I'm at the point where I don't even bother logging on to the free wifi but just use my phone hotspot. I'd guess it's dependent on the route; Berlin-Munich definitely has dropouts.
It's really a pity for a large part of international train travel too, given Germany's central position in Europe. Many people I know (moi incluis) would really like to take the train for holiday or work travel (instead of airplane) but it's just not worth the risk of having to deal with Deutsche Bahn. Holland to Denmark by train, tried it once, never again.
I've been told that since the privatization, the funding was split between DB paying for maintenance while the state provided funds for replacement and new lines. Allegedly this provided an incentive to let things deteriorate until they needed replacement.
Projects are planned, coordinated and funds allocated far in advance, so if the government can't agree on a budget and projects are shelved or canned, restarting the process causes a significant delay.
Same situation in Sweden.
It's a running joke in Stockholm that tracks, trains, signals, and people are owned/employed by 4 different entities
To clarify: Deutsche Bahn is still 100% government owned. It operates both its train service and the railroad infrastructure in fully owned subsidiaries.
And that's exactly what's not reflected in management success metrics. They are basically incentivized to steal from their owners through systematic neglect, what could possibly go wrong.
I think it's only possible to understand German politics in two ways: either nobody in politics understands incentives, or they understand incentives much better than the voters and are fully exploiting this fact.
No need to place it anywhere on the incompetence/malice spectrum when it can be perfectly occamed with design by committee.
If you lookup the details about the decision to build and construction of Stuttgart 21[1] it's an insane mix of corruption, nepotism and incompetence. Partially also a result of laws changing and allowing privatisation of public infrastructure.
This satire [2] about it on German TV is 6 years old now and the project is still increasing in cost and being delayed. It's a pit without a bottom now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_21
[2] https://youtu.be/V49b13fYFik
I moved to Germany from Southern California in 2002 and as a conscientious objector to gridlock and indeed any grid whatsoever, I experienced very distinct happiness at the change of transportation paces between those two worlds, and the very first thing I did was get myself a DB (Deutsche Bahn) membership, which gave me so many nice memories.
I'm very fond of those years of easy train rides all over that part of Europe, and indeed internally within Germany, too. The overnight trains to Munich and Hamburg, Berlin and Vienna (ÖBB membership too), the easy rides between towns all over the Rührgebiet and NRW, the delightful weekend trips to Wuppertal and Bonn and so on. The sleeper cabins, the disco car, the wonderful cold beers served during a summer sojourn to The Hague, and so on. Yes, German trains could get you around, and connected, and after all - the rail systems of Europe are a reason to live there.
So I'm kind of saddened to hear of the demise of things, having left Germany for another land with well-laid rail (Austria), which I use with little sense of a lack of quality. But I do remember days of being very impressed with Germanys' transportation services .. it seems the nation of unlimited speed limits on the autobahn did, in those days, have superlative rail as well.
(Still, that was ±20 years ago. I suppose I shouldn't be that shocked to see time take its toll.)
I remember 20 years ago where you could just impromptu hop onto a train to Paris, party for the weekend and come back Sunday evening.
I just checked online with the Dutch Railways:
- Train that leaves in one hour (18:00), arrives at 21:40 just in time to party. 148 euro! - Train that leaves 21:00, arrives at 10:35 the next morning. You'll miss the party plus you can't even book the train online for some reason. Multiple transfers and you need to sleep on a bench in Brussels between 00:15 and 07:30
Then for the train back:
- Train that leaves at 17:50, arrives at 22:30, decent times, 185 euro! - Train that leaves at 20:50, arrives at 08:20 the next morning, right in time for work. Can't book it online. This time your are sleeping on a bench at Antwerpen between 00:25 and 05:50
If you are with four people, just drive the five hours to Paris instead. Have one person be sober. So much better than the train. I'm sure the fuel and tire wear are less than the €1332 in train tickets you would have with the four of you.
