Germany's terrible trains are no joke for a nation built on efficiency | Hacker News Reader

Germany's terrible trains are no joke for a nation built on efficiency

theguardian.com

144 pointszolbrek124 comments

There are many international routes where the same train continues from Germany into Switzerland, and then possibly into other countries. Germany has gotten so unreliable that Switzerland is stopping this practice on some routes, because late German trains have a knock-on effect throughout the system.

So now, the German trains stop at the first Swiss station, when they finally arrive, and people gave to switch trains.

Germany is also years behind on their commitment to getting cargo on trains. Switzerland built a rail tunnel especially for trans-European traffic, but Germany is apparently incapable of getting cargo onto trains.

It ought to be mortally embarrassing for the supposed industrial powerhouse of Europe. But that's OK, they are building more autobahn.

The Swiss trip planner now completely ignores DB trains for trips within Switzerland. They don't want to disappoint their customers.

Doesn't seem so, just checked Chur -> Zürich HB, for Sunday "SBB Mobile" offers a ICE starting from Chur at 12:35. Basel SBB -> Zürich also offers ICE connections. AFAIK there are less ICE trains running in Switzerland due to the issues, but the remaing ones still seem to appear in the trip planner.

You're right, it seems like this is exclusive to the EuroCity between Munich and Zürich which is a cooperation of DB, SBB, and ÖBB.

I happen to take this train on a regular basis, and it is reliably delayed :-).

Conveniently, my connecting train is also usually sufficiently delayed so that I do not miss it.

They are not building more autobahn!!! Autobahn is not green enough. The infrastructure is falling apart.

A tunnel in Munich takes from idea to building at least 40 years. 8 miles of regional train extension takes 3 decades (building start date not known yet). Funny thing is that most of the track is already available. That’s the new real Germany. Not the one we knew from the movies.

>They are not building more autobahn!!!

Doch, Alter. The German federal government and at least 3 top parties are completely captured by the auto industry, so we're tearing down neighborhoods to extend urban freeways in Berlin: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesautobahn_100

And the FDP scored the transport ministry in the traffic-light coalition, so of course there announced a plan to extend a bunch of highways: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/plans-fast-track-expans...

This country is so fucked up. We're screwed.

I wish A8 towards Italy would re-build and would look like current highways in Poland. The whole country and neighborhood go there during vacation season.

They're getting there, they're building a more direct route between Karlsruhe and Basel. At the moment though, these ICE and cargo trains are passing through some tiny villages with barely more than two tracks.

I really wish cargo trains could just pass underground via tunnelling tech. They are obscenely loud, and given the mountain-valley nature of the villages in the Rheinland, their sound travels very far in the night, and often echoes around.

ICE?

German high-speed trains (InterCity Express).

Aka I Cannot Even arrive

ETA? I Cannot Estimate.

They should be embarrassed because Switzerland assumed the Italian part would be the one not finished on time and even helped a bit financially on that side to make sure it gets done. No one ever thought the Germans were incapable of getting it done. They are still buying land! Meanwhile Switzerland dug the longest train tunnel in the world. Italy is completely done as well and cargo imports are now shifting to the south instead of through the north.

That sounds great for Italy.

In general Italy builds transit infrastructure cheaply by European standards (which means massively cheaper than North American standards). Despite real concerns about corruption or ineffective bureaucracy they've managed to improve their rail infrastructure a lot these past few decades. Germany and the UK look very bad compared to them in this respect

> In general Italy builds transit infrastructure cheaply by European standards

And then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponte_Morandi

Given that bridge was in its 5th decade, I don't see how that applies to what the Italians have done in the last couple of decades, unless you're arguing what they are building today will be tomorrows Morandi Bridges?

i have no idea what the italians have been doing. i would observe that in the uk most bridge failures were in the 19th century, when the properties of materials such as cast iron were not too well understood - same lack of understanding that the morandi bridge seems to have had much more recently.

Wikipedia lists 282 bridge failures between 2000 and present, 4 of which occurred in the UK, 7 in Italy, and 35 in the US.

no doubt my wikipedia skills are lacking, but kindly where are you getting the 4 in the uk from?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bridge_failures#2000–p...

I admit it’s not great data, but I think it’s a step better than drawing conclusions from a single event.

Germany deliberately starved public transport to death over last decades, spending money nearly exclusively on motor highways to pleasure lobbyists.

Start looking at public infrastructure works in Germany and you’ll a series of massive cost overruns and hugely delayed delivery times. Airport in Berlin is a classic.

