Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn
theocharis.dev
theocharis.dev
Google Maps - No idea Citymapper - what? English announcement - nien.
Thanks to an old lady, who told me that i needed to switch coaches to go the airport. Madre mia!!
That is indicated on the platform screens before getting on the train. It tells you which part of the train goes where so you know which wagon to take.
I found it also not very intuitive first time I took it. But hey, when travelling there’s always local peculiarities to take care of ;)
im.surprised this not to be the case in Munich??
A train that splits, on the way to the airport where there will be a lot of non-german speaking people, and for some reason only shows it on the platform is insane.
Having a train that splits on that route is already bad enough, but you HAVE to emphasize it on the train.
I know that I need to pay attention to this, because I've grown up with DB pulling all sorts of fucked up shit, but we should not accept that this is reasonable.
Vienna (S-Bahn S7 4.40 EUR vs. City Airport Train 24.90 EUR)
While with the Stockholm one, the public transport option is cheap but a little bit more complicated (there are convenient medium priced options too), the Vienna one is really just branding and a non-obvious exit to the train station.
Many people use them out of ignorance, expense accounts or they have the disposable income not to care.
This really is the original poster's problem.
This is the one benefit of living in an overly-litigious country that has news media which can pick up on a story like this. They’d rather have the masses suffer to avoid the legal fees and bad press, so instead of sacrificing a train, they’d make everyone’s lives worse overall.
I’m not arguing for utilitarianism, though. Ir allows dictators to thrive.
If third party apps don't show that information that's on their part. Usually it's also said after departure inside the train by the conductor, though maybe just on long distance trains.
I once had a bit of Schadenfrunde while travelling in Netherlands, having the conductor telling us to switch trains in Dutch, and all my German fellow travellers wondering what it was all about.
The point was that even in international trains inside Germany, announcements related to trains problems are only done in German.
I speak it fluently, including some variations, however most travellers do not.
I also remember there used to be ticket machines in NRW only in German, about 20 years ago.
The Dutch seem to understand German better, but my Dutch friends credit that more to education and exposure.
I speak both some German and some Dutch (as nth languages, I can understand them fine but speaking is hit and miss) and sometimes I don't notice which is which and answer in the wrong language, to me they're almost the same language with a different accent. I translate the German into some Frenglish mess for my Flemish friends to help them understand and it works great.
i grew up in austria and in the north of germany so i got an early appreciation for understanding dialects. yet learning dutch took me a few months of staying in the netherlands. on the other hand when i visited luxemburg people were shocked that i could understand them when they spoke amongst each other
You have to "adjust your ears" a bit but I think if you know German and English then you can understand Dutch just fine if it's not slang.
A similar thing has caused the tension between the germanic and Romance languages that followed the Roman border line N to S that separates Europe.
If the EU were a serious and legitimate institution, there would be an effort to implement reforms that nudge English, Dutch, and present day German all towards better mutual intelligibility, NOT diversion from each other through perversion and "simplification", or what seems to be a pollution and destruction of the current German and Dutch language through what at least Germans have a term for, "Verdenglichung", i.e., the portmanteau of German (De..) and English, prefixed with "ver...", meaning the transformation or application of.
But you can't expect low level bureaucrats from a transportation company to start speaking english when it is not required to perform the job.
> The German site at my multinational company at the time was the only site on Earth which had to introduce an internal regulation about mandatory English, because they just switched to German all the time even when there were people on the call from different countries.
I've been living in Berlin for 15 years now, and every time I visit Finland I'm shocked when for example the cashier in the supermarket smiles to me and is friendly. Are they mocking me, is this a joke? It takes a few days to adapt.
Naturally living in Berlin means you learn to hate and love your city at the same time. You hate so many things in here, and when you travel, you're happy to come back because the place you were in of course misses all the unique aspects of Berlin.
The EU makes travel between EU countries as easy as travel between US states. You can just get on a train from Germany to Spain without any prior planning.
The majority of popular German language films tend to have English language titles when aimed at the English market, and nearly always when aimed at children: "Goodbye Lenin", "Run Lola Run" etc. I was pretty amazed at "Ice Age", because it would be easy and concise to translate.
I am fluent in several European languages and dialects, human languages is second nature alongside learning programming languages.
As for entitlement, the expectations on international trains crossing borders aren't the same as local trains, which I left out from the comment, it was an ICE after crew change.
Do you complain when announcements in your home country are given in exclusively non-German languages?
Making announcements in German in the US makes little sense.
But I don't think DB is unique in this weirdness.
Back in the UK, I think something similar happens on routes going past Gatwick; I've only heard English announcements on that train despite the airport being one of the ones serving London.
Plus, one time I was on a work trip to Liverpool (via London), and somewhere around Nottingham or Crewe a fellow passenger asked me when we'd be getting to "Liverpool Street": https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Liverpool+Street+Station,+Lo...
There's also the way my first leg home from university was Aberystwyth to Birmingham New Street, but the train regularly terminated early (Shrewsbury? Or was it Wolverhampton?) to game the rules.
The problem with UK announcements is that they are piped to multiple places in the station, which is all hard surfaces and produces lots of reverberation and echo. This often makes them hard to understand even for natives. Also there are some stations with really terrible old speakers , such as horn speakers.
If I had to guess, French, German, or Spanish, in that order. But it may well be that e.g. Heathrow has a lot more Arabic, Stansted gets a lot more German, and Gatwick gets a lot more French, Luton gets the Spanish tourists, and City is mostly business trips or something.
You're correct about the acoustics, but foam panels are a thing that can be installed (or not) independently of this.
We were so lucky that we'd decided to go to the airport much earlier than we needed.
And don't get me started on the ticketing machines not accepting Visa, Mastercard, or Amex at the central station in Munchen. Or the web ticketing interface which was at least as annoying as the train to use.
What language do you expect the Germans to use?
This is the norm around the world, especially with complicated situations like a train splitting in two.
Why should anywhere cater to my failure to learn their language and systems? It’s nice if they do but I don’t expect it.
If you are not a backwater that doesn't get any travelers, you should cater to tourists who, as a rule, do not speak your language. Even those tourists who do speak a few phrases will absolutely be unable to understand something as complex as a the train spilling up into two before going to the Airport.
> Why should anywhere cater to my failure to learn their language and systems? It’s nice if they do but I don’t expect it.
I certainly don't see this attitude from Germans in Spain.
Why should tourists be supported? Tourists are trashing my country nearly as badly as our largest industry (dairy). Without infrastructure they shouldn’t be encouraged.
I have no interest in having more.
We also have no trains, but I’d like that to change.
In Europe it is pretty hit or miss though, unfortunately.
Unless they happen to be selling something you want to buy.
Managed 2 weeks in the UK without touching cash and the transactions between currency were inexpensive and quick.
Massive fan.
I’ve used it like a debit card/credit card. On phone and as a physical card for tap-and-go on transport. I’ve used it for booking accommodation bookings online too.
Fees are low/non existent and conversion rates good.
As opposed to... swiping the card?
Are there really cards out there that exclusively support that?
There are also gift cards that are credit cards. Or, really, debit cards. See “open-loop cards” at https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/more-than-you-want-to...
They are perhaps prepaid debit cards. But you can change and set a pin on them just like on the old credit cards. Because that's what they are - old technology.
They dont have a chip, so you have to swipe them.
Some employers give those gift cards instead of cash and I think those cards use the older technology in order to be cheaper (the chip costs few cents to manufacture). After you clear your card balance you basically throw the card away (very ecological), but if they wanted they can also add more money to the same card again. They usually dont do it since people lose the cards, so they issue new ones. So you get a lot of plastic. Think of this as some pocket money every 3-6 months.
It says VISA on the card.
The companies could give cash, but due to some obscure law and psychological reasons they give cards. The card is still better than the paper sodexo gift cards they would give out years ago that were a pain to use since few shops accepted them. But still it is a pain, since you often end up with a small balance and you need to pay part with this gift card (to clean it up to zero) and part with cash.
I supposed it's a matter of semantics, is a prepaid credit card that is gifted not a "gift card"?
Also chip-and-pin is mostly not enabled with American credit cards or card payment terminals
EMV has multiple options. Many countries (including the US) chose the signature option for credit cards for convenience and use PINs only with debit cards. Before contactless payment apps became common, that was a major source of friction when using American credit cards in Europe.
But Chip-and-PIN makes using credit cards marginally less convenient, and forces people to authenticate themselves to perform transactions, unlike swipes and signatures, something that many Americans don't like. The US is happy with crazy high fraud rates, and crazy high interchange rates (fees for using credit cards). Those interchange rates also fund all the fancy points and rewards programs in the US, and primarily are paid for by the poorest in society (who can't access those programs, but are still paying the interchange rates). Plus high interchange rates mean more money for banks and the card networks themselves.
The EU on the other hand capped interchange rates, so either banks had to get fraud under control, or pay for fraud out of their own pockets. I'll give you two guess which route they chose.
Americans are not used to the pin concept.
The legacy reasons are part of why we waited so long to adopt EMV - my belief is that the US had much higher density of credit card adoption which significantly delayed EMV/Chip adoption - to give you an idea, even in the mid 90's a place that didnt take a credit card was an exception rather than common.
I dont disagree with you about interchange rates etc - we should cap them - but as a high earner I'm also going to maximize what I can from that system while I can ;-)
Nobody was. That's what happens when something new is invented, nobody is familiar with it until they're educated. Nobody in Europe were not used to the pin concept when Chip & PIN was originally created (except of course for access to ATMs, which I assume also existed in the US).
> my belief is that the US had much higher density of credit card adoption which significantly delayed EMV/Chip adoption - to give you an idea, even in the mid 90's a place that didnt take a credit card was an exception rather than common.
I don't know why you think Europe was any different, credit card adoption and acceptance in Europe matched that of the US in the 90s. Europe did take longer to hit the same levels of adoption as the US, but remember credit cards have been around since the 1950s, and were computerised in the 1970s. By the time you get to the 1990s, credit cards were pretty much ubiquitous across the entire western world. The US wasn't some futuristic bastion of banking technologies, if any thing, it was starting to fall behind. Today, US banking systems look comically outdated compared to anything you find in Europe.
Your "belief" for the reasons US banking tech lags so far behind the rest of the world are pretty easy to disprove with some fairly superficial research.
Claiming that the US had too large of an install base for chip and pin to work would be like claiming the US had too large of a propeller air craft install base to adopt jet engines (also developed in Europe), but somehow the US managed that transition just fine. Americas failure to adopt chip and pin has nothing to do with legacy, and everything to do with US culture has a different relationship which money and how it’s spent.
In Europe people generally expect to be challenged when spending money using credit cards, and that’s always been true. So chip and PIN was always an easy to sell to consumers. In the US, people simply don’t expect to be challenged, and even get up upset when challenged, when using a credit card. So selling chip and PIN to consumers is much harder, especially when the US so happy to accept exploitative banking practices, and crazy high fraud rates.
Only because they chose to require the PIN every time. They could have instead have it depend on transaction amount and amount/transactions/time since the last PIN check like what we have for contactless now.
People still do that? Are you posting to us from 20 years ago?
Later, in the train, when I asked the conductor to buy a ticket with my Girocard, he said "That's not a commonly used payment method" and asked for VISA, or cash (not having any to provide change, obviously).
Wow. You travel to a different part of the world without doing basic research. Hope you did not try stuffing USD on machines.
And also about the cards, just use cash, I mean, come on. Visa some local coins at the airport lounge or wherever…
Now, at least, the announcements are also in English, which frankly is very positive - that DB are improving anything noticeable. (And to be clear, Bavaria/Germany are absolutely not given to accommodating non-German speakers, like, ever.)
The preferred way to get to the airport is via S8 (not S1). Idk how one could push/guide people more to take this one. S8 does not split and it definitely has announcements in english. They also prioritize keeping S8 running above anything else.
I'd also recommend buying tickets via app, not via ticket machines.
It was partially on me because there are assigned seats and carriages, but I was late and had to jump in the train. But still no vocal announcement of "cars x to y go to z, the others go to w".
Now, the train itself was two trains connected together, and at the next stop we literally had to run like 100 meters or so to make it on time to enter the front part, because there was engine near the end/stop.
Not sure would the 2nd half of the train depart, but it was super stressful experience.
Where the train is going being a ’detail’ is completely hilarious.
You’d think so but you’d be surprised how un-joined-up things can be.
Train splitting is quite acceptable when the customer service is alright.
It's not that complicated.
Also, I believe you were trying to write "nein". But why would you expect an English announcement in Germany on a German train? Google Maps? What does that have to do with that; it's an unofficial and only like an 80% solution.
I agree that it's not that intuitive that a line can have multiple end stops (like Stuttgart - Munich ends in both Stuttgart and Munich, depending on the direction you are entering?
And if you went to smoke with your bag and disappeared, well, they never saw it.
The more bureaucratic an organization becomes, the more inhuman it becomes. An unwillingness to bend rules when the circumstance rationally calls for it is extremely dangerous. One might think that Germans in particular would be highly tuned to this problem, but no. They still put following orders first. Typical.
(I think it "helps" that Amtrak covers a very large area, most of which only sees a train once or twice a day at the most. So the practical reality is that there are a lot of stops where you pretty much exit the train right off onto the rails.)
Overhead electrification is a long term goal for the non-Metro UK rail network but it is a long way off.
The other method is an electric train with a diesel generator car.
Given that a considerable amount of the UK rail routes date from the late 1800s there are a lot of places where tracks cross roads and therefore mix with other forms of transport (including pedestrians). It's surprising just how little there is in between a pedestrian and a live rail in these situations, here's an example 5 miles or so away from central London: https://maps.app.goo.gl/nPcJM1YxBexaDDKY6
One of those live third rails start less than 5 yards away from where pedestrians regularly walk, with just some angled planks of wood to stop you walking towards them.
