Germany's train service is one of Europe's worst. How did it get so bad?
npr.org
npr.org
A cancelled train should be counted as delayed until the next train (close to the worst-case scenario) so as to discourage it.
But the real problem with deteriorating service is that people will put up with it for a long time - as long as they get to where they’re going eventually.
But they’ll stop choosing the train, and over 20 years you’ll find that everyone has moved to private vehicles or alternate transportation methods.
And then you have no riders and trying to get back on track will take 20 years or more.
The actual reason is that if a train is too late, it will conflict too much with the other scheduled trains and there's simply no room for it. Keeping the delayed train will just cause more delays for other trains on the same route, because German trains are scheduled with very high frequency.
E.g. where I live in Cologne, there's typically a high speed train every 20 to 30 minutes to Frankfurt. If one train is delayed by 30 minutes, then suddenly you have two (ore more) trains right on top of eachother heading to the same destination, both on very very congested lines that theyre simultaneously trying to do repairs and expansions to.
Those are the sorts of situations where it makes sense to just cancel the train, not because of metrics but because of actual track constraints.
The main thing people dont understand about Germany's train system is the scale of it. The network is physically very large, but also very densely packed, and has very frequent trains.
For instance, here is the map just of the regional (non-high-speed) trains between cities in my state of Nordrhein-Westfalen: https://karteplan.com/deutschland/land/nordrhein-westfalen/s...
It looks more like a circuit board than a traditional transit map. That's why this problem is so hard to solve and will take a long time and a lot of investment before it improves.
Keep in mind that for the majority of trains in Germany, nobody bought a specific ticket for that journey. We just use the DeutschlandTicket which is a flat subscription of 58€/month, which gives unlimited access to busses, trams, and regional trains (basically everything but high speed trains).
With the deutschalnd ticket, you typically just walk onto a train of your choice and go wherever you want. They dont actually know where all the travellers are going or even how many people there are
You could also select random virtual journeys, I suppose. In arbitrary units you should at least be able to measure whether DB is improving or not. You could even delegate this to an independent organization. Actually, now that I think of it, isn't the API public? I'm reminded of the talk by D. Kriesel about DB data mining.
> A train may be late by 15 minutes, but if that means I'll miss a connecting train, that might delay my journey by an hour or more.
Speaking from experience taking the subway in Shanghai, if a train is 15 minutes late, and it still manages to arrive before the train that was scheduled to follow it, it cannot be true that the network is "very densely packed" or that it has "very frequent trains".
This isn't obvious to me. Here's Deutsche Bahn's map of the system: https://cms.static-bahn.de/wmedia/redaktion/aushaenge/streck...
Here's a map of Shanghai's subway system: https://www.travelchinaguide.com/images/map/shanghai/subway-...
The German intercity rail network certainly identifies more lines, around 57 to Shanghai's 18, but this isn't directly related to the complexity of the topology. For example, line 14 appears to begin in Aachen and dead-end into Berlin, at which point line 95 begins in Berlin and runs out to Poland. As far as the routing is concerned, those could be the same line. But they're given different numbers. When the same thing happens (at a smaller scale) in Shanghai at the west end of line 9, the tail bit of the line going to Songjiang is still called "line 9". Note that if you want to ride out to Songjiang, at some point you're going to have to get off your "line 9" train and walk over to another station where a different "line 9" train will take you the rest of the way.
Discounting that, the two layouts appear to be roughly similar on the fundamentals, if differently scaled.
The most obvious difference is that the routes between major German cities are served by several lines. This is clearly meaningful in some cases; line 29 from Munich to Nuremberg continues north to Hamburg via Berlin while line 41 from Munich to Nuremberg continues northwest to Dortmund via Frankfurt and Cologne. On the other hand, line 8 from Munich to Nuremberg parallels line 29 for the entire length of line 8 (line 8 stops in Berlin, but line 29 doesn't).
My first guess would be that conflicts arise from the fact that the German trains are on the ground, and when their tracks cross, conflict can occur. This isn't true of a subway system; when subway tracks cross, they do it at different altitudes, allowing both tracks to be in use simultaneously.
