It will take years to get Deutsche Bahn back on track | Hacker News Reader

It will take years to get Deutsche Bahn back on track

economist.com

38 pointsrustoo60 comments

Considering this is from the Economist, I think it is worth to mention the dire state of British railways.

The main reason that Europeans fly (including Brits) is that it's simply the cheapest option, more-so that bus in many cases. Airplanes are pretty much providing services similar or lower than to buses, and trains tend to have better service and also tend to be more comfortable these days. Most airplanes have been reduced to low cost or no-frills status, even the full service ones, and flying is a nightmare in terms of peace-of-mind and comfort.

Deutsche Bahn is one of the better railway operators in Europe, especially compared to the railways in Southern Europe or the UK, but obviously there are a lot of improvements that need to be made.

> Deutsche Bahn is one of the better railway operators in Europe, especially compared to the railways in Southern Europe or the UK

Are you sure you're not just remembering their old reputation? DB's punctuality and performance has gotten to be terrible lately, I'd say they're well below Trenitalia or Renfe or most of the UK railways at this point. (And complaints about British railways are pretty overstated; prices are bad, but performance is objectively pretty good).

In the UK the franchise model is slowly falling apart after Covid gave it a death blow. Lines are being nationalized as the operators extract bonuses for the exec team and finally give up by tanking the service so the government has to step in. Here is the latest.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-65555262

Here's Deutsche Bahn for the same month: https://www.ksta.de/wirtschaft/deutsche-bahn-jeder-dritte-fe... - and note they use a much more generous definition of "on time" (up to 6 minutes late) than the UK does. And they don't seem to even be publishing the number of cancellations, which are specifically excluded from that delay figure.

Obligatory mention of a great talk on the topic: "David Kriesel: BahnMining -- Pünktlichkeit ist eine Zier" (2019)

English translation: https://youtu.be/AGCmPLWZKd8

Edit: Note: And that was still with better numbers than lmm posted.

Train performance is abysmal in the north of England. It’s a joke. The trains can barely be relied upon. It’s managed decline of the railways.

Strange, I live in the North of England and that has hardly been my experience of late. Most trains have been at least 1 or 2 minutes late.

This has to just be a side-effect of the revolving-door grace of government subsidies - Currently/lately, short-haul airlines are being subsidized. Even though those subsidies are costly and least effective.

Can you be more specific? What are the specific budgets or regulatory advantages you’re referring to?

Railways in UK are great, if you can afford it and if they're not on strike themselves.

Flying is actually annoying because not many cities are connected, unlike Germany for example.

On top of that, the airports in smaller cities have very few connections outside Britain.

I always hear a lot of grousing about DB, but I took it a lot the two times I visited, and I liked it. Even when there was a horrible windstorm that blew trees all over the tracks and stopped the ICE from coming down to Ingolstadt, I was able to hop onto regional alternates to where the ICE was, and get back to Berlin without too much insanity. The trains are pleasant and clean, and the stations are massive and have lots of nice convenience stores.

Contrast this with Metrolink or Amtrak, and it's night and day. If your train gets cancelled, at least in SoCal, you're likely hosed. You will wait hours upon hours, and some stations that are in the middle of the biggest metro area in the US get 2 trains a day. You can't just hop on something going the right way. Furthermore they are often isolated and have no stores near them.

I also really disagree with the article's implicit assumption that passenger railways somehow, have to make a profit. At least here in the US, that's often implied too, yet the interstates are completely free and funded by the state and no one bats an eye. Why?

I think it's not fair to fault DB or EVG for failing to run 100% service after a nationwide strike was called off just a few hours before it was supposed to start. An orderly temporary shutdown of a major rail network is going to require plenty of ramp-down and ramp-up as trains and people get in position. Some of that was undoubtedly already underway when the tentative agreement was reached, and you can't just turn it around on a dime.

To be fair, DB dragged EVG to court over the strike trying to get them to cancel it. DB wasn’t surprised by the cancellation. [0]

Nonetheless, a last minute reschedule of train and worker’s shift plans at that scale is a huge task and I’m impressed that they managed to get a big chunk running again

[https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/wirtschaft/bahn-evg-streik-ab...]

They couldn6ne sure about winning the court case (well, the didn't win, but settle the case technically) and not preparing for strike and then losing the case would have lead to a longer period of issues as the no train and no personal end up where they are needed

If they were serious about even their lame 80% on-time rate, they should try paying their workers more and giving them good benefits and comfortable and safe working conditions. But the management of DB has been taken over by the same people who want to privatize rail like the British have done with disastrous consequence.