There's a strong "stay away from train tracks" education whilst growing up.
Those who grew up in the 70s/80s had the benefit of some utterly horrific public information safety films such as https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-the-finishing-line... (well, that one was never used in the end, but it sets the tone...)
More horror here: https://artofthemovies.co.uk/blogs/original-movie-posters/sc...
The train stopped at "Kuhdorf", as the author says, at 10:30pm. The driver told us he couldn't continue because "the track was wet" (in Northern Germany in december, how unlucky!) and to wait for "replacement circulation" (usually buses or trains).
The driver then left the train. In fact he had reached his hometown and exceeded his work quota because of the delays.
Like the fabled German roadworker and the (more frequently observed) Krampus, the DB replacement bus is a fairy tale creature.
The passengers got out and forced the driver back into the train and he drove us to the terminus then took a taxi back to said Kuhdorf.
On the nightbus home a class of French highschool girls elected me the best-looking man in the bus (they thought I didn't understand) so I went back home with a smile.
If you got in a taxi to take you 35km away and he drove you 60km away to a random other town instead, would you consider "kidnapped" to be over the top?
Does it only count as "kidnap" if you are not eventually released? Or is it just that it's not kidnap when a corporation does it?
kidnap: to take a person away illegally by force, usually in order to demand money in exchange for releasing them.
The "usually" refers to the money, but the part that is "always" is the existence of an intent.
There was no intent here. This was a mistake, not on purpose. Nobody would say, unless to make a joke, "i was kidnapped by an elevator" Because the elevator works automatically, it has no intent to take the person by force and hold them hostage.
Can't believe i had to type this down.
The train operator deliberately drove the train, with passengers on it, to places they knew the passengers didn't want to go, and did not allow them a chance to get out sooner.
If a taxi driver were to do the same thing we would say he kidnapped his passengers.
The fact that trains are operated by big corporations does not absolve them of responsibility. If anything they should be held to a higher standard, not a lower one.
(I can't believe I had to type this down.)
Only when I checked the passenger reservation list, I found this was train from yesterday, late by 23:50 hours.
(for the curious... No, I could not get my reserved birth and had to travel on unreserved ticket, but at least I reached destination on my planned time.)
I did wait in a single spot for almost 10h, my 5-6h journey became a 15h one, in Serbia in the late 2000s. IIRC, a large part of the railway was down that day, couple hundred km, electricity issue or something. Some people walked off the train, which was in between cities but near the road. I was a student, didn't have an alternative, so I didn't. They didn't organize a replacement bus.
This kind of thing was (maybe not to that extent) common, like once every year or two. They rarely reported on it in media if the cause wasn't notable.
I asked locals what is going on, turns out that all trains were late, and this train departed from the platform already marked for Bonn! “You should watch what train number you board on DB, not trust sign on platform!” locals helpfully advised me.
Not to blame the victim but that’s always a good idea regardless of how punctual your local trains and busses are.
Because the train mentioned in the article is not operated by Deutsche Bahn, but by National Express, see https://bahn.expert/details/RE28521/j/20251224-a0049123-9494...
National Express is actually a subsidiary of the British train operator Mobico Group: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Express_Germany
It just raises so many questions in my mind that of all entities, a British train operator would be operating a train that is bounded within the German rail system.
My first thought is that it's some kind of counter-union effort through fake "competition" by bringing in foreign, private operators into the network.
Most regional services are tendered to the (in theory) best operator. The details on how, both which governing body organises the tender and whether the trains are branded by the region or the operator, varies across Europe. In Germany, these contracts are operated by a mix of DB, foreign state-owned operators and private operators. DB sells tickets for all region-organised trains regardless of who is the current operator.
Most countries have decided to have no or limited tenders on long-distance trains. In Germany, government support is prohibited for long-distance.
Shifting the blame away from DB, who is responsible for creating the terrible track conditions and is responsible for the operations, to the train operator, who zero ability to influence what DB is doing is just totally unfair.
DB is at fault here, they lead the train onto the wrong tracks and they also caused the previous delays. Regional trains in Germany have many different kinds of operators. Taking any of them is always miserable in exactly the same way, which is in almost every case caused by DB, because they can not operate the train network.
What is worse is that these operators also get into conflict with the DB trains. E.g. they prioritize a DB train, which is already late, over a regional train, causing delays for regional trains.
You cannot add a stop if the rails are single track and the next train is just behind you.
If you do said train will be delayed, will not be able to switch tracks at its final destination ( since it has a hard slot for that) and errors cascade.
It’s the best possible train system, given how little was invested …
What people don’t write clickbaity blog posts about is how in general things work very well. I’m currently sitting on a train from Nuremberg to Berlin and it takes less than three hours, it’s on time, quiet and just a good experience. This trip used to take five hours but then the high speed rail track got completed and cut the time by two hours. Wonderful!
Maybe I've just been lucky so far, but as an Aussie it is hard to overstate the fact it is even possible to travel almost anywhere within the country and between several other countries by train for fairly cheap is already quite miraculous to me. Yeah, I've run into a fair few issues and it was annoying but that goes for every country I've been to (Japan had the least by far but trains still get delayed there more often than people think and I've also run into situations as in TFA where if I didn't speak Japanese things would've ended up worse).
I'm not sure I'd even put DB in my "bottom three" in terms of overall experience. Should it be much better? Of course. But if you listen to Germans it sounds like DB is the worst train network in the universe by a clear margin, and that's just obviously not true.
Last time I took the train in Germany I was 30h late and had to spend a sunday between Cologne and Karlsruhe (not that I was really surprised).
The punctuality is a joke, ICEs are unpractical, train management comically incompetent (remember when the ICEs cars would never come in the announced order and there was luggage room for maybe 15% of passengers?).
The cars are very dirty, especially in 1st class where eating a full meal at your seat is encouraged but the cars are cleaned once every two days.
However, the train attendants are usually very arranging for every aspect of the trip on board.
Cheap tickets are cool, but have been there for so long (the regional ones) Germans take them for granted.
The major issues are with pricing and lack of investment outside of TGV but it's not too bad.
It depends which route you take, but for a wide swath of the German population, your chance of an absolutely wretched experience seems to be around 1 in 4. That means that people are constantly weighing the desire for affordable, sustainable, comfortable transport that may go horribly wrong, against the (similarly unpredictable) endemic traffic jams and exhaustion of driving, and often choosing wrong. If you have no car, you're weighing more reliable but slow and uncomfortable and traffic-jam-prone buses, or simply avoiding the travel. Constantly making decisions on penalty of deeply unpleasant consequences without any way to actually reasonably judge your decision is a special form of miserable.
At least in the US, most of the time, there is no decision to make: you drive.
A lot of the issues are local, some are time constrained. There is a CCC talk on youtube "BahnMining - Pünktlichkeit ist eine Zier (David Kriesel)", that concludes that any train traveling through certain trainstations will most likely end up significantly delayed. Then you have certain train models failing during summer. Or my recent favourite planned construction work with no apparent plan for a reliable replacement service beyond "here is a train, it might leave at some point".
Of course if you cite a Sprinter line like Nuremberg <-> Berlin, which has the newest tracks and newest trains, you will have a far better experience than on lines that have the worst maintained tracks and trains. Sadly, the badly maintained ones seem to make up the majority of the DB network.
That said, last time I was there DB was on strike and I lost hours.
So probably they need to add more parallel tracks, unused most of the time.
This is one of those issues I keep mulling about; it seems train operators (and airliners for that matter) tend to avoid being technically specific about operation problems, and just say "problems" and - if they are kind - where the problem is. And I cannot decide whether this is the wrong or right approach: how much information is too much? The argument is that travellers don't care why the train cannot move or why it is delayed, they just want to know when the next train is.
The problem - however - is that train operators come off looking like idiots, when they really aren't. As an example, the S-trains around Copenhagen have recently switched to a CBTC signal system, which has increased punctuality to 97% (below 3 minutes, cancelled trains counted). At cold temperatures, railway points (or switches, if you will) might become inoperable, as their mechanism freeze (of course, there are systems to prevent this, but can occur anyway). This happened this November on the S-train lines, but the announcement was "signal failure"; which meant the train operator (DSB) (and the railway owner (Banedanmark)) kind of looked a bit stupid, since the whole point of CBTC was to eliminate signal failures entirely (in fact, if you're being pedantic, since CBTC has _no_ signals, there technically cannot be any signal failures), and had promised as much.
But - then again - travellers really just wanted to know what the next train was, but I still think train operators are doing themselves a disservice by being oblique about the actual problem. Particularly when a problem lasts for several days, "technical problems" just makes people think their engineers are incompetent, when in reality they have no idea about the severity of the problem (because it is not communicated).
I may of course be biased here, since I have a high interest in how trains operate, but friends of mine - whose interest is far lessen compared to mine - are also frustrated by these opaque messages; and I think the reason is a strong sense of lack of control - since (assuming one made it to the station on time) up until this point, the passenger have done everything right, and yet the system failed, and now they are not privy as to why.
It's usually reported (briefly) in the local news.
It is therefore a beat practice to generally avoid mention suicide, because mentioning suicide means prompting people to think about suicide and in some cases that means prompting people to consider suicide. This is known as the Werther effect, you can look that up if you'd like to know more.
The official reason for the delay, according to the Ruter app, the info screens and announcements over the PA system, was "signalfeil" ("signal error"). So at least in Norway, we clearly have a culture of describing all sorts of problems, including completely non-technical problems like someone having a medical emergency, as a problem with the train signals.
I find it stupid, it is what it is, just say it. This double speak serves no purpose.
After the incident they will determine what's the least expensive lie they can plausibly give (perhaps the weather will change fast enough that you can blame the weather, perhaps you can't lie about an equipment failure when everyone in the airport sees you swap out the airplane). If they tell the passengers the truth at the time they risk being held to that later.
Edit: and also, these claim-assistance companies work on a winning fee.
My boss and colleagues weren't delighted though...
Nobody expects this to happen with train travel. Perhaps they should.
- encouraging you to take multiple tickets (so you can't claim compensation on the whole trip and becaise of missed transfers).
- saying it's not their doing (DB specialty).
- in some cases accepting an "alternate schedule" (typically by changing your ticket at the company's suggestion) will void any claims.
In some cases you have better chances hiring a taxi for 2000km and forcing the company to pay.
On the opposite, on (very expensive) French TGVs you get compensation starting at 30 minutes delay (connections counted) whatever the reason and SNCF will do their utmost to bring you to destination or ensure you get accomodation.
The costs of a high speed line are on the scale of 30 millions euros per km, with maintenance of 300,000 €/km/year. A TGV with 740 seats costs around 25 millions euros and has maintenance too. Most of the operating costs are per trip, a TGV typically does 2 to 3 500km trips per day.
A mid-range plane like the A320neo costs around 100 millions euros for 190 passengers and typical operating costs of 5 millions for a 2 flights per day average. A lot of these costs are hourly costs (fuel and maintenance) and airport costs. Fuel is 10%.
In France, trains and especially high-speed trains are heavily subsidised with a lot of tickets paid under various incentivized and subsidized schemes. SNCF (trains and railways) receives between 10 and 20 billions euros per year from various government entities (depending on what you include), i.e. 20% to 35% of revenue. There are also indirect subsidies through corporate tax schemes like commuting exemptions. Finally, long haul buses have long been forbidden and considered a threat to the train monopoly, and after a short golden age of EU-led monopoly breaking, they have been again heavily regulated so they can hardly compete. Similarly, short-haul flights have been almost banned.
The train is more practical but when I hear it is on par with air travel economically and more environment friendly I fail to make sense of the numbers.
However counter-intuitive it may be, air travel is indeed far more energy-intensive, and therefore destructive, than train travel. Mainly due to the exponential increase of wind resistance with speed. On a planet of 9 billion people, airplanes will simply not be a sustainably form of transport by any metric.
To be honest, I don't care about excuses. Yes, problems happen, but this is systemic. Does it help me if I know the train tracks are broken yet again? It does not. The reasons (excuses) they bring up ring hollow. I don't feel that drivers or station staff would appear stupid if they don't tell. They are victims, too.
Just explain what's wrong. Arm passengers with the best info you can give them. And figure out a way to let people disembark close to where they need to be.
DB has become a complete joke. I've had to travel to and through Germany several times these past couple of years, and almost always there's a problem.
I once paid 80 euro for a taxi from Essen to Dusseldorf because they cancelled the train that would connect to the last ICE to Amsterdam. When I got to Dusseldorf on time, the ICE arrived at a different platform than announced. I only noticed that because some people were suddenly leaving the platform. I warned a few people who still hadn't noticed it. I bet a lot of people still managed to miss that train after all the trouble making it to Dusseldorf.
Deutsche Bahn does not think this is true and neither do I. If this was ever the thinking, they've performed or read studies and changed their mind
You can very clearly hear the drilled setup "<delay info> grund dafür ist <error category>" rigidly being regurgitated every. single. time. a delay is announced. The middle words are (per my understanding) a formal way to say "because of" and it's not something you will hear in daily life, so I presume it's the output of a committee and corporate requires them to say this, no matter if they know anything more than "the signal is red". Whether they know or not, the detail is always at a level that sounds like malicious compliance. I'd rather they say "we don't know" or say nothing at all. And if they do know, I'd hope they make up a new sentence like "someone was spotted on the crossing up ahead after the barriers closed. Someone is checking the cameras to make sure it won't come to a collision" but we instead get the robotic "we have come to a stop on the grounds of person on track". It mimics their training samples and what colleagues got into the habit of saying so I guess they think it's good like this, but is not actually helpful
Idk what creates this useless information culture, but they clearly know that passengers do want this information
The main reason for this is lack of competition for DB in Germany. I used to date a guy who works at infra department in DB and based on what he told me, I couldn't believe how inefficient and massively complicated DB is. They have internal departments which acts as separate entities to mimic competition and each department has to place bids among each other to get contracts (more bureaucracy) but then they have an IT department and no matter how cheap or good outside IT providers are they must get the service from internal IT department (so much for competition).