Your map only shows ICE/IC lines, there are many more other lines which share the same tracks. This shows a more complete picture: https://www.deviantart.com/costamiri/art/Transit-diagram-of-... but it still doesn't show international trains and freight.
Trains inside cities (i.e. trams and subways) are much much more frequent because they have fewer constraints and lower speeds.
Passenger trains from Frankfurt to Cologne are infrequent because there is virtually no demand to move between cities 120 miles apart. Because the trains are infrequent, they aren't dense on the tracks.
But that's the opposite of saying that they are frequent and densely packed.
In Germany train station a platform can host multiple route.
https://iechub.rfi.it/ArriviPartenze/en/ArrivalsDepartures/M...
Of course usually the same train departs every time from the same platform. I think that it helps everybody.
And that's a wonderful thing, you can reach "everywhere" with a train in Germany. That's something I wanted to say that we need to keep in mind when we see a headline like this. It's a sense in which Germany's train service is one of the best in the world.
Not surprising that Germany has a better train network.
Besides, Canada used to have a much more extensive train network back in early 1900s when the population was a tenth of what it is now.
Canada could have functioning train networks if we wanted them.
And then there's a pet hypothesis of mine, that a factor in the unreliability of German rail is the famous absence of a general speed limit on the Autobahn: that this might make DB strive for fast best case connection times more than it would if driving was slower, pushing them to schedule an unrealistic house of cards with not enough slack to recover from the unexpected.
That said, this doesn't mean it's impossible the fix Germany's trains. Germany's network did work quite well before, and it can again. The fixes are happening right now, but it's going to get worse before it gets better, because all the construction that needs to be done interferes with the network.
Never mind congested lines, remember the trains are full of paying passengers!
(Let's assume both trains were more than half-full of passengers, which is fairly typical), what would you plan to do with the passengers on the cancelled train who can't get on the other train because there is literally no room for them?
I recently travelled on a badly-delayed ICE train (to Frankfurt Airport, as it happens) and it was running so late I ended up rebooking my flight from the stationary ICE because I lost confidence we would get to the airport in time for my flight.
Here is the link to his talk directly https://youtu.be/0rb9CfOvojk?si=7EImZU9x4zFb6LSf
Its true that the network is quite dense and used by also cargo trains, but there is no denying that things got worse and worse. I constantly experience delay to do some stuff not working. I forgot even the minute threshold when a train is still punctual according to DB. I believe it's 10min by now, which can be deadly if you need to switch trains :)
In the US I've been on a intercity Amtrak that was so late they combined it with the train ahead of it and had a massively long train (it had to stop twice at one or two shorter stations).
Re-reading up on ETCS-Level3, that would enable all of this. We're just fucking slow to implement it, while having let our infrastructure decay, and intentionally built back. Like switches to change tracks, for overtaking slower trains, if the other side is free, too expensive to maintain, da da da ah jetzt ja! Dumm gelaufen...
Selbst Schuld Ihr Arschkrampen!
ALAAF!
And finally fence all that shit in, and let the rats and crows have their fun with all the suicidals. No need to close the track. Light a candle, if you must, just another one bites the dust. Yawn.
This is a country with a $2.68 per gallon gas tax, compared to $0.51 on average in the US (€0.60 v. €0.11 per liter). This is partly justified as nudging people to use less carbon intensive transport. That nudge works a lot less well when the lower carbon alternative is painfully worse than your car.
Irrelevant comparison since US is a widely different animal to most European countries.
It might be expensive compared to the US, but Germany is still one of the countries with the most affordable income-to-cost ratios for car ownership in the Eurozone, so car commuting is incredibly common, especially for those not living in densely populated metro areas.
And also the government gives you tax rebates for your fuel expenses the further you have to commute for work which is a double edged sword.
Executive (VP+): I like to see a burndown chart (or some other format). I want a dog in a cat form factor.
Next meeting: Burndown chart
So I paid 3x for comfort, only to get stuck standing in the aisle with all my luggage for 6 hours and an additional transfer. Yes, I can get the ticket refunded, but the point is not about the money. What should I expect out of a service that can so easily be completely downgraded at a moment's notice?