It boggles my mind how such an efficiency powerhouse can be that bad.

I live in Switzerland and although I am not involved in trains, what Swiss do aint magic, just simple following the rules, and rules they do. Maybe even less efficient than Germans at the end.

I really dont see any difference with Germany on the ground, yet when I look at Germany's politicians and their actions, at least the public part leaves a lot to be desired. Rather then the question becomes how come this country is actually economically so successful? Certainly not due to perfect environment for private businessess.

> It boggles my mind how such an efficiency powerhouse can be that bad.

it's almost as if it isn't true that it's an efficiency powerhouse

The German "secret" was first "interim" jobs (effectively day laborers, with government support for not paying social services) and then cheap energy. You don't get to say it, though. Everything came from same old, same old. The secret was easy to exploit people plus cheap energy.

The article doesn't explain "nation built on efficiency", its a theme that continues to persist despite any significant examples.

I've been saying it for years. Germany's real strength is in marketing. Look at German cars. The myth about them being reliable still persists despite ample evidence to contrary.

Hm, that myth isn't that alive anymore. What I've heard is that German brands (except for Porsche) were terrible in terms of reliability. Italian cars are far worse though (probably the worst?). And that most European and American brands, in general, have a bad reputation among reliable car enthusiasts; with Japanese and S.K. brands being the kings of reliability.

That’s basically the point. German industry is bad, but not as bad a their neighbors. Expect Switzerland.

Germany has privatized a lot of infrastructure and what happens is as expected. The only way to make money is to cut corners, unlike a state which gets that "value" back in its economy growing due to go infrastructure, private industry can't make profit that way.

The profit in infrastructure is economic growth and optimizations of people's mobility. This can only be done by a state. A state can still mess it up but it is the only entity that can do it.

Good luck getting a "Taktfahrplan" working if you have to rely on private rail companies optimizing for every last dollar and having the locomotives catch fire blocking lines for hours. When the Fung Wah Bus breaks down for the 10th time on the way to NY it doesn't block all traffic but with rail you don't have the luxury to drive around it.

The extensive damage in the Swiss Gotthard Base Tunnel was caused by a bad wheel from a foreign rail company that cut costs to a point of running rail cars with wheels that have way too many km on them.

Japan has had a privatized rail system with none of these issues.

Conventional wisdom says that people throw trash on the ground at a rate inversely proportional to the number of public trash cans. Japan has very few public trash cans (a response to the sarin gas attacks in the 90s) yet their streets remain clean.

Does the example of Japan prove the conventional wisdom wrong?

It shows culture is more important than conventional wisdom

Germany is simply investing to little. Last year Switzerland invested more than 3 times the amount per person (413€) in rail infrastructure compared to Germany(124€). And the years before Germans spent even less. They increased the budget already by 40% from 2021 to 2022.

> ... such an efficiency powerhouse ...

I think this is just a cliché. There are a lot of examples in the public, the semi-public and the private sector were Germany is or became very inefficient or missed opportunities (long-distance trains, mobile phone prices and coverage, Berlin public administration, Berlin airport, Stuttgart train station, but also Deutsche Bank, Siemens, Bayer, BASF, not to speak of Quelle and Holzmann in the past).

However, one should not forget the special circumstances due to German reunification in the last 30+ years. In terms of GDP and population proportion it would be equivalent if the USA opened its border to Mexico today and gives all Mexicans US citizenship immediately. Than Mexico joins the USA 11 month later. After 10 years the USA gives up the US-Dollar for a Pan-American currency. For the 3 decades after the Mexico-USA unification the old USA transfers aprox. 2,000,000,000,000 to old Mexico. -- Perhaps this thought experiment makes it clear that it would have been more than a miracle if the high degree of efficiency that was associated with the old West-Germany could have been seamlessly continued into a reunified Germany. But allow the Germans another 34 years ...

Regarding long distance travelling (people as well as freight), Germany is also in a quite unique situation. It is in the center of major European long distance routes from every direction. In comparision even the traffic network topography of Austria and Switzerland is a lot simpler. In Austria it is North-South over the Brenner to Italy and NW-SE from Central Europe to South-East Europe. Switzerland is primarily NE-SW (Basel-Geneva) and a single major North-South train route (Zürich/Luzern-Lugano).

Just compare this map of the Swiss railway system (ignore the red lines, which are more or less only used for local transport):

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personenverkehr_in_der_Schweiz...

with that of Germany:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Germany#/med...