At this point DB needs a complete overhaul and let go of so much dead weight to make it working again and unfortunately German politicians are just throwing more money at every problem hoping they would magically solve themselves rather than fixing the actual structural problems.
I can't recall that this happened to me. The "lucky" scenario is when the connecting train is even more late so you can still catch it.
Who knows if it was better in the nationalised days, but it sure needs some unification and central governance without a profit motive today.
I do. I was there. It wasn't.
I was around but not a heavy rail user in the nationalised days though the stories back then were quite reminiscent of the current DB stories.
Ironically, Russian trains (even over distances of thousands of kilometres) are usually almost perfectly on time.
Germany's DB seems to fill the same niche as other companies there, like Telekom: semi-private companies living off old state-built infrastructure that they're now incapable of (or unwilling to?) maintain.
Same here, with a big German semiconductor player you all know. The IT department has to battle the non-it departments and external contractors for internal software dev jobs. It's a made up game, costing 70% of our work time (just the beurocracy).
It is way more complicated than that, but you could commoditize the rail separate from the transport of goods and people, where they each compete on price for capacity, but it all gets extremely political very fast, i.e., public transport people vs goods transport that primarily pays for the whole network.
The privatisation and the crazy idea that it could somehow not being run on a deficit is what ruined it. Of course the competition thing is artificial, and the internal structures are kaput, but I doubt that more competition would fix it.
Surprisingly, 90% of the train personnel is still pretty good, acting friendly and professionally.
Cannot be - there is no competition in Switzerland, but things run pretty smoothly -> in the case of Germany I'd rather say: "lack of oversight, controls, 'konsequent zu sein'" -> in the case of Germany's DB I think that nobody at all levels gives a *hit about its problems.
It's also funny considering how here in South America we look at Germany trains (and Switzerland trains) as always on time, and the best train system, etc. But I am sure if this happens here it would be on the cover of newspapers.
But, for example, Rotterdam or Utrecht are already a lot less likely to be announced in english.
In Northern Europe the percentage is even higher. In the Netherlands there are almost as many people who speak it as there are Dutch speakers.
Taking into account people from other EU countries who are there on business plus tourists there is a good chance that if only one language was to be used for train announcements more people on the train would understand if it was in English then if it was in Dutch.
Or maybe that is just me having grown to understand dutch and flemish as a cyclocross rider and spectator.
The point of an official language is that the government makes it as convenient as possible living your life knowing only that language. It wouldn't be that unreasonable IMO to switch official language to English, but seeing as NL is a democracy, that ought to be a democratic decision. A referendum of some kind would probably be best. It's not a small decision to be taken lightly.
But it's still nice to offer information in other languages in certain situations. Infrastructure used heavily by tourists and recent immigrants who don't speak the language yet should be made as usable as possible to people who don't know Dutch. Making important announcements in both English and Dutch on trains is an example of that.
If we follow your line Dutch will go the same way as Welsh or Basque.
Portugal has been better at that game when you consider its size.
No it won't. Mirroring important announcements in two languages is a thing most countries do, and their languages are far from extinct.
Honestly, I don't see the problem. As a tourist, you have to be prepared with apps, or you can ask someone for help. Happens all the time, and most people are happy to help.
Someone living here needs to learn the local language.
If it's anything like the UK, the staff have incredibly secure jobs and recently secured some good changes to their working conditions/pay. It's probably not in their contract to announce in other languages, so they do exactly what their contract says
They do have very good pay (drivers can earn as much as some airline pilots) and a very good pension scheme on top of that.
Even if the job is actually opened to basically everyone (and that’s pretty nice), you have to be in perfect physical and psychological shape with pretty strict tests, you have to be intellectually apt enough to follow the training which is pretty intense. You have to accept work conditions such as not knowing your work hours until the day before. You have to accept sleeping who knows where at least 2 times a week. You have to accept having only one weekend off per month.
So what happens is that when you have that much filters and you still want to hire train drivers, you can’t afford to expect your drivers to know another language on top of all of the rest.
Most of the time they do what they can to deal with issues.
I don’t feel like there are too much issues it’s just they are extremely bad at communicating issues when they happen.
Sometimes the train is not there when it should but on the screen it just disappears as if it passed. Most of the time it’s just 2-5 minutes late but you can’t know. Maybe it’s just late. Maybe the traffic is stopped. Who knows.
I just dont understand how they don’t have people whose job is just writing messages for the information screens.
What is worse is that in my region, they have a pretty decent community managers for live information but they only post information in twitter because why not. So they already have the people doing this work but those people are saying different things than what the screen shows. Just let them write things on the screens :D
Germany is the country where I found the highest number of people not being able to speak English, even people working in accomodation!
French people probably know English but they refuse to speak it; Italians don't know English that well, but they try their best using rolling R's and gestures.
(I'm a bit ironic)
That's very outdated, DB has been terrible for a long time though. Switzerland is still the best though. Here are some stats for 2025:
https://chuuchuu.com/2025wrapped
Since you have to scroll down quite a bit to get the list of most reliable European trains (with percentage on time):
1. Switzerland 97.8%
2. The Netherlands 93.9%
3. Belgium 88.6%
4. Austria 82.2%
5. France 79.7%
6. Italy 62.0%
7. Germany 58.5%
(Not sure why these are the only countries in the list.)
Not about Germany, Italy, and Japan, forming some sort of axis, I guess.
The tri partners have a mutual goal.
In many countries the train comes when it comes and goes when it can, regardless of any fictional like schedules.
It's not like countries outside Europe can't make trains run on time. Japan's are even more punctual than Switzerland's.
“Please mind the gap between the timetable and reality.”
What I am less able to excuse them for is capacity issues, especially on weekend and Friday trains on popular routes in the Summer. That Zurich Lugano train is packed to the gills most weekends during the summer such that it's standing room only for most of the 2 hour ride. They need to add more trains or at least more cars.
Reliability is not something to complain about. The trains are punctual, that's for sure.
They also spend far more per capita on their train system.
All that and afaik they still manage to connect all important places.
[1] https://www.acm.nl/en/publications/acm-rail-monitor-netherla...
If you look at France for example, 80% of trains are not punctual but the "total delays" is actually on the low range, France being on the large side with lots of lines, I would say that it shows that the delays (20% of the time) are actual shorts.
https://media.viarail.ca/en/press-releases/2025/q1-2025-time...
Also in Germany, a train that did not even arrive does not count as too late.
There is also a concept of the "Pofalla-Wende", which is when a train is so late that it just does a 180 and drives back, to mitigate that the delay doesn't carry over to the train's next route. Of course, that means that it skips the stations at the end of the route.
This was already the case around 2015.
Just don't count on them that they bring you to your destination in a timely manner.
Not true. Shareholder primacy is not as huge as in Delaware.
And in the end it's the government that owns all shares and thus can decide how much profit the company should make.
This is not true at all.
The shareholders set the targets and since the shareholder is the government they can set any target they want: profitability, more trains, cheaper tickets etc..
If the shareholder wants to inject 10% every year in stead of taking a profit they are absolutely free to do so.
I am sure the state could try to do _something_ about it, but I am also sure that a very strong car lobby here in Germany is working against that. BTW, the road network, which I would consider to conceptually be the same kind of infrastructure as the rail network, is to my understanding mostly built and maintained by state organizations, so it is possible to do it that way.
I guess it is also harder to market "let's subsidize this private company with tax payer money so they can continue to offer mediocre service" to voters, compared to "let's use tax payer money to build and maintain one-of-a-kind critical infrastructure from which everyone (with a car, which due to the less-than-great alternatives is a lot of people) can profit".
Again, having it organized as a private company adds indirection, diffuses power and responsibility, and adds a certain more or less implicit expectation of what private companies are supposed to do. That's my main issue with it. Private companies aren't supposed to run critical infrastructure as a monopoly for profit. It's the states job to provide and maintain critical infrastructure in the interest of all.
Again, if the shareholders decide this is the reason: yes.
But shareholders can just as easily set other targets or incentives.
>I guess it is also harder to market "let's subsidize this private company with tax payer money so they can continue to offer mediocre service" to voters,
The government owns DB AG, it is not a private company. It is a public company.
It is a private company, as in it is a legal entity under private law. This is in contrast to a "öffentlich-rechtliches Unternehmen" (I don't know if this even has a proper translation or equivalent in other jurisdictions). There is more than two options here, it can be both privatized and public according to your definition.
You are under no obligation to make a profit.
It's true of Switzerland and probably Austria. Germany is famous for having infrastructure issues that will take some time to resolve.
Eg see https://chuuchuu.com/2025wrapped for some stats
Yes, obviously. And that hurts statistics. That's like killing sick cattle to be able to say that 100% of yours are healthy.
(And tbf I'm ok waiting 30min, with Taktfahrplan how much you wait is usually max 1h and often much shorter, my experience in other countries is often hours of delays in case of trouble)
I could make out a bit of what the driver said, but not enough to be sure of the detail, which is what really mattered. I expected to miss my flight, but just made it in the end.
Other commenters have already set the record straight, pointing out that these are clearly not in the same cluster.
See also https://www.thelocal.de/20250430/switzerland-suspends-deutsc...
Pay-walled, but the title says it all: "Switzerland suspends Deutsche Bahn trains due to chronic delays". DB is so unreliable that it impacts the networks of neighboring countries.
Immigrants with fewer opportunities are more likely to try to learn the language and integrate. When a country is offering them something they can't find anywhere else, it makes more sense to go through all that effort. Even knowing that they will probably never fully fit in.
So, attracting the international workforce to come Germany vs being able to fully utilise them are completely different ballparks..
When taking an international train from Germany to Switzerland, don't count on it that it will run through to the final destination.
SBB (Swiss National Railways) started to block German trains if their delay is more than 15 minutes (so, basically every DB train) and won't allow the train on their network.
This is only peripherically educational. Constantly delayed DB trains completely fouled up the scheduling on the extremely dense Swiss network. So they just won't allow it anymore.
On a sidenote: In 2024 SBB trains were 93.2% punctual. Connectivity punctuality (where you have to catch a connecting train) was 98.7%. A train is counted as punctual if the delay is less than 3 minutes (half the German figure).
In the end of the 90s with neoliberalism being very popular, it was decided to privatize the trains. The effect was only minimal investments in the infrastructure and a gradual rotting away of the train network. Now we a reaping what we have sown.
The enshitification of the German trains was done on purpose so they don't compete with cars.
The Giruno EMUs of the SBB serving the Eurocity from Hamburg to Basel are having technical malfunctions causing delays & aborted trainrides for the last few weeks.
The Eurocity(Express) Zurich-Munich is the most delayed long-distance train route in Germany. Most of the German route is only single-tracked and overcrowded.
How much help does your home country give to German tourists who don't speak English?
Swiss railway is seen as the ideal DB should strive for, but fact is that Switzerland invests more than double per capita into its rail infrastructure. German stinginess now compounded over decades, and that's not the fault of management.
Blacklist everyone who was involved above a certain rank. Put together an entirely new structure. The only real way to get rid of this kind of rot is to make the consequences of dysfunction hit.
Unfortunately, the DB first got hit by Thatcherite neoliberalism in the early 90s that led to "unprofitable" things like switches, railyards or lesser-used routes to be torn down and the real estate sold off (to prepare for a privatization that THANK GOD never happened), and then we got 16 years of Conservative traffic/infrastructure ministers whose job priority was to funnel money to Bavarian highways [1], not towards railways.
Unfortunately, while the left wing loves to prune its ranks in purity tests (partially because its voters demand accountability), the Conservatives have a solid "better dead than red" voter base.
[1] https://www.merkur.de/politik/csu-parteitag-bayern-markus-so...
Would you mind sharing some examples? My only complaints with DB are cancellations and delays. Well, the ticketing might be a bit confusing the first time you realize "ticket" and "seat reservation" are two completely independent entities. Similarly, rules for which train you're allowed to take might be a bit confusing. But I wouldn't call it scamming.
The train arrived on time, we checked our tickets to see which coach we were on and walked down the train looking for it. We get to the end of the train, odd, we must have missed our carriage so we turn around for another pass. Then we start to notice other confused expressions.
We eventually figured out the problem: they had accidentally left the sleeper coaches in Hamburg, a full 180 miles away as the crow flies, or almost half our entire journey.
After waiting on the platform for about an hour, busses arrived to take us to Hamburg. We're now quite tired and our bed on a train is now a seat on a bus.
We finally get to Hamburg at about 3:00 the next day, walk to our beds and we're ready to collapse. Surely they're not going to come and inspect our tickets at this time?
They came and inspected our tickets at around 3:30. Two and a half hours later we were in Cologne. Yay.
I've been told that the UK is worse, but I don't have much experience with it outside of Eurostar.
On the plus side: local journeys are great. Delay Repay means you get up to 100% of your ticket back if you're delayed. If you cannot make the last train due to delays, they're obligated to get your home by bus or even by taxi. Train stock is (in my area at least) new and very comfortable. Views are good!
25km each way is 680 miles a month.
From my example, that's ~794 miles (corrected) a month, £255, £0.32/mile. Not as expensive as some other routes but still can be as as high as 12% of your take-home wage given the low salaries in that city.
Moving onto London... /under/ 20p a mile? Which route is that??
Just some random examples I picked:
Alton to Waterloo: £529, 1786 miles, £0.29/mile.
