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Comment by msavio | Hacker News Reader

> But the Deutschlandticket is not the end of the story: to make it still more attractive, German Rail is also planning to introduce more modern and faster trains. According to the Federal Ministry of Transport, this will create almost 20,000 new seats on long-distance services.

The mentioned trains are ICE long-distance trains. Exactly those that are not included in the ticket the article is about. It does not make sense to even mention them here, and is wrong to conclude that "it" gets more attractive.

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We don't need faster trains in Germany. We need trains that are more or less on time. Punctuality is a complete disaster and probably the main reason why people hate taking the train in Germany. If you have a connection that requires changing to another train, the chance that you miss your connection is too damn high.

fast is important, too

For instance, 1:30-2h by car takes 3h train + 1h cycling for me when the trains are on time.

> We need trains that are more or less on time.

i keep seeing these kinds of comments.

10 years ago i made the mistake of crossing the whole of germany by train. was a complete waste of my time.

since trains are basically a solved problem (see japan, china etc), i don't get why these issues still happen in developed nations.

China has 1.4 billion people and 150000km rail tracks.

Germany has 0.082 billion people and 40000km rail tracks.

Japan has a very different train system on an island. Germany is in the middle of Europe with a mesh of trains, long-distance and local - connected to all of Europe. One can take an excellent French high-speed train going from Germany to Paris/France. From my home-town there are freight trains directly going to / coming from Shanghai/China, more than 10000km away. There is a sleeper train going to Sweden, trains going to Switzerland. You can literally see people boarding a train here in Hamburg travelling 1000km to Switzerland, carrying their ski equipment.

> 10 years ago i made the mistake of crossing the whole of germany by train. was a complete waste of my time.

I was crossing Germany by train from south to north just this week. No problem at all.

Lets be real, Germany long distance ICE trains have a big punctuality problem. Other German trains are mostly good, but the ICE system has lots of issues.

A lot of those are political, the planning and execution of their high speed network is totally messed up.

They had a reasonably good plan in the 80s but then the reunification happens and of course building lots of highways into East Germany was higher priority.

All these things can be fixed, but it has persisted for quite a while.

Germany has very few fast trains ... going fast (not many train tracks are built for fast trains). It got better in the last few years, but there is still a lot to do (and catch up with France). As for the "regional" trains (that this offer is talking about), they go really slow and are just for people commuting. This kind of monthly offer would be sort of interesting if it were to apply to the ICE trains, as currently the price is very prohibitive (e.g. I paid last week ~90EUR for a second class ticket from Frankfurt airport to the nearby city of Cologne, not even 200km away - driving a Porsche is cheaper per km...)

As for the reason of many of the delays, it's good to know a problem specific to Germany (and e.g. not France). Human transportation trains and freight transportation trains share the same tracks. And freight is obviously very slow.

> As for the "regional" trains (that this offer is talking about), they go really slow and are just for people commuting.

That really depends on which line you are on. For example Munich - Nuremberg (~170km) takes 1:45 by regional train. That’s pretty competitive, going by car takes the same time. The ICE train on the same track needs 1:10.

Are you american?

The idea that trains are for 'commuting' is nonsense, they are for 'living'.

No I'm not American. And I don't live on a train either, not that (normal) Europeans do that either ...

If German had designed the high speed network in a sensible way, and had moved quickly on creating all those line, that would improve speed and punctuality.

The problem with the fast trains is exactly that the lines are either missing or end way to early, or start to late, only to then share to few local lines with local trains.

The new ICE trains are still helpful for local transit because if non-Deutschlandticket trips switch from regional rail to ICE that will clear up seats on the regional rail lines for Deutschlandticket uses.

It’s a very confusingly written sentence, but I believe the “it” is meant to refer to “German Rail” and not the Deutschlandticket.

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