While the tech described probably has merits, anyone who has been near DB lately would instinctively go: why are you doing this when you cannot get the basics right?
People tend to obsess over DB and it's management, but they only control maintenance. All decisions about renovations are made by the government.
So what do you want?
- Wait years for large renovation projects on all major routes, including lengthy closures for work(the current strategy)
- Cancel 25-50%% of all trains permanently, if then people can't travel because it's impossible to get through the door, tough
The latter one is the French solution - just run very few trains, regardless of demand. The last time I wanted to travel by train in France, I simply couldn't because all trains on the route for the entire day were 100% sold out.
Then there's Spain. The last time I wanted to travel there, I didn't because the first(!) train of the day left at lunchtime and arrived mid-afternoon.
The reason for DB reliability problem is 50+ years of infrastructure neglect, fixing it will not be improved by shutting down every other group at DB.
Personally having traveled threw Germany many times, its a mostly amazing. Yes sometimes trains are late sometimes, but the trains themselves are great and travel in them is a joy.
I think what Germans don't understand is how good they have it compared to many places in the world.
> sometimes trains are late sometimes, but the trains themselves are great and travel in them is a joy.
"Sometimes"? Let me tell you about my friends in the German area of NRW. The one that commutes far away regularly gets stranded on the way because the trains arrive so late that there's no connection home till the next day and because, of the two lines that take her home, one is closed. The second one commutes within the city and has decided to buy a car because the SBahn was closed for over a year with a repair that took longer than planned. The other two don't even consider trains in their daily life. My GF at the time had a year-long line closure, we moved to a place with a year-long train closure and I'm living now in an area where my regular train won't run until November (assuming no delay).
Yes, DB trains are pretty nice on the inside. Quiet, too. But what good is a nice train that doesn't take me to where I need to go, or at all? If anything, I think those that don't rely on the trains daily fail to realize how bad the situation is. Ten minutes delay on the one ICE trip on holidays? Sure, whatever, it's fine. Ten minutes delay on a five minutes connection to work? Enjoy wasting half an hour of your life every other day, like I did during my studies.
Switzerland has cut DB off [2] and Scottish fans received warnings [3] about how unreliable German trains are. It is bad.
[1] The DB signal is like the bat signal for comments downplaying DBs issues, but you often don't see it because there's a "Signalstörung" and it shows up an hour later. They usually apologize for the inconvenience.
[2] https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/deutsch...
[3] https://www.indonewyork.com/m/science/european-football-cham...
They should care about how other transportation systems are around the world as a coping mechanism?
I mostly travel around DACH region + Nordics/Spain/Netherlands and sometimes the contrast in terms of reliability, maintenance, and integration makes me feel that Germany is 10+ years back in time.
DB is facing the problem that the network needs substantial overhaul - the problem is that when you do a large-scale renovation, you gotta adhere to current code, not late 19th century code (which is when quite a few of the railways had been built). And that means noise protection anywhere where the tracks are adjacent to residential areas, but NIMBYs will launch intensive protests if they get presented with a massive wall of steel in their backyard - understandably so, these things are an eyesore.
So, it's a prerequisite for DB to tackle its problems... because most of them are caused by the aged infrastructure. Right next to Munich, on the route to Mühldorf, there are still mechanical switches in place, built around 1900 [1].
[1] https://www.merkur.de/lokales/erding/der-bahnausbau-nach-mue...
Though to some extent people got themselves into that situation of their own fault by constantly screaming about noise and nothing else – politicians listened and tightened up the rules for noise protection, with the result that legally noise protection is now weighted 100 % and visual aesthetics 0 %. Whereas to my knowledge the Swiss still take a somewhat more balanced approach, and don't completely disregard the visual impact of noise protection barriers.
It's not like they don't have a point... a lot of former switchyards were converted to residential use in the early 90s and ever since then, but of course the rail tracks that these yards were laid adjacent to still kept operating, and freight trains make an awful lot of noise.
Silent-brake requirements (basically, composite brake pads instead of the old metal-on-metal pads) have eased the noise emissions quite a bit, but damages in the wheels ("flat spots") or in axles still cause persistent and annoying noise. Unfortunately, 99.999% of freight cars are still dumb as fuck and have no sensorics on-board to detect issues, so it takes a loooong time until such cars are taken out of service. Maybe with the adoption of the new automated couplers ("DAK") that are in research at the moment, this will change as all cars have to be retrofit with electricity and smart components anyway so it is cheap to install monitoring on wheels and axles, but that will take another few years.
Additionally, the tracks themselves can cause ungodly amounts of noise due to neglected maintenance. Where rails aren't (properly!) welded together, they cause a bump noise, switches need to be properly lubricated and the wheels need lubrication as well to prevent those horrible screeches... but DB hasn't had the money to properly take care of that for decades now.
> Whereas to my knowledge the Swiss still take a somewhat more balanced approach, and don't completely disregard the visual impact of noise protection barriers.
The Swiss have more silent rail in the first place. Lots of rail-side detectors to check for damages on passing rail cars (an absolute necessity due to the high amount of tunnels, you do not want a train de-railing due to an axle or wheel issue inside a tunnel and catching fire) and about 5-6x the amount per capita invested into their rail system every year.
On top of that, Germany has to deal with rail cars (and trucks) from across the entirety of Europe passing through it - basically all transport from the Dutch and German sea ports towards Eastern and South Eastern Europe goes through Germany, the Swiss have to deal with far less traffic than we do.