Guildford to Waterloo: £453/mo - 1140 miles a month, £0.39/mile.
Gravesend to London Bridge: £436/mo, 836 miles a month, £0.52/mile.
Brentwood to Liverpool St: £336/mo, 706 miles a month, £0.47/mile.
St Albans to Thameslink: £440/mo, 756 miles a month, £0.58/mile.
(Mileages from https://www.scotrail.co.uk/carbon-calculator )
Alton to Waterloo is £5520 a year, 50 miles each way or 23,000 miles a year, 24p per mile.
Brighton 17p/mile
Battle 22p/mile
Compare to say wilmslow to Manchester (33p/mile), or northwich (29p/mile)
Compared to to people doing one off journeys. London-Southampton 77p/mile, Brighton 46p/mile, Battle 53p/mile
Just give up.
I've proved your "A typical season ticket into London is under 20p a mile" claim wrong multiple times.
Southampton to Waterloo is just about the exception at ~19p/mile if you assume 22 days per month which I think is exceptional.
I bet that UK trains "win" by being far more expensive than German trains, along with absurdly complex pricing. If you choose the wrong ticket you could also "win" a criminal conviction!
Don't worry though! We're currently building the most expensive bit of high speed rail in Europe, that won't even go into the centre of our capital city [edit: apparently it will now, see reply], or further north than the Midlands. Passengers who have the audacity to want to travel further north will have to transit over to the old tracks, creating even further capacity problems.
All of this is entirely avoidable, if the government just took a few common sense measures, but sadly it doesn't seem to be anyone's priority.
Largest most expensive jobs programme in Europe perhaps more accurately... lots of pigs' snouts in the trough.
Latest punctuality figures for UK are 84.8% and DE 88.1%. Making an assumption on distribution I’d guess UK comes out slightly better.
Of note, DE long distance stats are pretty bad!
UK: https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/ebmnxxih/performance-sta... DE: https://zbir.deutschebahn.com/2024/en/interim-group-manageme...
In all 4 cases the train was delayed in Germany - the longest by 4 hours, one by a mere 30 minutes.
Is Euston not the centre? Where all the other trains from the north-west come into, and literally on the same road as Kings Cross St Pancras? Plus Old Oak Common is going to be an interchange with the Elizabeth Line.
People also miss the fact that a big reason why HS2 is being built is to take load off of the West Coast Main Line, which is running at full capacity at the moment. There's no room to run additional services. Even though some unfortunate compromises have been made, this will still massively benefit parts of the North because they'll be able to get more frequent services once the line is no longer clogged up by trains from London.
Long range trains from, say, London to Manchester are often overcrowded and ridiculously priced.
Season ticket prices are under 20p/mile into London
Nationalisation will likely break this and increase costs for all but the richest. For the last decade the public have been clamouring for “simplification” because they couldn’t understand the restriction codes. Now it’s being rolled out they are of course seeing price rises and complaining “not like that!”
False, as per my other comment
I agree with your other points though
DB is state owned, yes ... but it's run like a private company. It's basically the classic "privatize profits, socialize losses" - done as a yearly routine.
Not even remotely exaggerating, it's incredibly corrupt.
losses get pushed to be picked up by the state/taxes.
That's why it's privatize profits, socialize losses.
But there has just been a leadership change, maybe things will improve..
I guess that makes you the person that's...?
I do think they’re working on improving these conditions. But I wish they did more to communicate that. Where is the big marketing campaign explaining how they got there, apologizing, and explaining how they will do better?
50% of operators are now state owned
Not that it's a guarantee for things to get better...
No matter whether the train operators and the network operator are private or a state monopoly, all decisions about major upgrades and new lines are made and funded by the government. The network operator just deals with the maintenance.
Nationalisation(or sometimes privatisation!) is seemingly seen by many as panacea, but it won't help you if your network runs at 150% capacity every day.
Ticket prices vary a lot and are unpredictable. I have not a last minute ticket from London to the midlands for just over £20, but they can be a lot more (several times as much?) for the same journey even booking ahead.
I definitely prefer the train to driving if I am going long distance by myself, but if its multiple people the car becomes a lot cheaper.
Local services in cities are pretty good. I never owned a car in London, nor in Manchester until I had a child.
I've had the last train out of central London for the night cancelled at about 1am and you can just message the train company on social media and they'll pay £100+ to get you a taxi all the way to somewhere like Cambridge.
Also, not sure how it is in other countries, but in the UK, everything is entirely open data. You can go to a site like https://map.signalbox.io/ to see a live map of every train in the UK, and sites like Realtime Trains let you get all the details about every train (eg. https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/search/simple/gb-nr:KGX)
And some operators love to ignore their obligations
Our protections are good on paper but in reality quite poor. London is of course better than the rest of the country though.
I don't consider having to message a faceless social media team on "X" to get a taxi refunded good customer service at all. And they are definitely pushing for you to pay first and then get a refund, which is not in the spirit of the contract. My mother doesn't have "X" and wouldn't know where to start
Oh c’mon have you tried trains in Slovenia? The ICE from Budapest with a constant 230+ min delay, the regional one from Ljubljana to Celje where half the track is seemingly under perpetual construction (so transfer to a bus!), passenger trains delayed all the time waiting for freight trains, trains randomly going 20kph on some segments, and lately even vandals sabotaging the tracks. And don’t worry, they announce all of that exclusively in Slovene with no extra answers.
I’ve been on DB and it wasn’t that bad. It was expensive but at least the train didn’t max out at 80kph.
I'm on the other side of this. I end up chaperoning lost tourists on my DB disaster trips with a regularity that I should be getting a paycheck from DB.
The connection in question is probably https://bahn.expert/details/RE28521/j/20251224-a0049123-9494....
According to this page, it actually did stop at Troisdorf (though, that doesn't have to be correct). I don't see why they should have been able to stop at Neuwied but not any of the stations in between. Most of them are possibly too small, as the RE5 is quite long for a regional train, about 200m. The usual "RE" on this track, the RE8, is only about 110m max. Bonn-Beuel should have worked, though.
In any neighboring country, where punctuality is at like 74-99%, depending on the country.
The DB is at 48.5% (Oct 2025) to 60% (2024 avg).
> didn't have to worry about traffic, icy roads, or snow
Aren't these statements contradictory? I think "grow up" means problems are unavoidable and the adult thing to do is expect them and accept them, and then you say you didn't have to worry, as if problems never happen.
To me it sounds like you just got lucky on your Christmas trips. Two trips on time hardly prove a rule that there's never trouble, and in any case you directly state there's trouble sometimes and that's something to accept.
Now I don't know the stats on problem frequency, which of course matters. But that's different from "don't have to worry". Opposite really. "Here's how much you should worry".
You can decide whether a 38.1% chance of being delayed by more than 15 minutes is bad. I think it is.
Source: https://www.deutschebahn.com/de/konzern/konzernprofil/zahlen...
Want to get to the airport 2 hours before your flight? Sorry, you have to plan in at least an extra hour, because there's a 40% chance your train will be severely delayed or canceled.
This unreliability drives people who need to get places on time to other modes of transportation. But if you don't mind being randomly delayed by an hour, the train is great. It's sad, and it didn't use to be this way.
But the idea that you go 55 minutes just because of policy; and skip 15 stations is crazy to me. Again with the assumptions that it can safely stop somewhere for 5m and I’m pretty sure the answer is yes.
I have fond memories of train stopping close to my house for various random reasons and I’d just get out so I don’t have to walk back from the station. The modern world where everything is “safety issue” and “someone else’s problem” is where we lost our ways, and it’s never coming back.
I can neither confirm nor deny, I may have done it to get to/from the grocery store from near my house when I didn't have money for a car.
In Germany there's also the issue that the powerful car makers are always lobbying the government to budget cut public transport.
There has been some popular demand for Cornish devolution, but Whitehall is only prepared to entertain it within some greater south west region.
There is also some devo to councils.
By the way, I can remember the state run British Rail and that was bad too. Neither nationalisation nor private operators have done well with British trains over the past fifty years.
A "one under" (likely suicide) plus signal problems (which can be basically anything) meant I was delayed by over an hour home from Yorkshire on Saturday, but that also means it was effectively free.
As a French, the culture shock was brutal and I never really got around that work attitude. I went through a similar issue back when I used to take a regional train in France, and the crew swiftly adapted by bending rules to accommodate a difficult situation caused by bad weather. I'm not sure this could happen today, but it was a thing 10 years ago, we used to trust the operators back then.
The system runs beyond its limits and consequently the culture collapses because the people inside learn they have no agency.
The German rail network is quite good on paper, with dense and high frequency connections even to relatively remote locations.
But keeping that functional (particularly with constantly rising demand) requires far more investment than it receives.
All the examples of great rail systems (France, Switzerland, Japan) are both simpler in network structure and invest more relative to their passenger load.
Like surely it’s easier to run a railway network when compared to the insane complexity to safely operate an airport and all the work that goes into plane maintenance and pilot training and so on.
The upshot is that trains are a lot costlier than most believe think and most railway routes require state subsidies (with goods transport usually being an exception), whereas air traffic works so well it can be taxed heavily.
In Germany (and also e.g. Switzerland), long-distance trains are expected to run either at cost (or make a profit). Short-distance trains (regional transport) are usually subsidized.
Planes are faster, and there is actual competition keeping prices down. There is no competition on railroads, no accountability, no nothing. More importantly, railroads have to be managed centrally to work. And this makes them overwhelmingly complex, resulting in an ever-growing bureaucracy.
Air travel is decentralized, and while individual airports (cue: BER) can get screwed up, it doesn't cascade through the whole system.
We just need to add a bit of carbon pricing to reflect the true price of flights.
Airlines are subject to market competition since any competitor around the globe can spot a poorly run route and buy their planes into those slots. If they can execute more efficiently than you, they can afford to lower prices (or increase the level of service) more than you, and thus put you out of business.
Trains do not work this way. No amount of investment can overcome the cushy institutional-rot, laziness, and demotivation that inevitably results from being a monopoly, as most train routes are not subject to competitive forces due to the real world constraints of the infrastructure needed.
That said personally I much prefer the mostly fixed pricing (and no reservation required) of swiss network than the dynamic one of other countries.
For Switzerland does this account for the almost double salaries or only absolute spending?
If you spend 1€ in Switzerland I imagine you get much less work output than for 1€ in Germany.
I have no idea if this is actually the case, but you have to take that into account or Switzerland would not be as successful as it is. Higher incomes have historically been a symptom of productivity (and while median incomes and productivity have decoupled, especially in the angosphere, it is still usually correlated).
If I go to Zürich I get a burger for 30Fr that I can get in Southern Germany for 15€ and in Berlin for 8€. That is with roughly the same quality.
I'd say past productivity leads to network effects and investments in one area that boost local salaries and decouples them quite strongly from current productivity.
My previous company had a per-dollar extremely unproductive location in silicon valley. The people there weren't at fault. You don't magically become more productive because you live next to SF.
I have seen this systemic problem in other domains I worked in. The problems are very similar, and at the end of the day I can somewhat relate to the workers attitude of "why should I lean out of the window if I get punished anyway". But in some cases the workers are unfireable and oftentimes it is exactly that attitude that let the management get away with the terrible working conditions (most of the times more psychological than physical abuse) so it feeds into each other.
So to me, there doesn’t seem to be a panacea except to hold the services accountable in some way.
The government is the most efficient and effective at big capital spending and with what I would call static operations. Competitive private entities are the best at delivering value on the front-end.
Monopolist/cartel private entites combine the rapacious nature of rent seeking with the lazy inefficiency of bureaucracy to great a giant ball of failure. Effective privatization requires either creating a framework for a robust competitive landscape OR tight, effective regulatory control. There's no universal correct answer.
If competition is in place and companies can win or lose, they will move mountains to yield marginal gain. If you let them get fat & lazy, you will need to move a mountain to do anthing -- even make more money!
... in the short term, happily screwing over society at large and possibly even themselves in the medium to long term. Perverse incentives are everywhere.
And everybody has the same "market" price.
> The new ICE's speed is actually lower than previous generations.
While not the fastest ICE, the new ICE-L (assuming you refer to it) with a top speed of 230km/h, is not actually slower than what it is supposed to replace on most routes: InterCity trains, topping out at 200km/h.
ICE-L, btw, was planned to be a IC train, but just like before with IC-T/ICE-T (same top speed of 230km/h), and IC X (ICE 4), DB management has a tendency to decide next-to-last minute, that new vehicles must earn money and thus get rebranded ICE, which is both more prestigious and (at least in a fictional world without "Sparpreis") pricey.
TL;DR: This would be outrageous if ICE-L was to replace ICE 3 (neo; 320km/h +) services - but it is not.
The other aspect is that there is a whole host of periphery issues, one of which is track maintenance, making it so for a lot of segments the ICE will not reach its top speed.
If you look at an org chart of the DB these days, the most fascinating part is that DB consists of almost 600 separate corporate entities that are all supposed to invoice each other.
Speaking with insiders, it appears that when the privatization happened, the new corporate structure took what was essentially every mid-size branch of the org chart and created a separate corporate entity, with cross-invoicing for what would normally normal intra-company cooperation. I think the (misguided) goal was to obtain some form of accountability inside a large organisation that had been state-funded and not good at internal accounting.
This fragmentation lead to insane inflexibility, as each of the 600 entities has a separate PnL and is loathe to do anything that doesn’t look good on their books.
Add to this a history of incompetent leadership (Mehdorn, who also ran AirBerlin into the ground, and who was also responsible for the disastrous BER airport build-out), repeated rounds of cost-cutting that prioritized “efficiency” over “resiliency of the network” etc. etc.