If German rail is anything like France's public railways (genuinely don't know whether it is), the workers are overpaid and the unions too powerful. On the other hand, if it's anything like US private railways, then the unions are right to complain about unethical working conditions.

It's not wideley known that part of the problem is Siemens with their abysmal quality of trains, for instance the Desiro models. I found an older article about this in connection with the Belgian rail

https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2014/08/14/desiro_trains_leavem...

The situation hasn't improved, though. Recently a local provider of train services has acquired a new fleet of Desiro and Mireo that were broken right out of the factory. The quality was so bad that Siemens was forced to send people to the train provider for weeks to fix the most urgent problems.

Also the introduction of the "Deutschlandtakt" was delayed not for years but for decades, so won't happen in my lifetime:

https://www-tagesschau-de.translate.goog/wirtschaft/unterneh...

I don't understand Siemens as a company, to be honest. We wanted to buy an expensive piece of software from them and they delivered it with all essential libraries at versions from 2014. We asked them to update the libraries, they spent a few weeks before replying and then said it's not possible to be done.

We do such updates on a weekly basis for our internal software, here incidentally on the exact same libraries, so the response flabbergasts me. They preferred to lose hundreds of thousands of euro rather than spend a few weeks (I'm stretching it) doing the updates.

Having worked for Siemens in the past, I can say I don't understand how they are still in business. Riduculous ration of managers to workers, no real processes - it was insane. Of course that was just one small part of a large company. However, the management issue seems to be endemic there.

Visiting Germany by train can be cost-effective: there's a good chance your train is delayed by more than an hour and you can reclaim the ticket price.

Trying to get that money back is like drawing blood from a stone; depending on your hourly rate and capacity for frustration it might not be worth it. I'm genuinely traumatised by a recent DB fuckup which ruined a 6 day holiday after an entire day of frantically trying and failing to get alternate connections and being brushed off by them (you have to physically visit a separate building or send snail mail), to the point where I'm putting off important stuff in another city because I just can't handle dealing with them yet.

I realise this is more about me than them, but I sincerely am having mental health problems regularly because of DB and have forgone 100ish euros refund several times in the last months because of it. Words cannot describe my seething hatred for Deutsche Bahn.

In 2017 I was on a late running DB train and was given a form to complete to get a refund. Problem was I live in New Zealand and have my bank account here. I fill out the form using my NZ account details anyway and posted the form from New Zelanad thinking I would never see a cent. I was shocked a few weeks later when I found out DB had managed to process my refund to my bank account on the other side of the world. I can tell you no train operator in New Zealand would do this if it was a German claiming a refund. Refunds for delays is definitely not a thing here.

When I was coming back from visiting family in NZ over xmas, all the ticket machines at one of the platforms were out of order and a DB guy said don't worry about it, get on the train. It was super late, I had all my bags with me and the next train would (hopefully) be in an hour or something. Then on the train he said he would technically need to give me a fine but don't worry, he will write on the fine ticket thing that it is invalid and I can just go to the DB travel centre thing to get a refund. So I go there and they said no, they can't give me a refund, I have to go somewhere else (different building, and obviously closed). So I go another time, obviously losing time and paying extra to get there, and they said sorry it's not valid. 60 euros right there, plus all the wasted time and stress running around with a month's worth of baggage from NZ.

I'm still having trouble dealing with my anger about this and several other incidents, and I basically never have mental issues like this.

There was this other time where a Brazilian lady was sitting next to me for something like 3 hours while our train was delayed 10 minutes at a time, crying super hard while using Google Translate on her phone to ask me what was going on and saying she's going to miss her flights... they struggle to reliably do my 5 minute daily trip to and from work...

Part of what makes this difficult for me to deal with is that I'm staunchly anti-car, and Deutsche Bahn are possibly singlehandedly going to push me to getting a driver's licence at 40, after having resisted it in South Africa, New Zealand, America, England, Poland, Czechia, ...

I can't say it emphatically enough: fuck Deutsche Bahn.

The same is true on UK trains (delay repay)

No surprise since that's a pre-Brexit EU regulation.

Compare DB vs neighboring SBB (Switzerland‘a trains, possibly the best in Europe or the world). Germany has been ravaged by neoliberalism. underfunding publicly owned services, failing to maintain the infrastructure that is collectively used. This leads to degraded service, which liberals and other right-wingers hold up as an example of the need for privatization because the free market will of course fix these inefficiencies, only to rapidly accelerate the decline of the service.

If you want nice things you have to pay for them. Deutsche Bahn has instead been stripped for parts by the capitalists.

> liberals and other right-wingers

... Is this a case of "words to describe politics mean different things in different countries"?