>However, one should not forget the special circumstances due to German reunification in the last 30+ years.

This is extremely misleading. Eastern Germany had a better educational system than the west and higher female labor participation. A better example might be like if the USA opened it's boarder to Cuba, and was flooded by doctors and engineers.

Of course there are a lot of aspects, were the two situations are different. But I did clearly state that the parallels are "in terms of GDP and population proportion", which are two major general numbers typically used to sort countries into categories. Cuba has aprox. 12 times less people than Mexico and its GDP is aprox. 7 times less (but twice as much per capita). So you would need between 7 and 12 Cubas to join the USA to make the comparison working.

My only point was to find an analogy that illustrates the approximate order of magnitude.

Your characterization of the Swiss situation is inaccurate - it’s much more complex than you say for three reasons:

1) There are actually many more corridors, of which Basel-Geneva is not really an important one. St Gallen - Zurich - Bern - Geneva and Basel-Lugano are the main ones, but there are two routes between Bern and Geneva, there are trains connecting Zurich to the South East and trains connecting Bern to Visp and Sion. On top of that you have non-SBB companies like ZB.

2) The topography of the country is complex with lakes and mountains everywhere.

3) The scale is off: Germany is massive and you’re showing a map that includes the Berlin S-bahn, while only showing major connections for Switzerland, even though that mapped is 4 times more zoomed in.

Ad 1) I was perhaps not clear enough that I was talking about the main transit routes. I agree that especially the situation in northern Switzerland could be described as being more complicated and the route from Innsbruck to Zurich should have been included. The area between Basel, Bern and Zürich is indeed the place where traffic from different origins and destinations intermingles.

Ad 2) True.

Ad 3) Perhaps a better map to support my point is this one about the core Trans-European freight train network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-European_Transport_Netwo... Of course this map is limited, as it does not cover passenger transport and does not show transport volume. However, the fundamental topological problem of the network in Germany should be quite apparent as there are a lot of options were traffic is changing directions and a congestion in a specific place may easily spread to other hubs. -- It is perhaps no coincidence that Europe's two largest marshalling yards are in Germany: Maschen Rangierbahnhof[1] near Hamburg and Mannheim Rangierbahnhof[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maschen_Marshalling_Yard

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mannheim_Rangierbahnhof

They have institutional inertia. But now they have internal demographics worse than Japan, and the immigrant workforce can’t be trained fast enough.

Ie their skilled labor force is shrinking and these are the knock on effects of having too small of families.

Cheap labor and poor contracts compared to for example France

Private in Germany is no better. The incompetence is everywhere. Actually it's not incompetence, it's something else, but whatever it is, it's pervasive.

in fact we germans bet on Italy being the one to blame for failure and did - nothing!

This is actually an intrinsic difficulty of the German rail network, due its highly interconnected structure, and the fact that it connects to other countries in all directions. The schedules are much more complex to handle than, say, in France where you mostly have a spokes-and-hub topology centered on Paris.

The Netherlands does cargo on rail just fine and has the busiest network in EU.

Netherlands has just two neighbour countries and 1/10 of the network. Most of its rail cargo goes into and through Germany.

This is the Dutch rail network: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6f/Ra...

And this is the German rail network: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Bahnstre...

Germany has almost 14 times as many rail stations as the Netherlands, and over ten times as many rail kilometres.

So why not just copy NL infra 14 times across Germany? If every subpart of Germany has same quality as NL, general quality will still improve

Because those 14 parts would be highly interconnected with each other. You couldn’t actually treat them as 14 separate parts. They aren’t compartmentalized like different countries’ networks are.

This is a bit similar to how a 14-core processor doesn’t give you 14 times the performance of a single core if the cores have to communicate and coordinate with each other.

And yet every time there’s a delay in one of those connections, it’s DB that’s at fault, and somehow never the rail companies it interconnects with.

If what you say is true and Germany is uniquely more interconnected than other European countries (which I don’t buy, btw), then you still have cause and effect backwards: the interconnection makes the impact of delays worse, it doesn’t cause them. The delay ultimately happens in a single place and then has knock-on effects, but the place it starts is usually inside Germany.

> German trains stop at the first Swiss station, when they finally arrive, and people gave to switch trains.

It's not just German trains. The Swiss are rather strict about train punctuality (more than 2 min is not accepted if memory serves), and if an international train would cause delays, the Swiss put on their own train on regular schedule and halt the tardy train at the border.

You are almost correct, according to SBB [0], train is considered to be on-time if the delay is less than 3 minutes.