DB is currently undergoing a massive corporate restructuring to simplify the 600+ entity structure, but there has been a massive loss of expertise, underinvestment in infrastructure, poor IT (if you see a job ad for a Windows NT4 admin, it’s likely DB), etc. etc. — it’ll take a decade or more to dig the org out of the hole it is in.
Which brings up an interesting question: How do you structure something with a large piece of infrastructure like a rail network in a way that could benefit from the market forces of competition and innovation?
In the case of a national train system, you may want to create a national entity to develop, coordinate, and make the physical trains and support technologies. You would create regional or metro entities to control the train network for their local area including the train stations. They coordinate with each other via negotiated contracts. Any edge cases or emergency falls under the purview of the owning entity. For example, the national entity controls the switch from diesel locomotives to the newest engine. The local authority is responsible for repairing the lines after a natural disaster.
If an entity is egregiously incompetent or failing, the national regulatory authority, with support of the majority of all the different train entities, takes control and reforms it.
Not, that "insight" again. Yes it was privatized and yes it is still completely owned by the state. "Privatization" is a term of art (in German) that refers to the corporate structure not the ownership. There are also public corporations in Germany, that are fully owned by random people: e.V. = registered association.
A rail network is near to a natural monopoly. You can build overlapping rail networks, but it's complex and interconnecting instead of overlapping would usually offer better transportation outcomes and there's a lot less gauge diversity so interconnection is more likely than overlap.
All that to say, you can't really get market forces on the rails. Rails compete with other modes of transit, but roads and oceans and rivers and air aren't driven by market forces either.
Transit by rail does compete in the market for transit across modes. You can have multiple transportation companies running on the same rails, and have some market forces, but capacity constraints make it difficult to have significant competition.
Thirty years ago, you would be correct. In the modern day, you could tie switch signalling to real-time auctions and let private rail's command centers decide how much to bid and thus whether or not they win the slot for putting their cars onto the shared rails. The public rail owner likely needs to set rules allowing passenger rail to pay a premium to secure slots in advance (say, a week) so that a timetable can be guaranteed to passengers during peak rush hour, but off-peak slots can and should be auctioned to naturally handle the difference between off-peak passenger rail and not-time-sensitive, more-cost-averse freight rail.
you summarized my 5+ year experience living in Germany with one sentence in a way that I have never found the words for - thank you, really, thank you
I feel that in Germany, the original intent of the many rules, processes, and procedures has been lost. Employees are trained to operate such that every situation is governed by a rule/process/procedure, and their job is to look up the situation in a massive leather-bound book of branching rules, see which rule applies in the given situation, and then… apply the rule. But, they will do this only if they assess that helping you falls under their job’s responsibilities. Sometimes your situation is neat and clean, and was what the rule-writers thought about when they wrote the rules. Sometimes, not.
TLDR: if you have an edge case in the German bureaucratic system (forms at the doctor’s office, Deutsche Bahn travel troubles, closing a bank account), you are f***
It seeps in everywhere too, with almost all aspects.
Day-to-day with restaurants, cafe, shops. Almost all interaction feels like it's actively checked if it's in their process or job description. Shop staffs are typically disengaged and can't really help you with anything outside the normal process.
Healthcare, both receptionist and doctors. You can see the rushed service because they are only compensated for limited amount of time by the state insurance. This took me a while to figure out; the process really defines what treatment you get, with what equipments, as well as the duration, and they have to do their best with the constraints put by the process.
An example: with Wurzelkanalbehandlung, the process says (at least back then) only 1 hour of Laborkosten can be compensated by the state insurance. This means if the dentist took more than 1 hour to work on you, that would be done at their personal loss, and thus the incentive to rush the procedure.
Going private helps (they tend to be more relaxed after the mention of of Privatzahler, and gives you access to newer equipments not yet acknowledged by the state insurance processes), but you still have to research, find, and pick the right practice.
Bureaucracy, administrative. You often have to deal with clerks that just go "I just work here", the rules says this and there's nothing I can do, throws hand in the air. Goodbye, next person please!
In day-to-day work, I can also see it. New hires tend to be more into the work, and questions things, but the system does push everyone to just follow the process and not do anything more. I've seen my colleagues slowly shift into this mode, delivering what is outlined, nothing more, not questioning the intent behind the work (or at least, doing it much less than before, because the system does not incentivise that).
It turns out, people everywhere want the same things, in the end. They just go about them differently.
In Germany, it often helps frame it as both of you trying to work with the rules together; as a framework to build within and on, rather than a cage to hold you in.
Doesn't always work. Nothing works all the time, (especially if the other person is having a bad day themselves and just wants it to be over). But if it helps even once eh?
But I'm interested in how Germans perceive Americans in reverse? If shop staff went out of their way to help them find a product, shoot the breeze, or recommend a lunch spot, would Germans tend to see this as being overzealous? Would it cause embarrassment, or be a pleasant surprise? Just curious.
A good example: Here in North America I'll jaywalk without a thought if there's no traffic. In Germany, you'll get grandmothers calling you a child-killer for setting a bad example if you did the same.
Another example: Both France and Germany spend roughly the same amount (in raw Euros) on their militaries. France (which ALSO spends and develops a lot of their own kit) has a functional and effective military, including the only non-American nuclear aircraft carriers, and a bunch of nuclear attack and ballistic submarines and it's own nuclear deterrent. Germany is barely able to maintain their much smaller infrastructure because of its ineffective bureaucracy (there was a scandal a few years ago where over 80% of their euro fighters were combat ineffective due to lack of maintenance).
The person behind me flashed their lights. Cultural difference I guess. Why wait when there is nothing to wait for.
1: Australia is very egalitarian, rather than hierarchical. Pragmatic, rather than bureaucratic. Australians are direct and emotive communicators. Spontaneous planners, etc. etc.
I mean, only people who think for themselves can do that!
Regardless, I don't share those values. I have stared into the abyss of what people who praise conformity and the common good will do to a municipality if given free reign to regulate it's minutia and I do not want. My neighbors on one side blast music in a language I don't speak until a couple hours after my bedtime most nights and the neighbors on the other have barking dogs. I don't even notice them anymore, same with the nearby highway noise.
You THINK that your rule-breaking has no consequences. This is called in the safety science "normalization of deviance", and it usually leads to more and more rules being ignored. And not necessarily by _you_ but by other people.
This is colloquially known as "being a bad example".
Like I said, I've stared into the abyss of what you people will do to a society if left unchecked. You are worse than the alternative. That's why I live where I do.
Have you lived in any country where you are not coddled by the society?
I'm kind of curious how you expect this to work.
A driver is driving down the road at the posted speed limit. Instead of crossing at an intersection, a pedestrian steps into the road from between two parked vehicles directly in front of the moving car. By that point the car cannot be stopped before it hits the pedestrian because of the laws of physics, so who would you have at fault and how was that person expected to prevent it?
Showing kids good example is good. What you mean is showing them bounderies. Getting shit drunk in front of kids and telling them how much fun it is but they cant do it is behaving like a child
This varies wildly in Germany. In Hamburg, at 7 - 9 in the morning near schools or kindergartens with kids around, many people are following good traffic behavior. At 9 on a university campus, or at 9 at night no one really cares.
Yeah, some Bavarian villagers can be hylariously weird. I, personally, have jaywalked all my life growing up in East and West Germany, and I only got "the lecture" twice: once in deeply pious Bavaria, and once in... Spain. Both involved the rolemodel-shaming routine as kids were to be seen, but only one came with a small fine attached.
> "Here in North America I'll jaywalk without a thought if there's no traffic."
Most likely not a POC and not from NY or Washington D.C., I see (I'm reporting for a friend). Ah, anecdotes. The spice of life!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3EBs7sCOzo
What really ought to bother people more than it does is that within just about any white western country/culture you can run the same comparison with "decently well off" being the german side and "everyone else" being the english side.
The gate people tried to tell us it was impossible to be there without tickets, as if we were somehow collectively hiding them and a bit of persuasion would convince us to find the non-existent tickets! Not one person found they had a ticket, despite this allegedly being impossible.
It's always some magical higher power preventing you from doing the sensible thing. One favourite excuse is insurance liability. We can't do the sensible thing, because the insurance wouldn't pay if something bad were to happen, even though the odds of something bad happening are virtually nil.
You can also observe this in German politics. "Oh, we absolutely cannot do <common sense thing> because the rules won't allow it." Well, you could change the rules, but then you would have to take some actual responsibility, and we can't have that.
My actual favorite part of German work culture is that meetings always have an agenda, that part is a delight when doing business with German customers.
(this is what happened to OP)
Big bits of equipment moving around fast and limited guard rails.
The culture of taking personal responsibility is vastly different to where I’m from.
That kind of explains why they tried to pull it of at Nuremberg. And why some nazis that weren't sentenced internationally got good jobs in post-war Germany. For Germans they weren't really at fault if they were just following procedures.
At the end of WW2 a strong West Germany to oppose the USSR was more important than punishing some middle manager and the quickest way to get the West German state together was to use a lot of the existing bureaucracy.
And the fact that Germans did not really care about punishing nazis didn't matter at all?
But what this episode also highlights is the opposite of this in the form of the American approach that is much more flexible and willing to bend the rules if necessary. Rightfully, the Allies could and probably should have brought everyone to justice, but they realised that a lot of the Nazi scientists were extremely valuable assets that they needed to get a leg up on the Soviets. So rather than execute them or put them in prison and throw away the key, they recruited them.
Supposedly while the French and British officers were frozen waiting for new orders to be telegraphed when something didn't go according to plan, Germans took the initiative based on what's happening on the ground. US and other countries adopted this doctrine after the war because of how unexpected successful the German army was (despite being outgunned by the French and the soviets who had better tanks and more trucks just couldn't figure out how to use them efficiently)
There's always an option. You could die. And if you didn't choose that option before committing atrocity as ordered you definitely deserve death afterwards.
Rheinhard gehlen and everyone around him is a something that could have been prevented.
And so many high class nazis where in such good positions because they where experts on anticommunism. For the americans and brits it was "safer" to give positions to exnsdap officiers then people from the SPD(socialists)
Gehlen kicked even the only high ranking spd member in secret service out
for god sake they even hired klaus barbie. that guy had entertainment partys where the guests could torture jews homosexualls etc... and he killed most of french opposition. Got hired from the bnd and cia as expert on anticommunism
Germany didnt change much..
fuck we even voted a full member of the nsdap as chancelor. Kurt kiesinger. Yes we had two Nazi chancellors!!
honestly the only reason the denazification was shit was because most people at power at that time where kind of nazis.
edit:// btw the DDR had somehow solved the problem and didnt had as much nazis in high position.
Bad faith actors and cultural dysfunction can break pretty much anything no matter how well thought out it might be.
U.S. politics today in a nutshell.
You need to make the people best positioned to notice something is stupid responsible enough to make them say no fuck you because otherwise every oversight and edge case will be substantially more likely to cause harm because they have less skin in the game.
See also: Cops getting "paid vacations" for bad stuff.
People need to be given timely information, communication channels, and authority to straighten things out when they go awry. That's good for safety!
Pilots fuck up all the time so blaming them doesn't excuse anything.
And I find myself butting heads with people over that all the time. Coworker (smug satisfied voice) well if the end user fucks up it's not our fault. Me (trying not to sound really annoyed) yeah it's still our problem.
At first they assumed their recruitment process accidentally favoured stupid people so they made sure to only recruit smart pilots. But it kept happening. Then they put a little flap on the end of the flap lever and a small wheel on the end of the gear lever and the problem went away.
I simplify. Read the full story. It is cool!
... Yep.
It's for similar reasons why everyone is up at the crack of dawn frantically shovelling snow outside their homes.
Rather spoils the fun of towing the kids to school on a sled when every 5 meters there's a perfectly swept bit you have to drag it across.
Worse. You can't even take responsibility even if you want to, that's usually against the rules too.
Of course maybe that didn't apply to committing atrocities to the same degree.
Neither absurdity nor "German philosophy", but just stock-standard safety and security culture in action. Or more specifically in this case: generelle and objektspezifische Dienstanweisungen (general and location-specific administrative instructions or regulations) [1]. You don't follow them, it's you who's on the hook. :)
And when was the last time anyone here visited a railway control centre in a metropolitan area? Yeah.
I document German bureaucracy for a living. I cannot stress enough how "vibes-based" the entire thing is. Half the job is convincing bureaucrats that you're either overprepared or litigious to be worth the trouble.
https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/
(p.s. I don't mean to nitpick over a perfectly clear message, but it's "much ado")
In france they Busdrivers let me out between stops if I ask them before.
Germany is crazy rule obsessed. they also have the crazy mentality that if you put it into rule problem is solved xD
The absolute "I won't do anything more than I explicitly have to." was brutal. It was hard to even talk to them as they seemed terrified / constantly defensive of being asked to do something outside their typical process. They never were asked as long as I was there but man they were on a knifes edge about it at all times.
I'd even be on the phone with folks I met and got along with and I'd ask them about what they saw on a ticket they used to own, and I'd get angry made up rules about "I don't have to tell you anything because that ticket doesn't belong to me anymore!" Like bro ... we had a good time having beers together, I'm not your boss I'm a peer asking, it's still both our work hours ...
They were smart folks, got along with them otherwise, but it was just a horrible experience working with those folks when it came to work. Company eventually just shut down those offices, complied with whatever local laws were required to do so and washed their hands of those locations. I didn't blame them.
This situation seems pretty unusual, even for the DB. A regional express train should have many more stops than that. It sounds a bit like they switched the train to a direct connection to the final stop because they switched to the other side of the rhine (so you can't make any of the other planned stops anyway).
The major mistake here was not making the stop in Troisdorf. At the point where they missed that they should have planned the earliest usable stop for the passengers that needed to leave there.
