Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

(Edit: this comment was based on apparently incorrect information from GP that there is some rule that high-speed trains need to stop in any state they cross. A counter-example is given below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31548720)

> there are a lot of people who actually use the stations between, say, Berlin and Cologne

Sure, and a stop in the middle would make sense on that length of route, or alternating at which intermediate place(s) it stops. But with a stupid rule like having to stop in whatever state you pass means that you have to build rails around to avoid hitting a corner where nobody lives anyway because you'd have to stop for absolutely no reason.

Let the trains make stops and rails be laid based on, like you say, demand. Not on arbitrary border lines.

View on HN

"with a stupid rule like having to stop in whatever state"

There is no such rule in Germany.

That's literally what was said above? Did I misunderstand this sentence or was this person wrong?

> high-speed trains need to have at least one stop in every federal state they cross

yeah, that's wrong.

For example the ICE from Hamburg to Berlin tomorrow at 14:35 goes directly, not stopping in Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern or Brandenburg.

Might have been worth mentioning in your existing reply above to the person who said that. I'm kind of wondering who to believe now: one the one hand there's the silliness of the rule that makes me inclined to think you must be right; on the other hand there is my experience living in germany and their love for rules and bureaucracy (whoever spawned the phrase 'german efficiency' must have been sarcastic).

Edit: ah I see you added an example. That settles it then, thanks!

Another one: I used to take the ICE Sprinter from Hamburg to Düsseldorf. It didn't stop in Bremen and Lower Saxony. Went directly from Hamburg to NRW.

I should have made that clear: there is no such formal rule, although there are quibbles like that where regional politicians demand additional stops.

That's the system working as intended, though. People like to laugh about small cities like Montabaur or Limburg getting ICE access but it turned out that the regions benefitted a lot from that access and after two slow years the demand for high speed train access in the region exploded.

But that doesn’t mean there can’t be express trains that bypass the minor stops, no?

There is no such fixed rule. Many high-speed trains Hamburg-Berlin-Leipzig don't stop in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Sachsen-Anhalt, or Brandenburg through which almost all of the route is going through. As far as I am aware there isn't even a single service on that route stopping in Brandenburg at all.

This was a reasonable reading of the sentence, let me indulge into a digression about German grammar.

> A big impediment is the federal structure of Germany, as high-speed trains need to have at least one stop in every federal state they cross for political reasons

English is more topic-loaded: We might say "for political reasons, every high speed train in Germany..." and so on. In fact if it made any sense for the reason trains cross states to be a political one, the "for political reasons" clause would attach to "cross", not "have", where I believe this is unambiguous in German.

"for political reasons" could have been regulation, also. It happens that it isn't. For that matter "need to" carries more of a sense of obligation than I feel is truly warranted.

That all said, it's valid English and I read it to mean as the author intended.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com