[0]: https://company.sbb.ch/en/the-company/responsibility-society...

> Switzerland built a rail tunnel especially for trans-European traffic, but Germany is apparently incapable of getting cargo onto trains.

And the same is happening with the Brennerbasistunnel in Austria again. Italy and Austria are about to start constructing the last remaining sections, which are going to be finished in around 2034. While Germany has not built anything, and is still discussing where they are going to build the tracks. They expect the construction to start 2030, not to be finished before 2040 Likely even later as that are wild guesses and the construction phases are not yet planned.

Edit: more detailed dates

I used to complain about trains being late in my home country before moving to the USA. I had a 90minute commute each way which sounds terrible but it was actually wonderful. It was 3 hours of bliss each day. I would board the train near my home, sit down and enjoy a smooth, quiet ride (electric and quiet carriages) all the way into the stop next to my work (no changeover). I had internet for almost the whole way.

Anyway i would complain when it was 5minutes late. "This is ridiculous!! How can the trains be so bad here!!!".

Now having lived in the USA for almost a decade i will never again complain like this. I long for the 90minute each way commute on a train that was silent and silky smooth. The 5minute delays here and there wasn't nearly as bad as i thought at the time. I just didn't have perspective.

This article has no precise details on the time trains are delayed. It just says they often run late and gives vague non-specific "The degree of lateness ranged from minutes to several hours" and it's really not based in fact. You can ask anyone anywhere in the world what they think of the delays on their train system and even for the world class train systems people will complain due to the lack of perspective while not realising just how lucky they are.

On my connection from bumfuckville in south-east Germany to Berlin, all involved trains run on a 1 hour schedule, but they are not perfectly connected to each other (for instance in Leipzig I miss the ICE to Berlin by just ten minutes). Sometimes when the previous train is delayed I'm lucky and catch that. Paradoxically saving me time despite a train being delayed ;)

All in all I can't complain, last 6 months were bad because of an unbelievable amount of construction work so some flexibility was required (eg going over different cities or taking an "express bus" between two cities, but now the connection is working normally again.

With at most one hour until the next train, I guess it's mostly ok if one plans ahead with some wiggle room. People are really getting riled about the tiniest things these days.

PS: the most likely delay on that connection is the ICE between Munich and Hamburg via Leipzig and Berlin, the regional trains are pretty much always on time (except when there are construction sites of course).

My perspective: grew up in Texas where I was not able to leave my little housing development (void of anything but houses) independently until I got a driver's license and car at 16, then went to university in Baltimore with its sketchy buses, subway that appears to have been built to bring housecleaners from the inner city to the wealthy suburbs, and commuter trains that were mostly good for getting to the stadium downtown from various suburban Maryland parking lots.

Germany's rail system, despite irritating delays, is a wonder to this Texas gal, and changed my relationship with driving. Intercity rail is about as irritating as flying, delay wise. Getting good with the schedule app adds a lot of agency - I've made lots of spur of the moment connection change decisions (having the 50% off flexible fares card also helps).

The rail system has been a bit of a victim of the Deutschlandticket's success. When everyone who kind of takes the subway or train sometimes and can commit to 49 EUR/mo now has unlimited rides on everything but the high speed trains, they use it. And Germany had a really nice summer that extended well past the usual summer time, resulting in packed trains to anywhere vaguely scenic up to this weekend.

> subway that appears to have been built to bring housecleaners from the inner city to the wealthy suburbs

Yep. This right here is why North America, with tiny exceptions, has terrible public transit; it is built under the assumption only the poorest will use it and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

People who commute regularly remember the days when there was some problem--not all the days when things worked pretty much as expected.

I will say that I went in maybe 50% of the time into my city office at one point and it was about 90 minutes each way. It got old. Get up at 6am, drive to train station, take train, 10 minute walk to office. It's just a big chunk out of your day and the train could get very crowded. Almost never go into another office these days and that's about 2 hours each way.

The difference for me was that my home was a 2 minute walk to the train station and work 5minutes.

Without changeovers it was essentially 3 hours of "Do what you want to do online guilt free without distraction" sitting in a seat on the train. I'd hate to do any form of intermodal commute but zoning out on a single train? Easy! In fact kind of a nice forced escape.

Here is a quote from a different article with numbers (apparently self reported by Deutsche Bahn) for January 2023 for one station:

> Less construction work in cold weather normally means fewer delays. But only 71,8 percent of Deutsche Bahn trains that ran between January 1 and February 9 managed to pull into the station on time, or with a delay of no more than five minutes and 59 seconds.

https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/2023-de...