I would also assume that there is no safe way for the conductor to halt at any earlier stop. A safe halt would need to be planned at a higher level.
OK, so you disgorge however many people, at what age, with or without babies in ipushchairs or people in wheelchairs, onto the tracks, and they avoid the passing 100mph trains, they then walk along in the dark and rain for a few miles looking for a gap in the fence?
Sure, just a "bit" of an issue.
American railways are far less regimented than European or Chinese, when you have 3 trains a day you can do stuff like that
Around here if the Conductor gets a call from dispatch telling him that a station is unavailable, the dispatcher will already have cleared the train to stop at some logical alternate location. That might mean another train station in the same city or a specific level crossing. It might mean delaying or stopping conflicting traffic. They’ve thought ahead and planned a way to fix the problem _without_ carting passengers an hour out of their way.
If they got off at the next stop after troisdorf they could take the local bus back to Troisdorf (ten minute wait worst-case).
At later stations they could get on the train in the opposite direction (30 min wait worst-case).
There is really A LOT going on through the tracks in NRW and Düsseldorf/Köln/Bonn. It's sad people just read an article like this and just blame it on the poor guy as if he was a monkey.
The guy actually wanted to do something nice (get people closer to Bonn, so they could change a train with an easier alternative). It didn't work out, but this shows how bad the sync with these systems is, and safety is and must be prioritized.
People don't understand how many freight trains travel on those tracks.
Fourth world: Parts of the developed world that have collapsed past third-world conditions because industrial safety nets have simultaneously withered from neglect/underfunding, and are being overwhelmed by demand, but where pre-modern societal structures don’t exist as backstops anymore.
This is what this story reminds me of.
I think most of America would be fucked as most people don't know to how to do anything but their job plus buy things with money from their job. The top 25% of handy people might be able to change their own oil and that is it (not that they can't learn more, but it takes time).
Most of America would be substantially less fucked than the slice of mostly officer workers who mostly have enough money that "spend money rather than upskill or barter" is their default mode of operation you see via HN.
it's impossible to build on what Third World means or add lore like Fourth World when the definition is on a shaky and now non-existent foundation, while much of the unaffiliated world is highly developed now.
IIRC Wikipedia says the term was coined ca. 1950s, so it could be argued that the USSR's decline was already factored into the term.
What? The Soviets got the bomb in 1949 and launched Sputnik in 1957. That makes no sense.
It's progress, taken to its extreme. From a certain point of view it's effectively the same as collapse.
I might even pull the emergency brake before it gets that far and cause you more problems, even.
The developed world does have decaying infrastructure but moving it between the private and state sector has caused problems. As has lockdown and other international policies. Our local government's main interest seems to be in shutting streets off and designing bad cycle infrastructure that is little use to cyclists (I am one by the way). It is letting our streets fall to pieces and spending lots of money erecting physical blocks.
If they weren't able to announce the train would stop at one station, why do you think they'll be able to do that at another?
I'm pretty sure train conductors aren't allowed to just stop somewhere unscheduled for good reasons, there's always a train behind and in front of them with no buffer.
Of course doing this can have ripple effects on other services, and if a common factor has severely delayed dozens of different trains, the central control room might not have enough staff to deal with dozens of unscheduled stop requests.
(For longer “technical” delays, keep an eye out for emergency vehicles without their sirens on.)
And then you have cascading delays across a whole region.
Since we don't know "the other side of the story", we can't really tell. All people here see is the "I got kidnapped". If the story was written from the control room person's perspective, they might write a fascinating story about how they single-handedly avoided 17 trains being late by sending one train on a detour.
Would be awesome if there was someone on HN that knows if DB actually has the capacity to run a scheduling algorithm for their network within a few minutes, repeatedly, for many different trains at a moments notice. What kind of infra do they have for that, what do they use? With a large, interconnected, network that's tightly scheduled already that can't be easy.
OP was also unlucky in that he was on a regional train. They prioritize long distance trains usually as a regional train can more easily wait on a lower speed limit track somewhere than a fast long distance train on a potentially shared single track bottleneck.
Conductor radioed ahead and the train heading the other way stopped when we passed it and the passenger was transferred over.
They didn’t have to do that, but it was nice.
They’ve also hired a cab for a station miss that was their fault.
Where she started to go a little weird is she thought anyone who had an idea had the right to just go do that, and society can go hang (she grew up suffering the worst Sovietism could serve up, her concept of community was damaged as a result). Unfortunately, her ideas are now held close to the hearts of some of the most powerful people on Earth, who are also going a little weird.
I'm actually OK with experts deciding that a particular policy is the right way to keep people safe. What I'm not OK with is using the policy as a prop to avoid independent thought or agility. I'd rather that instead of a procedure or a policy, people were taught a way of thinking about the World.
"We're not allowed to stop at the next station because we're not registered to do so", is a statement made in deference to a policy regardless of whether it makes sense or not. "We need to spend a few minutes making sure we're registered at the next station before we go any further" complies with the policy, but is a person taking ownership of resolving the problem, and comes from a place of empathy for the passengers on board. We need more of the latter, but unfortunately the Randian version we're now getting is "We'll stop or carry on wherever the driver feels like because he is sat at the controls so there's nothing anybody can do about that".
You were supposed to take the last exit, to be on the local road instead of the highway. No, we cannot let you off on the highway. We are not allowed to stop here. There are no stops. We wait for another exit. Sorry.
Here's the map of the station:
This is basic management, it's basic competence.
The train was misrouted because nobody cared about routing it properly: the driver, the conductor, the signallers, the routers, the management. Something weird happened and everyone shrugged and started to hum "Que sera, sera" to themselves, rather than committing to doing a job in the passengers' interests.
That's actually the nub of the topic. Humans can accumulate some expertise in this or that topic, to some limited extend. But they can't integrate all the cases that actual people are going to face in an anticipated manner.
There are different kind of attitude with expertise. Some people will grow humility as they realize how little they know and how tiny their individual contribution actually is in the grand scheme of cosmos. Other will grow a metastased ego and leverage on the little few things they believe firmly to grab as much political power as they can to enforce whatever fantasy come to their mind as they get out of touch from feedback from the rest of humanity (except the yes-man court).
If an expert have meaningful things to share, of course it should be considered. But not as an absolute authority. Experts can also be fake people, or bribed, or missing clues about the specific context, just as well as be perfectly on point with well framed context and best intention to the general public at heart. But taking blindly anything that an expert labeled person for unquestionable certitudes is a receipt for the kind of trouble exposed in this thread.
https://media.amtrak.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Autumn-1...
Up top are seats and maybe a lounge, below are bedrooms, bathrooms, and storage. There's a spiral staircase to change levels.
The locomotive has steps right outside the wheels with handrails.
It's pretty obvious where the doors are (middle), which have windows. My point, replying to my parent, was that they said Amtrak platforms are at 110cm height. The lowest part of those doors are not at 110cm height, but much lower, almost as if the platform was much much lower than my parent claimed ;)
And yes, trains do exist, which either have doors at two different heights (these don't seem to) or that either automatically fold away so you can get out at ground level via the stairs that are revealed/created by the mechanism or that simply stay up for platform height entry/exit. Used both types. Now, whether or not Amtrak has those in specific parts of the US I can't say.
Every car has a metal step that will be placed in front of the door by the attendant.
Edit: Oh, except for a few lines on the East Coast where the trains are only single–level. Those are 48” above the top of track.
For really long construction work they’ll actually build an entirely separate train station, like they did in Denver Colorado a few years back. They knew that the construction of the new station downtown would take a few years, so they built a really cheap platform a few miles away on a siding and moved all the arrivals and departures there for the duration.
The Amtrak people I've met over the years pretty clearly want to do a good job in a system that is stacked against them.
When every useful idiot is screeching about statistical optimization you lose any optimization for anything that isn't measured or isn't optimized for.
Like it's not hard to imagine the breathless comments on HN about how trains should never(TM) stop without a platform if they'd have stopped the train on both sides and some old lady tripped and fell and broke her nose on the rail.
It reminds me of letting a child that's too young to not be stupid pick it's own dinner and it picks of candy then to the surprise of nobody with a brain it's cranky later despite being calorically satisfied by the numbers.
>The modern world where everything is “safety issue” and “someone else’s problem” is where we lost our ways, and it’s never coming back.
It'll come back if there's something bad enough that happens to kick society back to a point where "lol we ain't got the spare resources for that shut up and go away" becomes an acceptable way to deal with the peddlers of these things. But anything that gets us that far won't be pretty.
Yes. That is a good reason to not stop without a platform. But I tell you one even better. Look at the layout of the Troisdorf station. There are tracks with platforms, and there are through tracks. The trough tracks are surrounded by live tracks on both sides. If the train stops there, unlocks the doors, and somehow coaxes the people to climb down those people are immediately on a live track. To get off of it they have to cross the track and climb up a raised platform. And who knows when is a train coming on that track. The risk here is not breaking the nose of one old lady (which by the way, can easily kill an old person) but forcing hundreds of passengers into a meat grinder. But go on with your snark.
Dumping people on the tracks is not the solution here. Going beyond the station and stopping there (which is always safe in the "other trains are not going to run into yours" sense, that is what signals are for) then letting the signallers set the points for you to reverse back into the station is the solution.
This is unfortunately exactly an example of the type of take I was complaining about.
Just let the people who are actually there and can actually see the situation use some judgement.
Arbitrarily halting traffic on an arbitrary section of track isn't something the parties involved don't know how to do. It's something that happens somewhere in the rail network every day for some reason or another. It's a supported function. I trust them to be able to invoke it.
Okay. But we are beyond that. The people who were there handled the situation and we both seem to agree that they didn't handle it well. We just seem to disagree how they should have handled it differently.
Your proposal is that they should have dumped people on the tracks. My proposal is that they should have done more to get the train next to a platform.
> This is unfortunately exactly an example of the type of take I was complaining about
Tell me where do you disagree. Have you looked at the track layout of the station? Have you looked at images of the platforms?
I'm confused about what are you asking. Are you asking if I have looked at the layout of the station and the images of the platforms? If so yes. That's how I'm describing it in my first post.
You can too. Here is a general layout for passengers: https://www.bahnhof.de/en/troisdorf/map
You can look at satellite images of the station via google maps, or you can check the track and signalling arrangements on https://www.openrailwaymap.org/
On top of that you can see the platforms in question on wikimedia: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/S13_Troi...
They ("ze germans" broadly speaking) should've handed this 300yr ago by not heading down a path (in their defense it probably wasn't obvious) to a culture that create obvious failures by following rules to the point of absurdity.
The train is just an example, and unfortunately there's no control train. If not the train then the absurd and trivially avoidable failure will be something else.
What I know, and what I'm repeating now in the third comment, is that it would not have been safe to let the passengers out on the platform-less track there. Not because of rules, but because of common sense.
Curious to hear what strategy you've learned over time.
I think it's a "busy tracks" problem in general, which yeah, is a problem in Europe in general. You can't just stop a train in the middle of some track, there are a bunch of other trains coming too, who can't just pass unless you get to a place where that is possible, which isn't everywhere.
None the less, the rest of what you say is true of Sweden, but I don't think it's the reason a train refuses to stop on some train tracks.
No, but these places generally prefer to take care of the collective, even if it means slightly worse conditions for some individuals. This is impregnated into our brains from early on, and somewhat humorously "codified" in the Law of Jante, among others. From the outside, for the last two decades, it seems to be slightly changing more and more into another direction, but that's how it was when I was born and raised there at least.
Once you understand the common perspective of "sacrificing the individual for the group", it becomes a lot easier to understand this sort of reasoning.
Personally, I don't agree with it, together with a bunch of other weird social rules, hence I don't live there anymore. But the other side of the fence, where every rule is constantly broken by everyone, "just in this case" but 100x times a week, isn't so much better after all. Just different. Some people seem to be wired for some things, others not so much.
I feel the same. It is easier to hide behind rules, regulations, bureaucracy etc. Not saying we should stop following rules, but using a bit of common sense and having a bit of compassion would go a long way.
I also remember reading about a train that Japanese railways kept running, just for one kid, she took the train to school. They kept it running until she finished school, just for her (I know, someone is going to point out the inefficiency, cost etc about this story, but that is a separate conversation). I suppose stories like these are going to become rarer and rarer as time goes by, as everything has to be "efficient" and everyone has to follow some "rules".
I suppose it would be slightly inconvenient to her to change habits, as well as a bad precedent. Still, hard to accept there was no additional factor involved in the decision.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%AB-Shirataki_Station#In_...
I wonder if there's a country somewhere with the right balance.
"In a developing country nothing works but everything is possible. In a developed country everything works but nothing is possible"
In Lord of the Rings, fellowship of the ring when Gandalf arrives in Shire and Sam runs to meet him he says, "you're late!" to which Gandalf replies, "Deutsche Bahn is never late but arrives precisely when it means to".
"I'm going to manufacture precision optics at competitive prices, right here, and I'm gonna tool up a factory to do it" is bold but believable in Houston or Dallas. It's a fucking joke in Trenton or Newark.
Likewise there's a whole bunch of ex-soviet 'stans and random east asian countries where such a statement is far more believable than middle easter, african and latin american ones that are of comparable GDP.
When you get on the bus there's a big sign stating the rules of riding the bus which include strictly stopping at designated bus stops ONLY and threatening fines. For the rest of the day I watched every bus driver stop anywhere they like if a person hailed the bus, allowing people to get in while waiting in red traffic lights, and if you talked to the driver he'd drop you off anywhere you wanted as long it's possible. Those drivers make nothing from this so they are doing it because this is life and also because there's no real enforcement against it. Also you can get in through the exit doors and leave through the entry doors, whatever you like.