A similar regulation for trains would likely tighten up reliability, though it could also raise ticket prices.
Their claim form is here: https://www.lufthansa.com/us/en/fast-compensation
An overview of the regulation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Passengers_Rights_Regulati...
It really should be a three hour train ride but due to incompetence it takes over six hours.
As someone who fairly often travels by German ICE (not their regional trains), I've only ever experienced the timetable unreliability.
WiFi is fairly reliable and much much better than for example the Dutch railway (NS) WiFi which never seems to work, and I can't remember the last time it didn't work on an ICE. I've never had any seat reservation mix ups or (knowingly) missing train cars; the last two I've experienced only once in Europe, on a cross border train from Slovenia to Austria, with the seat booked via the ÖBB on a Slovenian train.
When these ICE's are on time and show up, I like them a lot. The seats are very comfortable, there's food service in the train, the seat reservations aren't thát high, and are optional (unlike say high speed rail in Italy, where there's a 15 euro required seat reservation on top of the ticket price), the staff is consistently friendly and so far (I think) they haven't joined the annoying recent trend to put digital ads on the same monitor as the in train timetable.
More so, I really really like the Deutsche Bahn app and use it for trains all over Europe.
Reading this article makes me ask myself if the route and type of train matters, but also that the article didn't really add anything new from what wasn't already known. With their ongoing frequent delays DB made them an easy target for anything under the sun, but comparatively to other trains in Europe, at least for DB ICE's, delays aside, I feel they're doing quite alright.
For Americans: Flixbus a cheap bus service which is often used by people who are not really bothered by social norms.
In that case, yes, Flixbus is similar to Grayhound.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/i-feel-sorry-for...
https://www.cps.gov.uk/london-north/news/two-youths-jailed-b...
https://people.com/what-happened-in-the-july-7-london-bombin...
Their drivers can't do anything except scan your ticket and deny entrance if the computer says no. They don't speak any local language or English. Any minor problem cascades in delays of half a day. Their bus stops were druggie/thief zones where I felt really unsafe. After their train was 2 hours late, I was a minute late for my connection. The bus driver saw us running to his bus, smiled, waved at us, closed his door and drove away, showing his middle finger out of the window.
Deutsche Bahn is a useful parallel. It was once fully public and later privatized, yet it still carries much of the old organizational DNA. The result is a company that adapts painfully slowly to changing market needs, compounded by chronic mismanagement.
Germany’s problem is not a lack of innovation or talent. It is structural: excessive bureaucracy, risk-averse management, and incentive systems that reward process compliance over outcomes. Until those change, progress will remain slow regardless of funding or good intentions.
A joint stock company fully owned by the government isn’t exactly privatized either. It’s still controlled and staffed by the government and is financed by government budgets, with tons of decision making constrained by being a public interest.
In practice it just means the management and financial structure operate as a pseudo corporation.
People don't even grasp the difference between value creating activities people and activities that don't.
I, for one, am learning Polish and will leave this shithole country as soon as I can.
Btw, I‘d leave this country as well if I didn’t have aging parents.
The justification for this law is ostensibly to protect gig workers like Uber drivers, delivery drivers and so on. Big companies like Uber or DHL like to outsource that stuff to independent sub-sub-contractors because it allows them to doctor their statistics and circumvent labor laws: Freelancers do not get minimum wage, sick pay, PPE, vacation days and so on. Of course, this is all just a pretense. Low-skill work like parcel delivery is exactly the kind of work where it is easy to have multiple clients at the same time and negotiate fixed-price-per-work-order, so the law does nothing to protect those workers that need it. In reality, this law exists to fuck over high-skill workers like software developers to force them back into a permanent employment contract where they can be more easily controlled by the government. Then they can no longer work from outside Germany and they have no choice but to pay into the horrible government pension pyramid scheme. It's quite obvious because this law has existed for a long time but only recently the government started to make it more strict and enforce it more as the collapse of the government pension system becomes imminent and they are desperately searching for suckers to prop it up for a few more years.