Notice that trains which are about five minutes late are not reported as such. These included, the ratio of delayed trains might well be more than half. (Canceled trains are also sometimes not included as delayed, it is unclear if that is the case here.)

The reliability of German long-distance trains is objectively bad (and getting worse). Here are the official statistics: https://www.deutschebahn.com/de/konzern/konzernprofil/zahlen...

The middle tab ("DB Fernverkehr") shows the percentage of trains arriving less than 16 minutes late (black) and less than 6 minutes late (red). In September 2023, 23% of trains were more than 15 minutes late!

Compare this to Switzerland's SBB: https://reporting.sbb.ch/punctuality?highlighted=e68508fb204...

The SBB already considers a train late when it arrives more than 2 minutes after the scheduled time. Yet, they routinely achieve more than 90% punctuality rates.

> Here are the official statistics: https://www.deutschebahn.com/de/konzern/konzernprofil/zahlen...

A few years ago David Kriesel did some independent data mining on the reported delays. One point that came up is that official statistics do not even cover train stops that where cancelled and I think it was also mentioned that cancelling stops was one of the ways used to make up for lost time if needed to avoid knock-on effects.

German presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rb9CfOvojk

popcorn!

The same presentation without Google tracking: https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10652-bahnmining_-_punktlichkeit...

Interesting. As a point of comparison, here are the official statistics of the Belgian railways: https://punctuality.belgiantrain.be/nl/dashboard

Last year, 10% of trains were delayed by > 6 minutes; this year 12%.

Note, some common complaints about these statistics are:

1. They measure delay at arrival at the end station. However, many trains have some margins built in during their ride, so they may be delayed en-route but "catch up" by the time they reach their end destination; resulting in more favorable numbers.

2. Cancelled trains are not counted in the statistics. So ironically, to improve punctuality statistics, it is "better" to cancel a train than having it run with a delay.

3. Trains are more delayed during peak hours than off-peak or during the weekend, but all trains count equally in these numbers.

4. If a (e.g. 5 minute) delay causes you to miss your transfer, you arrive much later at your final destination (e.g. 30 or 60 minutes).

5. If you inflate travel times (adding some extra "margin"), you can avoid bad statistics but passengers still don't get at their destination faster. This has happened in the past.

A fairer way to calculate delays would be to take a sample of all passengers and measure how delayed they arrive at their (final) destination. An organization that advocates for public transport users (TreinTramBus) has done this in the past, I thought, but I can't find it back.

Having commuted 55 minutes each way into Munich for more than a year, I'd say my average daily delay is about 15 minutes with >30 minutes delay happening at least once a week.

That's a level of regular delay that makes early morning meetings impractical because I'll be late more likely than not.

Are there any investigations into what changed? I remember DB had always been looked up to by Austrians but now OEBB seems to run a better service?

anecdotal, but my experience a year ago when i travelled international was: 2/2 delays by OEBB that made me miss connections (and absolutely rude and inconsiderate customer service reps in Vienna HBF on top of that), 1/1 on time trains by DB ICE

> Anyway i would complain when it was 5minutes late. "This is ridiculous!! How can the trains be so bad here!!!".

> Now having lived in the USA for almost a decade i will never again complain like this.

The German way is rather to compare the punctuality of the German trains to Swiss or Japanese ones: these are a lot more punctual, so this problem is mostly solvable.

Thus German citizens legitimately ask why are the Swiss and Japanese able to solve this problem, and we can't? In particular in consideration that this is considered to be an engineering problem where many German citizens consider Germany to be better in than Switzerland or Japan (legitimately or not shall remain undecided).

Japan has dedicated lines for high-speed trains and a mostly north-south corridor.

Germany has mixed-use lines in a meshed network directly connected to neighbour countries.

> where many German citizens consider Germany to be better in than Switzerland or Japan (legitimately or not shall remain undecided).

I think you made that up. Germans complain a lot about their infrastructure and you can read&see a lot of reports&comparisons with other countries train infrastructure.

I don't really mind a few minutes here and there.

I mind random cancellations, platform changes (announced at the last second of course), mind-bogglingly unreliable (late, overcrowded, unable to carry bikes) replacement buses and incorrect (and sometimes conflicting - this has gotten worse!) information about all of it on the apps.

Never take the last long-distance route of the day.

Most of the time, Germans complain about the wrong things (e.g. their postal system, which is outstanding).

