Hacker News Reader

Comment by dickiedyce | Hacker News Reader

As a Scot who travels on Scottish, English, and Welsh railways, and on Swiss and German railways... Scotrail (now in Public ownership) is pretty good. And I say that as someone in the Highlands, which has had the worst of it in the last 30 years. There's been recent investment, and even the re-opening of closed lines and finally new stations where they've been desperately needed (Inverness Airport, Kintore, Laurencekirk). But still plenty more to do. I visit the south semi-regularly, and worked in London in the 90's. Rail around London seems to have really improved over the last few years. Swiss Rail (SBB) is still the poster child for a decent rail system. Clean, on time, reasonably priced (compared to UK rail), and easy to use. What was eye-opening for me was recent travel in Germany (München to Basel in CH)... DB was dreadful and the stations were in an awful state of repair.

View on HN

Fun fact: DB (Germany public-private national rail company) has become one of the UK's biggest train service providers - even the Queen's train was under their service.

DB (Schenker) buys stakes in transportation all over the world - with German tax payer money: A fact that many Germans do not like given the very poor train service in their own country.

DB Schenker was sold recently. So your point is not entirely correct anymore. Also yes, it did invest tax payer money but was profitable doing so.

> DB Schenker was sold recently

Ah, the traditional privatize the profit, and nationalize the losses then. Great.

Just looked through DB's annual report. There's no mentioning of any passenger rail operations in UK. It's "just" DB Cargo. So I don't understand what this "fact" has anything to do with passenger transportation in Germany.

By the way, Cargo is the mode of operation where most profitable rail companies are. Hence the dualism of loss-incurring Amtrak and profitable North Amercian freight operators as well.

DB Cargo is producing more losses than the other branches, i.e. passenger rail. It doesn’t generate profits like in the US (shorter trains, more single rail car traffic, shorter distances, infrastructure held up to higher standard thus more expensive, lower priority compared to passenger rail)

You're missing the point: it is still less loss incurring than passenger rail (and has been at least profitable sometimes, or in some markets).

> the very poor train service in [Germany]

Amtrak has entered the chat.

(It was originally scheduled to enter the chat at 2:42 AM, but was delayed until 6:01 AM.)

3 hours, that’s not even a drlay.

Scotrail was shockingly bad when Abellio were running it - much better now and certainly much better than the likes of Avanti West Coast...

Plus the Scottish Govt have removed the peak/off-peak ticket split, everything is now priced at off-peak - i.e. cheaper - rates.

Doesn't necessarily impact season ticket holders but it's been a pretty good move for the most part, and a well received change.

> DB was dreadful and the stations were in an awful state of repair

DBs state is probably too unique to draw any conclusions (attempted privatization stopped just before IPO, so now it's lot of different state-owned private organizations with degraded infrastructure). But the stations are actually fairly straight forward: the platforms and the means to get there are still publicly owned, but 80% of the station buildings have been sold off to private operators. The bigger ones are glorified malls that are exempt from laws about shopping hours, the smaller ones mostly just decay

My wife uses ScotRail to commute and has no complaints. Yes, there’s the usual weather related stuff but nothing too bad. She probably has the same number of issues with her commute as I do by car - my journey was twice as long tonight as the road was covered in chickens after a crash.

It's a mystery to me how Germany, known for its high efficiency in many industries, cannot get the trains to run on time. It's almost as bad as Italy.

This is great to hear.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com