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Comment by bradley13 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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

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.

> 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...

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.

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