The trains suck a little bit. But this is mainly caused by two reasons:

1. Years of under-investment

2. No separation between bullet trains and freight trains (compare to China!)

1 can be solved over time. Point 2 is trickier. In general there is some but not enough fantasy. I would suggest:

a) more investments

b) several bullet trains connecting Europe.

c) more sleeper trains

d) self coupling trains.

Yes, you can go from Frankfurt to Paris in the same train. But why not from Warsaw to Madrid? With self coupling cars this might be feasible.

OT: This is interesting for freight. https://www.cargobeamer.com/

> Earlier this month, after weeks of speculation over the future of Britain’s planned HS2 high-speed rail link from Birmingham to Manchester, the prime minister finally announced that the northern leg was to be scrapped.

Actually Germany has and is building&upgrading new train lines and is buying new trains. It's also building/upgrading new train stations in major cities.

There is an extensive public transport system with regional trains and also long distance trains. Core technical infrastructure in many places for them is old. Especially computer controlled train operations have to be introduced in many places.

Upgrading this takes a decade or more and this process is very expensive and will cause even more delays during the update phase. It will partly get worse, before it gets better.

For example the high-speed connection between Hamburg and Berlin (roughly every 30 minutes ICE trains travel in both directions) will be upgraded during the next two years and there will be longer travel times for several months.

Upgrading the major train stations is also very difficult, since most of them are in the center of already dense cities. Here in Hamburg one of the important ICE train stations (Altona, where several ICE trains are starting) will be moved to a new place in the city (a few km apart). The train station then will no longer be a terminus (trains now enter/leave only in one direction), which will improve travel times. Cost will be more than 0.5 billion Euros.

One factor which also makes upgrading the infrastructure difficult is the very low unemployment rate, which makes it difficult to find trained workers...

> One factor which also makes upgrading the infrastructure difficult is the very low unemployment rate, which makes it difficult to find trained workers...

Does the German government have a history of offering competitive pay to train system workers, sufficiently high to make it a more attractive option than a Mon to Fri 8AM to 4PM desk job?

Try to find skilled workers now. There are many industries/professions in competition. It's also not the "german government", which employs train system workers.

For infrastructure, it does not matter if it is the government directly paying or not, either way it is society’s leaders deciding not to sufficiently invest.

And what is a “skilled” worker? Is it someone who has to use their hands (not on a keyboard) and work outdoors and evenings/nights/weekends, and has to do a job that cannot be done sitting in a chair?

Because for as long as I have been alive, I have seen many societies around the world not offer the rewards to go into that type of work, and instead offering comparatively high rewards for desk work.

> And what is a “skilled” worker?

Experts in digital train infrastructure, for example.

The digital infrastructure for train systems is crucial. Companies like Siemens provide equipment. These are complex projects to convert old infrastructure (signalling & control) to modern digital systems. There are literally thousands of complex projects necessary to upgrade the old train system.

This also necessary for local public transport. For example my local train connection to the city has recently been upgraded with digital systems capable to support autonomous train operation. This was one of the first in Germany. Still the trains are not driving autonomously. Much more effort is needed to provide higher throughput for passenger transport.

I was in the Donau valley two years ago (a gorgeous place) and the local train station for a village of under thousand people had fully mechanical operation! As in: levers, pulleys, weights that had to be cranked up, springs and even those cool mechanical sign posts that work on gravity and steel rods.

It was beautiful engineering, I spent hours watching it all being operated by two men who lived on the station. I can only imagine how such old tech is holding everything back. But can also appreciate how it just keeps running: it just needs skilled humans, and lots of grease.

yep, and that's not rare, unfortunately.

Amusing article. Yes German trains are often late. One of the main reasons was suicides. Previously all trains in that area would be stopped until all body parts were found and collected. This practice is no more. Trains have to go slower in the clean up area but not stop. Comparing Deutsche Bahn and the UK train service is like comparing night and day. With DB you get value for money and comfort. With UK trains you get something else entirely, must not forget to mention most of them don't pay tax and are run as offshore entities..

According to random search result[0], there are ~800 annual suicides by train per year in Germany. For the number of lines in the country, that does not seem like a sufficient number to explain away train delays.

[0] https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/rail-suicide-...

If you have two of those each day, you'll get lots of network effects. Imagine a train track from Hamburg (where a lot of ICE trains are starting) to the south being delayed for two hours in the morning. That means a lot of effects since the train lines and train stations are often operating at the higher end of the capacity.

For example recently two girls im my hometown were doing Tiktok videos for a challenge on a high-speed train track. One got killed and one barely survived. The whole track between Hamburg and Berlin was closed for hours.

