Most trains did arrive a few hours late in the end. I remember on one train from Prague to Cologne, the train had to sit outside a station for multiple hours while two passengers argued outside(?) and the train staff waited for police at ~midnight.
That's one thing I wish the EU really did better - do more to integrate and de-federate the rail systems. There should be no major difference riding the rails in any state. Of course, this is a lofty goal since even within countries usually commuter transport is run by local companies and not even nationally interoperable.
High-speed rail became dominant in the next decade and I think it was the cynical kind of of ‘competition’ that if there is an affordable option and an astronomically expensive option (HSR is often 2x or 3x the cost of flying) why should the provider offer the affordable one? (It’s like how a car dealer has no M or L cars but they have rows and rows of unsold XL, XXL, and XXXL SUVs)
They passed a bunch of rules requiring the separation of the track ownership from the train ownership which means any private company can come in, lease some track time, lease some trains, and become a train operator overnight.
Similar rule changes have led to tremendous improvements in Italy for example, which had the unfortunate (?) side effect of bankrupting the national plane carrier Alitalia (not sure if it’s really unfortunate considering it was heavily subsidized by the govt, much like plane travel throughout the world, where govts inevitably subsidize plane travel by bailing out plane companies on a regular basis, and even the companies that don’t need bailing out benefit because they share costs with highly unprofitable companies essentially running on govt bailouts).
I'm doing Paris <=> Wien, and it was financially competitive to airplanes. 100€/person/way (ok cheapest seat rate, that's probably very uncomfortable... I'll see) I had 240€/person/2 way with airplanes. I just checked airplane prices again and that's still pretty much the same prices (a bit lower than train if you accept going to the FarAwayAirport, much higher if you take the Airport on a train/subway station)
It does take a lot more time because it's one train every 2 day and arrives a bit late to do train => home => workplace, so if you value being where you want to be when you want to be, you could probably say that airplanes is more competitive)
Though supposedly theft is a greater issue on night trains than flights, so I was apprehensive to sleep..
(It was also the last train of the day that would get us to our destination. Ultimately we got a nice story out of it. But it still smarts.)