Liberal means the same thing in the U.S. in more left-wing / academic circles => neoliberal capitalists. It depends on if this is left or right of center in your country

I think it’s more a case of Americans not realizing that their liberal party is rather right-wing, possibly because there’s nothing to the left of it and the US media falsely conflates “liberal” and “left”.

Yes.

Liberalism is right wing in most of the world.

"Liberal" has a long history as an insult used by Communists against non-Communist democrats.

I live in Germany in 1999 and was excited as an American to ride the rails everywhere but I found that even then Europeans thought trains were passé and were more inclined to fly, but also that flying in Europe was a much better experience with less BS at the airport, more competition and less of the “let’s make coach as awful as possible so people fly first class” game that domestic U.S. carriers play.

> but also that flying in Europe was a much better experience with less BS at the airport

For what it's worth, that's no longer true since 9/11. We have the same security theatre the US has (with the exception that we don't demand TSA locks), our airports have gone all in on upselling you overpriced crap (really, they're better equipped than some malls, it's insane), and Ryanair drove down the bar for "acceptable" behavior to below zero.

You don't have to take your shoes off at any European airport. Also the security people all seem professional and not on a power trip. This has not been my experience in America.

I worked in an airport in Europe for several years: it depends on the country, the airport and the flight (some commercial flights had special security requirements, extremely strict).

Yes, totally agree on the security personal. Everyone is shockingly friendly.

I stopped flying via US where possible as the experience was always horrific.

Depends on the shoe type. I was asked multiple times to take off heavy winter shoes. But no one ever told me to take off my sneakers

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> As is (consistently) utterly ill-mannered, power tripping, unprofessional security staff.

Manchester or Manchester?

Maybe it’s not true for some countries. But I flew Porto to Barcelona and it was like riding a bus.

My record time from taxi to gate is 12 minutes at Porto airport.

There’s definitely no excess of security or any theatre. Very vanilla.

I regularly achieve this at JFK (having Global Entry certainly helps).

Global entry is for gate to taxi vs taxi to gate which is TSA Pre. I find taxi to gate to be a lot slower than gate to taxi.

Classic elitist response. Ryanair has done more to democratise travel than anyone else in the world.

You don't have to use the TSA locks if you go full American and throw some guns in your luggage.

Hey, at least you can still keep your shoes on.

Flying in Europe is now basically similar to taking a bus, even for all the full service airlines as well. It's only on a handful of international routes to Asia where you can get a nice level of service if you opt for the higher classes. In ever aspect there is very little comfort in plane travel these days, whereas train travel is generally more comfortable and with better services.

It makes sense that if you spend longer onboard, it's got to be more comfortable.

No, European short-haul is uniquely not comfortable.

European business class for example, is often just a triple economy-row seat and maybe the middle seat is blocked off. This is different from, say, American business, which is not great when comparing globally, but is at least a bigger seat with more seat pitch.

This is not really true for most long haul flights though, even the ones to Asia if you take economy class. At this point you are just paying for the speed of intercontinental travel over oceans and unstable regions, which obviously buses and trains can't compete with currently. The only situation where a flight is notably more comfortable than a bus or train is business class and first class on a handful of long haul routes of certain Asian airlines.

That really was a long time ago.

Trains are trendier than ever and the networks are expanding again. Sleeper trains are making a huge comeback and private companies are shaking up the industry with low fares on popular routes.

Flying through Tegel was a notorious exception to that less BS rule. The wait for our bags was longer than the flight in from München.

I liked Tegel. The low distances between entrance and all the gates, combined with the per-gate security, allowed to arrive much closer to the departure time than at other airports, IME. I never checked luggage flying via Tegel tho.

And the luggage carousels were immediately after your arrival gate, no convoluted pathways to the baggage hall, off the plane, straight to pick-up.

But yeah I flew through it a few years before it closed, and you could tell that they were struggling to handle the flight workload of the 2010s in an airport built for an earlier, lower flight frequency (and pax per flight) time.

The new Brandenburg airport is pretty good, if a bit big.

Meanwhile Russian Railways are chugging just fine, and make up for closed airports in the south of Russia.

You can also take a suburban train from Rostov-on-Don, change train at Uspenskaya and ride all the way to Makeevka, DPR.

You would get a nice view of all military equipment going to the front lines as well I bet. Trains must be critical for the war effort. Oops, SMO.

Not that much, but we've got to see one military convoy with a few vehicles on platforms followed by two passenger cars with a crowd of people near them, half-dressed in camouflage, smoking.

The funnier thing may be the fact that Ukrainian railway at the moment may be better functioning than that of Germany or UK, despite decades of financial neglect of the former and the fact that nobody actually tried to bomb electric infrastructure of the latters'.

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