Whenever there are reports of people on the tracks, they need to be checked and trains are stopped.

I mean that is on average >2 lines per day, which doesn't sound like much, but how many people use a line per day? and I'm guessing suicides occur more often on busy lines, so it's significant still

UK trains are very expensive but it's a myth that the service is poor. when I was last in Germany, I took 3 trains. 2/3 were more than 15 minutes delayed and the third was 5 minutes late. obviously 3 is a small sample size, but I've taken tens of trains in a row in the UK without a delay of even 5 minutes. the trains also appeared to be a lot older and in worse condition than the average British train I've been on

Not true. Rail card makes German trains a total value for money proposition. Rolling stock is 10 times better. Comfortable, warm with many seating options. This is across the board. Want to experience time travel? Take a regional UK train and go back to 1950...

depends on the lines. from my experience the UK is considerably better in all regards compared to german trains.

I emigrated to Germany 4 years ago when I still belived in the myth of German efficiency but at this point I am completely disillusioned.

It's a myth that is problematic because even Germans started to belive in and it's holding it back. German rail is in horrible state, internet speed is a joke, banking system is ancient and you still have problems with paying with cards. Also dealing with even simple stuff require a crazy amount of documentation and personal visit for no good reason.

And the worst part is that due the German mentality and their feel that their are the greatest nothing will be improved and any insight from abroad used. Their approach is always just "Well what can we or oh it's definitely the best system".

Germany is the best in marketing and eating the benefits of the previous generations.

The same situation in Sweden. My assumption is that German train operators maximize profit. So they calculate. Either run trains on time, have redundant train sets in nearby depots, have locomotive drivers on standby in case one gets sick (not an uncommon reason for delays). Or don't have any redundancy at all and hand out refunds and gift vouchers to the passengers affected by delays. Also make the claims system as Byzantine as possible to make it difficult for passengers to make claims. Think it's an easy choice for most operators.

You know that experience where as a company ages and grows, as a product evolves, it becomes harder and harder to do anything? Sure, if you do a great job planning and designing your runway is longer, but the music always slows.

This also seems to happen with cities. The bigger and more established, the harder it is, for obvious reasons, to retrofit mass transit and whatnot. Downtowns of large cities always feel kinda hacked together.

Does the same happen with a country? The longer a country’s current established governmental system exists, the more it inevitably bogs down?

> The longer a country’s current established governmental system exists, the more it inevitably bogs down?

Doesn't really apply to Germany all that well.

Have you seen the subway extensions in Paris?

I want to give props to Italy and Spain. Highly efficient trains, the rail building is as fast as Switzerland and France, and cost way less (Italy used to have cost issues but it seems fixed now). I think they will have the 2nd and 3rd best railroad network in a decade if they keep up (behind Switzerland, and maybe ahead if Lausanne hub keep getting slowed down) (i'm forgetting about Benelux, let's say the 3rd and 4th, and let's not count countries like Luxembourg or smaller).

Fyi N=1. I remember a train from Stuttgart to Amsterdam, even quite a few years go, the end result was we would be quite close to missing the last trains to final destination in Amsterdam due to mishaps at Frankfurt. We (the Dutchies) got better support from the NS (Dutch railways) than the Germans at all places. We could call a number to get alternative routes, get advice on where to go, what to ask and got notice on what to do when. Eventually we were told to board a train by taking a local train to Frankfurt Flugplatz but first get our tickets transfered so we would get prefered seats. Afterwards we even got all tickets back, including transfers, due to delays and even the transfer tickets back with a few online clicks while the Germans had to fill in all kinds of forms. On the final train the Germans were surprised when the Dutch officers were asking everyone their end destination (stil in Germany) to know if they could delay the transfer trains in the Netherlands so everyone could get home. If you could not a cab would be free of charge.

For me that was the day I realised the Dutch trains weren't as bad as I thought.

edit: I did have a first class ticket but the end line -make sure every one got home- was in general no questions asked.

I recently traveled from my small town to Cologne - it is such a shit show, I cannot imagine how people cope with it for years. I took more or less a direct connection, but trains would be late (30 min or even 2h late), skipped parts of the route, 1st class is a joke (it is like in a tram, people with flat-rate tickets can run there without a reservation and occupy free places) - it is certainly a very bad deal if you already own a car, since even not considering that every journey with DB is an adventure, is pretty expensive, even with discounted tickets. If you travel with a family, it is a terrible and very expensive choice overall.