Projects are planned, coordinated and funds allocated far in advance, so if the government can't agree on a budget and projects are shelved or canned, restarting the process causes a significant delay.
It's a running joke in Stockholm that tracks, trains, signals, and people are owned/employed by 4 different entities
At least Germany has trains that go places. Ireland ripped most of their tracks out in the 50's and now there are two separate rail networks that are "joined" by taxi between Heuston and Connoly station in Dublin. Going from Sligo to Ballina (both on the west coast) means going through Dublin. I don't think any airport in Ireland is served by rail.
There was supposed to be another ‘loop line’ linking Connolly to Heuston, but it never happened; DART Underground was also supposed to do that, but was cancelled. They just have a luas for now. The 2050 plan contains yet _another_ Heuston-Connolly link. Separately, Dart+ SW will provide a link from Connolly to a new station beside Heuston, which will be called Heuston West, presumably for maximum confusion of tourists. Trains from Connolly actually pass Heuston platform 10 (note that there is no platform 9 and never has been), but do not stop there.
The “loads of terminals in slightly awkward places” thing was actually a somewhat common feature of Victorian rail, but in most places they were at some point either consolidated or linked via metro. Irish Rail is simply preserving the highly inconvenient past :)
The worst bit is, it is likely that in the next couple of decades, Dublin will need a third terminus, because Connolly is more or less at capacity (and will be overcapacity after Dart+ is finished in 2030 or so) and can’t realistically be made larger.
This satire [2] about it on German TV is 6 years old now and the project is still increasing in cost and being delayed. It's a pit without a bottom now.
I'm very fond of those years of easy train rides all over that part of Europe, and indeed internally within Germany, too. The overnight trains to Munich and Hamburg, Berlin and Vienna (ÖBB membership too), the easy rides between towns all over the Rührgebiet and NRW, the delightful weekend trips to Wuppertal and Bonn and so on. The sleeper cabins, the disco car, the wonderful cold beers served during a summer sojourn to The Hague, and so on. Yes, German trains could get you around, and connected, and after all - the rail systems of Europe are a reason to live there.
So I'm kind of saddened to hear of the demise of things, having left Germany for another land with well-laid rail (Austria), which I use with little sense of a lack of quality. But I do remember days of being very impressed with Germanys' transportation services .. it seems the nation of unlimited speed limits on the autobahn did, in those days, have superlative rail as well.
(Still, that was ±20 years ago. I suppose I shouldn't be that shocked to see time take its toll.)
I just checked online with the Dutch Railways:
- Train that leaves in one hour (18:00), arrives at 21:40 just in time to party. 148 euro! - Train that leaves 21:00, arrives at 10:35 the next morning. You'll miss the party plus you can't even book the train online for some reason. Multiple transfers and you need to sleep on a bench in Brussels between 00:15 and 07:30
Then for the train back:
- Train that leaves at 17:50, arrives at 22:30, decent times, 185 euro! - Train that leaves at 20:50, arrives at 08:20 the next morning, right in time for work. Can't book it online. This time your are sleeping on a bench at Antwerpen between 00:25 and 05:50
If you are with four people, just drive the five hours to Paris instead. Have one person be sober. So much better than the train. I'm sure the fuel and tire wear are less than the €1332 in train tickets you would have with the four of you.
https://dict.leo.org/german-english/r%C3%BChren vs. the name of the river it's mostly built around https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhr (SCNR)
Basically, my method of traveling with Deutsche Bahn has now gotten me back to improving my geography, because I developed an instinct of "try to get as physically close to where you want to go because as soon as you step outside the train, you have no guarantee that the next train will arrive". Rather than immediately planning the entire trip in advance, I'll say "okay I need to head roughly east and I know that larger cities have more frequent connections, so if anything happens, I prefer being stranded in a large city rather than being stuck in No Mans Land just because bahn.de says it's the fastest connection". This is very important when traveling late in the day, to not spend the night at a station.