I decided I feel ok about this and don't want it to change
In many places without rigid rule enforcement, that kind of flexibility can actually feel more humane in practice, even if the overall system is worse. What frustrates me in the US (and sometimes in Europe) isn't rules themselves, but how aggressively and impersonally they're enforced in very ordinary situations.
For example, a friend of mine in New York casually crossed a line at a small PlayStation event and was stopped by a bodyguard as if he were bypassing airport immigration. I had a similar experience at a small event, maybe 300 people, where I tried to cross a line to get coffee and was abruptly blocked by security (they were just preparing the snacks).
Compared to more informal cultures, this kind of hyper enforcement can feel oddly hostile, especially when it's disconnected from any real safety concern.
During the Great Financial Crisis astute observers pointed to the loss of local bankers for most transactions as a component of the multifaceted structural causes. When you have your mortgage through the bank down the street, you're much less likely to mail them the keys instead of paying your bill, especially if you have to see the banker in the grocery store etc.
What did we do about this? Of course we didn't learn anything - we actually further consolidated banking.
The same is true of train service, traffic etiquette, and political discourse. The tragedy of the commons is exacerbated by moving away from local community.
"I built it with my hands. Straightened old nails to put the sheathing on. Rafters are wired to the stringers with baling wire. It's mine. I built it. You bump it down — I'll be in the window with a rifle. You even come to close and I'll pot you like a rabbit."
"It's not me. There's nothing I can do. I'll lose my job if I don't do it. And look — suppose you kill me? They'll just hang you, but long before your hung there will be another guy on the tractor, and he'll bump the house down. You're not killing the right guy."
"That's so," the tenant said. "Who gave you orders? I'll go after him. He's the one to kill."
"You're wrong. He got his orders from the bank. The bank told them: "Clear those people out or it's your job."
"Well, there's a president of the bank. There's a Board of Directors. I'll fill up the magazine of the rifle and go into the bank."
The driver said: "Fellow was telling me the bank gets orders from the East. The orders were: "Make the land show profit or we'll close you up."
"But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don't aim to starve to death before I kill the man that's starving me."
"I don't know. Maybe there's nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn't man at all. Maybe, like you said, the property's doing it. Anyway I told you my orders."
It's way cheaper to not wrong people or to not walk up so close to that line than it is to secure the full stack and pay everyone what you'd need to pay them to compensate them for the risk of being the unlucky guy who gets scalped on livestream or whatever form sloppy retribution takes.
The message out of 2020 and 2021, is that the big people know what they're doing and we don't.
Thankfully it seems to be waning slightly.
This is a figment of living in a culture where being right but distasteful in a variety of poorly defined but broadly similar ways effectively makes you wrong. Toward the other end of the spectrum is stuff like "I don't care if he's a card carrying nazi he builds good rockets" and other stuff like that.
that is sadly exactly how most people operate now. Somebody gives legitimate critique to an issue? simply tone police them and you can claim all they say is [ism] or hate speech and therefore not even worth engaging with.
While Iran is not a third-world country per se, you'd be surprised how many times the bus driver would stop at random locations closer to passengers' destinations as well as bus stations.
There's more flexibility in day-to-day life of Iranians; people are expected to follow the rules but there's also this ancient concept of "morovvat" in the culture which encourages self-sacrifice for the betterment of others. Ask any tourist who's traveled to Iran and they tell you about the hospitality of Iranian people; e.g., you ask someone how to get to a place and they literally pause whatever they were doing and walk you to that place so you don't get lost!
It's strange how the image of Iran has been stained by the theocratic government (which Iranians protest against many times...).
I'm from Bangladesh, and the attitude you're describing is one reason why the country is poor and a mess! Deviating from the schedule for the sake of a single person is completely insane and maddeningly inefficient. It's classic third-world mentality. In a good country, the system would never tolerate such deviations. In a really good country, someone wouldn't even ask for such accommodation for themselves, because it would be shameful to inconvenience others even slightly for one's own sake.
Did the individuals and industries that truly drove fabulous innovation and development in the first world REALLY do it from a mindset of "it would be shameful to inconvenience others even slightly for one's own sake"? There are an awful lot of stories of rulebreaking out there... "The Wild Wild West" turned into some of the richest parts of the world, that name doesn't suggest that a society needs to follow the rules to the point of extreme shame to avoid staying poor.
Contrast somewhere like England, where, for whatever reason, extended family networks began breaking down as far back as the middle ages. People in England were living in small nuclear family units back in the 14th century. When your neighbors aren't related to you, that forces people to rely on formal rules and procedures. You can't count on future reciprocity backed by the collateral of kinship ties. And if someone is causing problems, you need formal systems, based on rules and procedures, to deal with them.
These formalized systems are, in turn, far more scalable! You can plan and organize civilization building when everyone is socialized to follow formal timetables in a way that you cannot when people are socialized to follow the informal timing consensus. And the lack of individual accommodation is a feature when you scale from small networks of a dozen or so related individual to millions of people moving through the London Tube every day.
A small amount of rule breaking is tolerable, even beneficial, within a society where everyone otherwise rigidly adheres to rules.[1] But there is no developed society that isn't rule-based at the baseline level. In some places, like England, this rule-focused culture developed organically. In other places, like Japan, there was a deliberate effort to destroy extended family networks and clan structures and replace those frameworks with systems of formal rules and procedures.
[1] America is a good example of a society that is less rules-oriented than say Japan, and arguably derives some benefits from that. But even in America, we pay a price for that. Americans just aren't as good at large scale social organization as the Japanese or Taiwanese, and we compensate by structuring our society in a more decentralized way where less such organization is required in the first place. Ronny Chieng has a funny bit about how New Yorkers try to force open subway doors that have already closed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifX0oafDe3Q. This behavior, multiplied by thousands of occurrences per day, slows down the whole system.
I agree. My mom comes from a family with thirteen siblings in Bangladesh, and moving to the U.S. was a very lonely experience. I felt the loss, but mostly got over it because I was young. My mom never did. My dad remembers a very happy childhood in his village, even though back then 20% of kids died before age 5.
But if you’re optimizing for economic development, informal societies are a hindrance. Informal societies have strong kinship networks,[1] and the intensity of kinship networks is correlated with many negative metrics: less functioning political institutions, less innovation, less specialization of labor, and lower economic growth: https://historicalpsychology.fas.harvard.edu/assets/files/20... ("We establish a tight empirical relationship between kinship intensity and economic development ... A one-SD-increase in the KII is associated with: ... a ~35% decrease in per capita luminosity and GDP worldwide ... [and] a ~10% decrease ..., within-country."); https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic... ("We report a robust association between in-marriage practices and corruption both across countries and within countries.").
[1] I'm not aware of any informal societies that don't have strong kinship networks.
Sadly, this attitude of designing mediocre and over-complicated systems and then sticking to them no matter the cost is very German nowadays. And we hate it. But we can't help ourselves. And this does not affect trains alone; it also affects our tax system, every government process, and often businesses.
We are unable to design better systems; we are unable to design simpler systems, and improvising is a skill we have eradicated from our minds.
In 3rd world countries it might be acceptable for people to jump out of 5-foot high carriages onto live tracks with trains running at 100mph for convenience, but not in Germany
In my experience, this doesn't always happen, and I say this as someone who traveled very often on that same RE5. The situation is what it is (poor maintenance, etc), but the main issue is that the tracks are shared with freight trains impossible to stop given their weight, so to avoid collisions and have a nice (albeit late) Christmas, they made that call to play it safe, rather than have a freight train crash into a train full of people.
I wouldn't blame it on the person, I would rather blame it on the shitty system the train driver has to rely on - apparently so unreliable they had to do what they did. Keep in mind, that's a delay also for that person who very likely doesn't want to work on that day either - the same person that has to deal with that level of BS every day now.
Of course, just to be clear, there is always the German ready to save the world by following an idiotic nonsense procedure, but that's everywhere in the world.
> I have fond memories of train stopping close to my house for various random reasons and I’d just get out so I don’t have to walk back from the station. The modern world where everything is “safety issue” and “someone else’s problem” is where we lost our ways, and it’s never coming back.
You got lucky many times. All it takes is that one time someone makes the wrong call and you get smashed by a train. In Europe this is very rarely the case, because exactly of these "nonsense" rules.
The main issue is the shitty maintenance/sync with other trains etc. "Digitalization".
This situation is an absolutely perverse application of policy.
The situation is rather an indicator of how bad public transportation has become due to lack of investments, maintenance, expansion, etc. For years they didn't care a bit about this.
Why should a driver risk his life and/or job to save the day, when the issue is bigger than him/her?
Today, pulling the emergency break to get off in a field would quickly end you on surveillance videos and with a large fine for obstructing operations, possibly with a detour to the police station for a stern conversation.
I miss the “yeah, whatever” attitude.
The only thing I can agree is the "speaking only in german as if it was the lingua franca of the world". Germany is part of the EU. The EU has 24 langueages. You should at least speak in English. And no, my mother language is not english but spanish.
At 8:15 they dropped us off several stops away from the airport, claiming this train could not continue because it was so delayed. So we hung out in the country...
I finally go to the airport at 9am, rushed to the gate, but they people manning the counter had left (it's usually the flight attendants that man the counters I guess). I called the airline to try to get someone up there, but after waiting 45min on hold the flight had boarded and it was too late.
also, whatever jackass put ellipsis "..." substitution on the Munich flight board because "H32" or whatever was too long to fit into to their div and they couldn't bear messing out their UI, needs a flogging. The UI on the flight board is completely useless, but OH does it it look pretty
If you don't want to pay extra, you have to book six months in advance and be familiar with the fare system. It's super frustrating. It's just a train ride. I don't want to have to plan and organize it like buying a new car at the best price or trading stocks. And in the end, you can't even count on arriving on schedule. If you're unlucky, you'll be stuck at the train station in some godforsaken village.
I prefer to travel by car. The travel costs can be easily calculated based on the price of gas and fuel consumption. The total maintenance costs for a car are transparent. You are much more flexible and autonomous when planning your trip. The probability of arriving more or less on schedule is almost 1. And if you do get stuck in traffic, at least you have a little private, quiet, warm, and dry space around you.
If it were reliable, inexpensive, and uncomplicated, I would still find it more sensible to travel by train. But that is far from being the case. Instead, DB manages to combine the disadvantages of administrative bureaucracy and market economy.
But one thing is clear: I won't be bothered, robbed or even stabbed in my own car, and I also won't arrive in a different village lest I drive there myself. I won't arrive three hours late either, or have to stay overnight in some shitty Hotel because they couldn't find a replacement train.
The German public transport, like many other things in Germany, is an absolute fever dream for a "developed country".
The train experience in Germany is as bad as it is because of lobbying by the car industry and corruption both in the government and train operators. Not enough investment over decades paired with the absurd idea that train fares need to cover operating costs. Nobody would ask this of road networks, it’s just infrastructure that a society pays for. In addition to that the Deutsche Bahn suffers from common inefficiencies of large corporations that are not mitigated in effective ways by its leadership.
Cars aren't complicated. Make the right choice (buy cheap, buy japanese or french, avoid wet V-belts, prefer timing chains). Change oil and oil filter often. Keep an eye on the brake pads, shock absorbers, brake discs, tires, brake fluid, rust on the bodywork. Taking care of all this is surprisingly inexpensive. Of course, you can also have a car mechanic do all of this. Then you pay for their labor. But I really don't see any nasty surprises that might be lurking there. Of course, it depends on how well informed you are. If you've never looked under your car, then it's obviously a surprise when the floor panel is rusted through.
I understand that this is unreasonable for most people. But there is scope for ensuring that costs can be planned very well. However, I must admit at this point that you might as well deal with the complicated DB tariffs if you want to.
> but also because the price of gas is literally political.
Super 95 currently costs between €1.60 and €1.80. I still find that pretty easy to budget for.
> The train experience in Germany is as bad as it is because of ...
I agree with all your points. I'm just totally disappointed that we as a society can't manage to make public long-distance transport appealing. I would love to live in a world where I would feel like a complete idiot if I drove from Leipzig to Stuttgart and back instead of just taking the train.
Delays are to be expected, trains cancelled without reasoning, train stations skipped in similar ways as described on the article, and if using connections, better plan for at least 30m interval, while taking into account a plan B for every connection that might be missed.
Living in the Netherlands (not native Dutch) I will now rather fly than take a train if it means that I can avoid using DB.
For contrast, tomorrow morning I am heading from the Netherlands to Paris with a train (non DB), and don't really expect anything but a pleasant and smooth journey.
Oh boy. There's something deeply human about the frustrations of state institutions and bureaucracy.
From the linked article:
> How are train cancellations and delays compensated when traveling with the Deutschland-Ticket?
> In the event of a delay of at least 60 minutes at the destination station due to a delay or train cancellation in local transport, you will receive €1.50 compensation per case.
> Amounts under €4 will not be paid out due to a legal de minimis threshold. However, you can accumulate multiple late payment claims.
https://www.bahn.de/faq/deutschlandticket-verspaetung-erstat...
E.g. on December 20 a WizzAir flight 4768 was diverted to Thessaloniki (Greece) instead of its destination Skopje (North Macedonia): https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/WZZ4768/history/2025... . Those with Schengen visas (or appropriate passports) got a bus to Skopje. The rest allegedly waited for three hours and then got returned to Cyprus (EU, but not Schengen), but to a different airport (Paphos instead of Larnaca). So if someone had a car left on Larnaca's parking, too bad.
But when a train had to divert and delays someone by an hour or two it’s somehow kidnapping.
If you bought a regular route ticket you get 25% and more than an hour delay, and 50% at more than two hours. Not sure how it is with other multi-use tickets.
This, combined with the certain delays CAN make traveling by train quite affordable… /s
https://www.bahn.de/service/informationen-buchung/fahrgastre...