In my bubble even people who where holding out for decades are giving up and getting a car. DB is falling apart and needs to scale down the number of trains until the network can manage it, from this point on it is about investments.

I am not even that bullish on rail network, since I mostly drive from one small town to another one and public transport does nothing for me. But at least big town to big town connection should work like a clock.

The UK: "Hold my beer."

At least Germany has high speed rail.

The fact that the Beeching cuts of the 60's happened should be a point of national embarrassment - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts - the country is still suffering the consequences of this "strategy".

i don’t think you realise just how worse train travel is in germany compared to the UK

Despite the Beeching cuts the UK still has a pretty dense rail system. I think the bigger problem has been the lack of S-bahn like development in the major cities outside of London.

I was just in Germany and my train to the airport arrived over an hour and a half late. I was shocked.

Don't be. It is such a nightmare esp around places like Frankfurt.

With the UK having their share of railway reform (and love/hate relationship), I'm wondering if there's an objective assessment of the two countries' systems according to being on-time, being broadly available wrt place/time, pricing, and general customer satisfaction. The article mentions people blaming service deterioration on Deutsche Bahn being state-owned and without competition. UK should be quite different after Thatcher's privatization campaign starting in late 80s (been there in early 90s on a London station heading to the east, totally confused which train to board while being yelled at ^H informed over the speaker about the service provider/operator but not much else).

At times it can feel like being trapped in a nation of self-saboteurs.

Today I tried to travel 80km. By car it's about 1 hour. By train it's almost 2 hours. 10 minutes in the ride, the train stopped because a tree was about to fall into the rails. 20 minutes later we continued and I missed my connecting train by 10 minutes. Next train in 2 hours. I tried to find another route but the trains were cancelled. So I abandoned my plan an decided to go back home. That train was delayed 5, then 10, then 15 minutes. It stopped right outside my home station and waited 5 minutes. Almost 2 hours on the Deutsche Bahn and I was back again, where I started.

> Germany may be the home of an ever-powerful carmaking lobby and an autobahn which includes some sections free of speed limits

I recently spent a week driving around southern Germany. The freeways around Munich seemed to be in permanent Stau (jam) mode, even off peak on weekdays. Outside cities, on the notionally-unlimited stretches, I could rarely even drive at 130 (the advisory limit) because there was simply so much traffic.

> The delay is now such a common occurrence that the train manager does not even both to mention it to disembarking passengers.

Do these corporations even have proofreaders?

> Do these corporations even have proofreaders?

It's called The Grauniad for a reason!

> When he began his daily commute in January 2016, he had few problems with the hour-long journey on a high-speed intercity train, bookended by cycle rides. The trip would have taken three times as long by car

This part confuses me a bit. Deutsche Bahn was bad 7 years ago and it has only gotten worse, but travelling more than 230km a day while depending on DB seems like a bet that can only go wrong, no matter when this started

This Adam Something video was really enlightening as to just how bad Europe's international train situation really is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oxz4oY0T85Y

oh, the railways recently became measurably more on schedule. Simply by raising the threshold value for 'belatedness' for the statistics. Magical.

Seems and odd focus for a british paper, a nation that pretty much invented railways, to look outward and criticize another country like this.

First where idea that Germany is build for efficiency came from? Is it Germany government paid material?

Germany is rulled by car makers lobby, it's obvious train infra is let to rot and underfunded

German railway is managed by former car managers for decades. Doesn't work out. Surprising?

Jetlag's current season involved a lot of german trains.

It didn't go well.

This is partly by political choice. The Germna traffic department has been held by the conservatives (CSU) for years, and ministers like Peter Ramsauer, Alexander Dobrindt, and Andreas Scheuer were more concerned with investing in roads (particularly in Bavaria, their home state) than in rails. Now the ministry is with the liberals (FDP, Volker Wissing), who also seem to be more concerned with defending drivers’ freedom.

Not only our trains!

may I add to the list: - Covid Vaccination Rollout - Government plane routinely breaking - Berlin Airport Construction - Military Weapon Procurement - last but not least, German National team

Look at the management boards of German transport and telco companies in the past twenty+ years. Scrape it together. Check previous positions and countries and so on. That's enough for a fun start. Build your knowledge graph from there. Or rather let an AI have the fun and you just watch the pathetic mess unfold.

I don't think anybody is going to do this (I wouldn't even know where to start, not being in Germany), and you've clearly done so and discovered something that's not clear from context, so could you just tell us what you've found out?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com