The Ruhrgebiet may be a melting/mixing pot, but it comes without an Ümläüt :-)
https://dict.leo.org/german-english/r%C3%BChren vs. the name of the river it's mostly built around https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhr (SCNR)
Ireland: Hold my Guinness.
At least Germany has trains that go places. Ireland ripped most of their tracks out in the 50's and now there are two separate rail networks that are "joined" by taxi between Heuston and Connoly station in Dublin. Going from Sligo to Ballina (both on the west coast) means going through Dublin. I don't think any airport in Ireland is served by rail.
Fun fact; there used to be about _six_ terminus stations. Harcourt and Broadstone are gone, though parts of their lines have become parts of the luas system. Pearse used to be a terminus, but the loop line in the 19th century linked it in to Connolly, and it’s now a through station. Connolly used to be two separate termini for different companies, which is why it has such an anwkward internal layout.
There was supposed to be another ‘loop line’ linking Connolly to Heuston, but it never happened; DART Underground was also supposed to do that, but was cancelled. They just have a luas for now. The 2050 plan contains yet _another_ Heuston-Connolly link. Separately, Dart+ SW will provide a link from Connolly to a new station beside Heuston, which will be called Heuston West, presumably for maximum confusion of tourists. Trains from Connolly actually pass Heuston platform 10 (note that there is no platform 9 and never has been), but do not stop there.
The “loads of terminals in slightly awkward places” thing was actually a somewhat common feature of Victorian rail, but in most places they were at some point either consolidated or linked via metro. Irish Rail is simply preserving the highly inconvenient past :)
The worst bit is, it is likely that in the next couple of decades, Dublin will need a third terminus, because Connolly is more or less at capacity (and will be overcapacity after Dart+ is finished in 2030 or so) and can’t realistically be made larger.
Don’t worry, at the current trajectory Germany will have a leader who “makes the trains run on time” in 10-15 years.
Heh, isn't this funny? If someone I don't like wins an election, I will compare him to a dictator from another country. Using a completely unrelated thread. I am very intelligent.
With the still rising numbers for the AfD, Germany has plenty of reasons to worry about fascism without bothering to bring in American politics. Not everything is about Trump.
Why should the Germans be more worried about AfD than the people who have been running the show for the last decades?
After all, they’re not the ones who have implemented disastrous policy one after another.
Because they make it pretty clear that they will be much worse.
padjo was explicitly talking of a leader (Führer).
The trains running on time “joke” is about Il Duce.
But yes, absolutely nothing to do with the US
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> Don’t worry, at the current trajectory Germany will have a leader who “makes the trains run on time” in 10-15 years.
This historic comparison is absurd and demagogic. It is rather plausible that Germany will be ruled by some quite right-wing party or coalition with all its negative consequences.
Then, when fusion is finally ready? :-D
Oh, fusion has been ready for this sort of application for over 70 years.
For sure, someone just didnt understand the irony in context of Germany and the timeline of "10-15 years".
I'm in EU so I might have a different picture.
I once had an idea to build an "probabilistic routing" system that "predicts" the likelihood of arriving at your destination. I.e. "you have a 85% likelihood of arriving in Berlin over Route Y instead of the official Route X because it uses train connection Z, which is historically always late". Obviously the bahn.de routing will only get you the "quickest calculated connection", but then during the travel I rarely have one day where there's no "your connection is not available anymore, please look for an alternative" error in the DB App. Especially if you have to change regional trains 3, 4 or 5 times.
Basically, my method of traveling with Deutsche Bahn has now gotten me back to improving my geography, because I developed an instinct of "try to get as physically close to where you want to go because as soon as you step outside the train, you have no guarantee that the next train will arrive". Rather than immediately planning the entire trip in advance, I'll say "okay I need to head roughly east and I know that larger cities have more frequent connections, so if anything happens, I prefer being stranded in a large city rather than being stuck in No Mans Land just because bahn.de says it's the fastest connection". This is very important when traveling late in the day, to not spend the night at a station.