The downside is obviously that German traveling has now degraded to a state of "medieval mode" traveling, where you have to plan your overnight stops at the local inn while fighting robbers, peasants and bicyclists for a spot in your horse carriage (sorry, I mean "RE3"). But when you are eventually stranded in Knitschendorf-Unteroblingen main station at 23:59pm because bahn.de said that there should be a train here and then staring into the night sky above you, at least you remember that traveling beyond the horizon has finally become magical again. Onto new adventures, travelers! See y'all at Mt. Doom.
The solution is to lose even more of your time (as if public transport wasn't slow enough already) and be at the station already for the previous schedule of what you'd ideally need to take. But at that point, sometimes it's just better to go a longer route by subway, or if traffic is not bad, go ahead by car for those occasions.
"Chronic underinvestment in Germany has derailed yet another ..."
[1] Source (2024): https://zbir.deutschebahn.com/2024/en/interim-group-manageme...
After they spend untold hours waiting for trains that were late or cancelled, they told me that this is the last time they care for pollution in Germany. Will fly and drive and show the midfle finger everytime they see a railway.
As you can imagine they were pretty heated up after this journey.
Then they took the plane to Munich last year and got stuck with a massive snow fall, there were pictures of planes tilting when parking because of the snow.
They refuse to travel to Germany now :)
- 2022: 15512 km travelled, spent 150:23 in trains, timetable: 148:42
- 2023: 9818 km travelled, spent 121:01 in trains, timetable: 118:39
- 2024: 11614 km travelled, spent 129:28 in trains, timetable: 127:48
- 2025: 10636 km travelled, spent 116:21 in trains, timetable: 109:58
This year was skewed upwards by a 3 hour delay because some teenagers managed to get into a railway tunnel causing a track closure for multiple hours...
A lot of times the time you save by going for high speed rail is still worth it.
[0] https://www.progressiverailroading.com/high_speed_rail/news/...
Of course delays depend on budget and investments, and bureaucracy.
But not only. For instance, comparing high speed trains in Germany and France can give the impression that German trains are ineficient and slow, but Germany being a much less centralized country, which is good, trains have to make many more stops, oftentimes leading to more complex scheduling and not being able to reach the top speed between stops, and thus less time to catch up on small delays.
Similarly, there are different policies regarding international trains vs national trains, or freight vs passenger, and also different variables they can optimize for: number of delays, total duration of delays, availability of emergency paths, etc, and various policies will yield different sentiment regarding "is my train on time".
A document that gives an overview of the variety of policies across Europe: https://rne.eu/wp-content/uploads/RNE_OverviewOfthePriorityR...
Same as buggy front-end dev for non-technical people, for instance. :)
It just says "decades of neglect". It gives little vignettes of bad experiences and a quote from a French person saying the French would revolt.
Any actual explanation?
In the decades they converted the German rail service (DB) into a stock company (AG) that is 100% owned by the state. The plan was to make it profitable then IPO it. So DB started to stop investing in order to become profitable short term. It never became profitable, so couldn't be floated. Now it also has a large infrastructure neglect debt on top (and is still 100% owned by the state with this weird structure with a CEO).
If it were a startup, one would just let it fail (creative destruction). Since it is obviously critical infrastructure, they should really have thought of this before. But same could be said about banks before 2008.
> "Every process at Deutsche Bahn is really complicated," Iffländer says. "It takes forever and that frustrates the people that actually want to do something."
Liberals, please take notes. It all started with the train service being privatized to increase efficiency and decrease costs.
The truth is even worse than the article suggests. I use the train every week. Switching train once after 10 Minutes with total started travel time of 2 hours. In only 20% of the time does that actually work. I am happy with only 20 minutes delay as often it ends up 45-60 minutes. Plus the cognitive load because I have to take care to change my travel route depending on where and when I and arrive and I have to regularly check the app, switch platform and alike.
It's not.
> Chronic underinvestment in Germany has derailed yet another myth about Teutonic efficiency. The German railway Deutsche Bahn's long-distance "high-speed" trains are now among the least punctual in Europe. In October, the national rail operator broke its own poor record with roughly only half of all long-distance trains arriving without delay.
Of course, NPR would never mention this.