The downside is obviously that German traveling has now degraded to a state of "medieval mode" traveling, where you have to plan your overnight stops at the local inn while fighting robbers, peasants and bicyclists for a spot in your horse carriage (sorry, I mean "RE3"). But when you are eventually stranded in Knitschendorf-Unteroblingen main station at 23:59pm because bahn.de said that there should be a train here and then staring into the night sky above you, at least you remember that traveling beyond the horizon has finally become magical again. Onto new adventures, travelers! See y'all at Mt. Doom.
As someone who travels on Deutsche Bahn regularly for work, everyone complains about the train system, but I honestly don't have a lot of issues, maybe a 20-minute delay every so often. I have spent 20 hours on the train system in the last month. I also fly a lot, especially to Germany, and this is far more unreliable and problematic. I was stranded last weekend in Paris due to delays on planes.
What's up with train services reliability in Europe? In my european corner here, I always have to give this advice to people who are new to the city: do NOT use the commute train ever if the deadline is serious and absolute (you got a work interview, a flight, a funeral). Trains get stopped in the middle of the trip, get delayed, or get cancelled all the time!
The solution is to lose even more of your time (as if public transport wasn't slow enough already) and be at the station already for the previous schedule of what you'd ideally need to take. But at that point, sometimes it's just better to go a longer route by subway, or if traffic is not bad, go ahead by car for those occasions.
From the article:
"Chronic underinvestment in Germany has derailed yet another ..."
I had to travel from Copenhagen to Berlin and Copenhagen to Basel several times, and I was open to choosing a train, but ended up flying to avoid dealing with DB. I really didn’t want the risk of missed connections cascading into messing up my appointments and vacation plans. And now with Fehmarn Belt link under construction, I ask myself, what’s even the point of shaving off a couple of hours from the trip duration if I can’t rely on DB for reliability anyway?
As an American I would take DB over Amtrak any day. At least the country would be covered with fast rail to some extent
You're in luck. DB will help build California high speed rail, lol [0]
[0] https://www.progressiverailroading.com/high_speed_rail/news/...
> It's not just crumbling tracks and sticky signals that need attention, he explains, but the network operator's overly bureaucratic infrastructure.
> "Every process at Deutsche Bahn is really complicated," Iffländer says. "It takes forever and that frustrates the people that actually want to do something."
Liberals, please take notes. It all started with the train service being privatized to increase efficiency and decrease costs.
The truth is even worse than the article suggests. I use the train every week. Switching train once after 10 Minutes with total started travel time of 2 hours. In only 20% of the time does that actually work. I am happy with only 20 minutes delay as often it ends up 45-60 minutes. Plus the cognitive load because I have to take care to change my travel route depending on where and when I and arrive and I have to regularly check the app, switch platform and alike.
Do you believe that Deutsche Bahn is privately owned and that this is the cause?
It's not.
The article doesn't talk about how did it got so bad.
It just says "decades of neglect". It gives little vignettes of bad experiences and a quote from a French person saying the French would revolt.
Any actual explanation?
Germany ate the captialism/markets/privatization for everything bug. If one wants to be optimistics it is that we are currently figuring out how to construct competitive markets (e.g. Flixtrain/Austrian/French rail is starting to compete on the rail network managed by DB).
In the decades they converted the German rail service (DB) into a stock company (AG) that is 100% owned by the state. The plan was to make it profitable then IPO it. So DB started to stop investing in order to become profitable short term. It never became profitable, so couldn't be floated. Now it also has a large infrastructure neglect debt on top (and is still 100% owned by the state with this weird structure with a CEO).
If it were a startup, one would just let it fail (creative destruction). Since it is obviously critical infrastructure, they should really have thought of this before. But same could be said about banks before 2008.
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I can confirm. While there is a fair amount of train infrastructure, it is horribly unreliable. Plan for being delayed for 30-50% of the scheduled travel time.
I work in the German healthcare sector, which is partly public and partly private, and I have been doing so for a little over a year. The level of bureaucracy is staggering. There is no shortage of good ideas or genuine innovation, but most of them drown in administrative processes long before they reach implementation and are eventually abandoned.
Deutsche Bahn is a useful parallel. It was once fully public and later privatized, yet it still carries much of the old organizational DNA. The result is a company that adapts painfully slowly to changing market needs, compounded by chronic mismanagement.
Germany’s problem is not a lack of innovation or talent. It is structural: excessive bureaucracy, risk-averse management, and incentive systems that reward process compliance over outcomes. Until those change, progress will remain slow regardless of funding or good intentions.
100%. The focus on non-value adding activities is very high since it is rewarded.
People don't even grasp the difference between value creating activities people and activities that don't.
> Deutsche Bahn is a useful parallel. It was once fully public and later privatized
A joint stock company fully owned by the government isn’t exactly privatized either. It’s still controlled and staffed by the government and is financed by government budgets, with tons of decision making constrained by being a public interest.
In practice it just means the management and financial structure operate as a pseudo corporation.
Privatized implies private ownership (not the case). Perhaps a better word would be corporatized.
I also work in the German healthcare sector (as a contractor) and all of my permanently employed colleagues there have at least 4h of meetings per day. Some are closer to 6 hours. I also know people who worked at DB and they report the same thing. Large automotive companies (BMW, Mercedes, VW, etc.) are not much better. External contractors are the only reason any actual work is still getting done there because we have no access to anything on account of all the security red tape and thus don't get roped into as many meetings. Right now the German government is doing its best to destroy even that last bit of efficiency because they can't accept that the self-employed are trying to escape their greedy hands and are essentially outlawing freelance software development.
I, for one, am learning Polish and will leave this shithole country as soon as I can.
How? Mama Merkel squandered a decade of budget surplus in millions of "refugees" who crossed multiple safe countries to get to Germany while neglecting all infra and agreed to close nuclear plants. So now Germany is on its way to economic collapse.
Of course, NPR would never mention this.
TLDR: government "savings" on rail (between quotes because the economic loss resulting from large amounts of people not being able to work punctually no doubt far exceed the savings on the rail company)
> Chronic underinvestment in Germany has derailed yet another myth about Teutonic efficiency. The German railway Deutsche Bahn's long-distance "high-speed" trains are now among the least punctual in Europe. In October, the national rail operator broke its own poor record with roughly only half of all long-distance trains arriving without delay.
Europe's falling apart, baby get out while you still can!
Privatization and capitalism.
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Scheduling trains is a complex problem involving many parameters, but the public see only one facet of it: is my train delayed or not?
Of course delays depend on budget and investments, and bureaucracy.
But not only. For instance, comparing high speed trains in Germany and France can give the impression that German trains are ineficient and slow, but Germany being a much less centralized country, which is good, trains have to make many more stops, oftentimes leading to more complex scheduling and not being able to reach the top speed between stops, and thus less time to catch up on small delays.
Similarly, there are different policies regarding international trains vs national trains, or freight vs passenger, and also different variables they can optimize for: number of delays, total duration of delays, availability of emergency paths, etc, and various policies will yield different sentiment regarding "is my train on time".
A document that gives an overview of the variety of policies across Europe: https://rne.eu/wp-content/uploads/RNE_OverviewOfthePriorityR...
You are trying to add a lot of nuance to a topic which is just not very nuanced. Trains in germany are a nightmare because of decades of mismanagement. All the rest is copium, as the kids say.
Maybe, but there are some things that, when they do not work, easily give the impression that someone somewhere hasn't done his job properly, because it looks simple and easy from the point of view of the user but in reality are quite complex. Having met a few people working in this field in the past, I have the impression train networks are like that.
Same as buggy front-end dev for non-technical people, for instance. :)
Or maybe they didn't do their job properly. I remember a few years ago when new train cars were introduced in Hamburg the new models broke down constantly because of problems with software and broken springs. Supposedly because the designers forgot to account for the weight of passengers.