Events like this seem to only be explained by accountability sink[0]. Naming it gives me some brief sense of sanity.
I appreciate that there is a safety concern; where's the humanity in large systems, especially as we trend towards more automation?
[0] https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/accountability-sinks
Russian trains only get delayed if there's something seriously wrong. Like an accident or an act of sabotage because of the war. A month or so ago, a Sapsan train from St Petersburg to Moscow broke down en route. People had to wait for hours to get out. It made big news. As far as I can tell, this is a weekly occurrence in Germany.
If you don't buy a seat, you don't get a seat. I was taking the 4am train 8 hours from Brussels to Berlin, and I bought seats for both legs of the trip. To sleep, of course.
The first leg of the trip was delayed, so they gave me a free ticket on the next train, 40 minutes later, but with no seat.
So, exhausted as all hell and wanting nothing more than a little nap, I was forced to stand in one of the hallways between the carriages, unable to rest much even vertically because people had to push past me to get to the bathroom.
Absolutely horrid experience.
They did occasionally announce the reasons for delays. Two that I remember: "Leaves on the track" in Autumn, what a surprise. "The wrong kind of snow" um...it's Winter, it snowed, it was nothing special?
Because of the substandard, cost-cutting line-side vegetation mismanagement coupled with the NIMBYs and save-the-planet warriors getting up-in-arms. Plus high wages making proactive vegetation management not cost-effective due to the extent. Network Rail is well aware of the issue but due to budget cuts, can't do much.
Behind every excuse on the railway, if you peel back just a tiny bit of the layer, you'll see the real reasons. In the UK it's usually "we need to spend that money on the NHS and welfare" and "ROSCO profits are not put back into the railway"
On the train back, we were delayed by the train in front of us catching fire.
The operator is called National Express. Their trains look completely different than the ones of Deutsche Bahn.
It was pretty fun, I used it a lot, those beer/disco clubs on the train between Düsseldorf and Bonn and Frankfurt, whoa, just .. really used to be fun.
So its real sad to hear of, what was once a great institutions’, demise ..
The problem was a broken relay, no trains were able to run for a few hours through Bonn. The official statement said that the trains have stopped and were replaced by buses.
Is this the right connection?:
https://bahn.expert/details/NX%2028521/j/20251224-a0049123-9...
The RE5 seems to be operated by National Express, not Deutsche Bahn, right? (but DB InfraGo is most probably responsible for the routing)
It is operated by National Express, but I guess the routing comes from some other company (likely InfraGo)
And of course there is some huge fine or even potentially jail time if you moo in protest and pull that nice red lever to avoid the Christmas present of this bureaucratic idiocy (after all, you have legs that are capable of crossing train tracks and eyes to do that safely)?
But back to my country (Poland), it's better here - some had problems with physically getting out on the right station, and when the conductor saw it she even encouraged us to pull this lever in those cases so we don't have to get out at the wrong station.
We had a trip planned in which we needed a specific train. The website said “there has been an incident on the tracks. There will be a delay of 20-50 minutes waiting for a platform. Not all connections will be made,” and that is exactly what happened. This worked for our time window so we took the train. But there were a lot of confused and upset passengers who had absolutely no idea what was going on.
I’m sure DB has many problems, but one of them appears to be communication that surely isn’t too difficult to fix.
I changed my ticket to get a French train as soon as possible.
Other survival story: I lived in Northern Germany in the late 2000s as a young exchange student. Almost all the DB lines in the region would go through a particular railway node where, almost every Friday, someone (probably an evil reincarnator) would commit suicide, blocking the whole region.
My reflex: so as soon as the train would stop, I'd get out, get a taxi, then convince 4 other people to go to Hamburg or even Hannover with me, sharing the cost.
Never regretted.
I've been bundled into taxis by the train operator in Norway because it was expected, but also likely cheaper for them to ensure full taxis than have people arrange it themselves and end up with everyone able to demand the maximum refund.
The costs are low enough that it's not a problem if it happens occasionally, but does create some real pressure to actually fix issues if it happens often enough.
This is the fundamental mistake underpinning their train service since the long distance trains frequently have to wait for other trains to pass, cascading delays through the system.
That and an almost criminal level of underinvestment in the past 20 years or so.
I have also been left in remote villages when the last train of the day broke for some reason at 12:30 am. All travellers and myself had to look for Ubers, which the government also tries to suppress.
I agree with some comenters that German companies seem to prefer to stuck with Bureaucracy other than finding what could be confortable or even human solutions.
No one is trying to suppress Uber. They are just obligated to adhere to the law like anyone else in this business.
In Dresden we were told that they had issues with the power lines on the Czechia side and had to leave the train. It was still an hour to the border but seemed to be the best place to dump all the people and let them go the merry way the rest of the journey. The basic service was a printed paper directly out of the connection lookup system. No info if this connection is actually the best or makes sense since other travelers will be also on route. We had to switch trains 2 more times and arrived in Prague at around Midnight. Let’s say I really don’t want to take the train anywhere at the moment. Sidestory. Check the current state of the S-Bahn Service (run by DB) in Berlin. One wonder why they bother to announce issues with the system day in and out. They could just switch over and announce when stuff is running smoothly instead.
Back in NL I used to complain about trains being late...
Boy oh boy was I not ready for Germany and Deutsche Bahn. I heard stories, but it was so absurd at times that I treated them as comical acts.
Then I traveled long distance on DB...
- trains being late by 15-40 minutes is NORMAL. It's included. At this point I feel like it's even planned. - the "thrown out in the middle of nowhere" happens! Ruthlessly. Operationally. With zero empathy or guidance. One minute you traveled inside the train approaching your destination another minute you are on a station in some village, knowing nothing about "why?" And "what is next?"
I still take trains - but I do not plan any appointments on arrival. As arrival is theoretical and not guaranteed. I just take a gamble and sink hours into the journey. Read books. Watch movies.
P.s. I am surprised that DB is not held more accountable for the absolutely shit service they provide.
It is an area where proper governance is failing. I don't know about Germany, but in The Netherlands, Dutch law requires at least 90% of the trains to be on time (less than 5 minutes delay). If national train company do not reach those numbers, they are fined and I think in an extreme case they can lose their concession.
Yes, however, any train delayed more than 30 minutes gets canceled entirely and doesn't get counted in the statistics. The train this article is talking about would not be registered late under Dutch terms (though it probably wouldn't have traveled comically far without stopping).
Not saying Dutch trains are as bad as German trains, but applying the same laws won't fix DB's problems.
NS is state-owned so all fines are just money transfer between two branches of the government. Also, they know that "the trains fail with current amount of public funding, I wonder if less funding will improve the situation" is not good logic. Therefore there won't be any actual fines.
> and I think in an extreme case they can lose their concession
And then what? Most of the country will be left without trains? The company will be dissolved and replaced by the Chinese? Not gonna happen.
I don't think it would happen all at once for the main network, but Arriva sure likes to get more and more lines.
Tell that to the current government (and most of the previous governments in recent years).
You can't put money into it! Guess NS will just have to increase ticket prices _again_.
That's the famous German efficiency, not to waste time on things that were not done or caused by being inefficient in the first place. There's no point in wasting time on improving some process, fax machines still work, don't they?
The weirdest thing in my city is that the bus driver often forgets 1 or 2 stops. There was a kid bursted into tear when she lost her direction on her way back home from school because the bus driver took a "wrong" path.
German railways could be better, but at the same time it's nowhere near the level of complaining the average person makes, as in this article. I think it says more about the author than the company. "It's twenty minutes late, I consider this early". Despite the problems that exist, I wouldn't say I ever had the feeling of being relieved the train is only 20 minutes late. Especially not with local trains.
I wonder sometimes how these things develop because if you're objectively pissed off that your train was delayed, I cannot imagine enjoying taking the plane, or even worse a car. Like I haven't had a plane take off on time in my life. I took only a few business trips with the car and was stuck in traffic every single time. So objectively despite experiencing issues with DB myself, it's a lot better than my experience with alternatives. Stuttgart - Leipzig has a direct connection, and in my experience the biggest reason for a delay is when you miss a connecting train. E.g. your train is 15 minutes late but you had only 10 minutes to change trains. So other than the train going out of service I honestly can't imagine what the issue would be. You sit for 4h, can work comfortably, it's quieter than anything else, you can have a coffee or a beer, a meal etc. etc. And then maybe you'll have a half hour delay, but you can get that with anything else also.
It's not "your train connection didn't work out", it's "you were planning to go somewhere, and the train took you somewhere else entirely, much farther away than when you started, and gave you no way out of this, and not even an apology or explanation". This is absolutely comparable to a form of kidnapping.
Sorry, but no.
* It has tracks so it cannot go anywhere it wants to go
* It can only let passengers go at certain places, these are called stations
So no, I would not compare it to a random Uber driver that takes me somewhere random on a whim. I wouldn't call the police if an Uber took me on a different road if the original road was closed. Etc.
Please start making sense, thank you. I'm done.
The manned DB Travelcenter was still open so I walked in and asked for an international ticket to Warsaw. The gentleman (who spoke fluent English) typed a bit on the computer and told me he cannot sell a ticket for the Berlin-Warsaw leg of the journey due to a "system error on the Polish side". I knew that probably meant the Berlin-Warsaw-Express is at full capacity again and they don't sell tickets with no seat indicated for that route. I asked for a ticket to Berlin instead (€207, 2nd class) and went for a hamburger - still had about an hour until the train.
The train was initially supposed to arrive delayed 5 minutes but that was soon to change. The delay kept ticking up to 20 minutes, 45 minutes, 1 hour (around this time the DB travelcenter closed for the night) then two hours then cancelled altogether. I wasn't sure if my ticket is valid for the next train (the DB website was a bit vague about that) so I called my friend in Hamburg who confirmed I was good to jump onto the next train which would arrive on schedule in another three hours. I tried getting a Capri-Sun from a vending machine but it got stuck and wouldn't fall out. So I sat at the empty station with noting but rats as company until 3AM when the next Berlin-bound train arrived on time. In Berlin I got out at Sudkreutz and jumped onto a FlixBus to Poznań (€22) and stayed the night over at my friend's place (I badly needed a shower at that point) before taking a train to Warsaw the next day (€16, 2nd class).
Now, I technically did eventually use my Frankfurt-Berlin ticket but I was quite annoyed at DB so I applied for a reimbursement due to a cancelled train, which was granted in full. I also applied for reimbursement of the plane ticket from Lufthansa which was also granted. With the additional €250 compensation for denied boarding I actually made money on that little adventure but I probably wouldn't do that again. Gotta check in earlier from now on.
Italy is pretty similar, and I would say even worse, but after reading / hearing more about DB I think they're just competing for being the worst train company ever
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtbahnwagen_B#/media/File:K... / https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rheinuferbahn / https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtbahnstrecke_Bonn%E2%80%93... )
Once I was travelling back to home from Munich and the train stopped somewhere in Frankfurt in the middle of nowhere. Literally stopped on the tracks and it was completely dark outside except some far away lights from the houses around.
We waited for 3 hours, with 2-3 explanations which did not make any sense. After 3 hours the train started riding again and I arrived in Cologne, which is ~1h away from home still, and they said this is the last station. I needed to spend the night in Cologne in a hotel, because it was 3 o'clock in the morning and there was no other train to my hometown.
Fortunately I was able to get a refund plus the hotel cost for that night back.
The Swiss railways are excellent and friendly. In Milan, I was unable to catch the reserved train to Zurich, but the conductors on the Swiss train that was just departing even accepted my ticket for the Italian railway.
It’s much worse than that – FedEx would never treat cargo like that. If they took cargo further away from its destination than it started and then left it there for the customer to sort out, that would break so many SLAs …
But at this point, I'm convinced you should avoid any train in and around Germany. This includes Denmark as well. Just take a plane, but don't have a layover in Germany. The same could probably be said about France. My first train from Paris to Nancy stopped for about 2hrs in the middle of nowhere. As the machinist said: "The train is tired."
Other countries like Italy or Spain seem to actually have well-functioning rail though.
I regularly travel on DSB (2.5hr journeys, 4 times a month minimum), and only very rarely encounter issues. Staff have always been easy to deal with and on the rare occasion I've had to be refunded (the carriage with my reserved seat didn't show up) I've received it within days.
Avoid trains run by GoCollective though.
I do support having basic public transport and solid bike infrastructure for young people, but once you’re 25 or older, there’s little justification for relying on such low-quality public transport.
I’ll be going to Prague next year, and I’m fully willing to drive for hours rather than sit on a train that keeps getting delayed, is unpleasant to be on, and costs far too much.
The UK government hates how expensive it is to operate, so they are reducing subsidies and massively prioritising the most profitable routes and raising prices.
Staff got nice condition/pay bumps during COVID and all have the attitude that they are doing us a favour. I don't mean that lightly or that I've had one bad experience with a member of staff on a bad day. They are work-shy, offensive, rude, lacking training and plain bad tempered.
I'm very pro car now these days, which is exactly what the Government wants.
I consistently find railway workers to be some of the most helpful and approachable people I have to interact with, which is remarkable given the sort of people they have to put up with. I think the sort of person you'll be speaking to certainly depends on the part of the country you're in though - in Scotland and Wales, I've seen people who've been let off for having a ticket that expired several days prior, and staff are happy to have a friendly chat if the train isn't too busy.
What's your experience?
And it's taken a massive turn for the worse since 2020
England is definitely worse than Scotland and Wales I grant you that. And fwiw, in Scotland, they have far less powers to prosecute compared to England, which is why they seem like they are more lenient
As I responded in another thread, not all operators are 15 minutes. Not that 25/50% often isn't really that much compensation...
And that taxi is far from gaurenteed.
I get the sense you had one or two good experiences and extrapolated?
But ooof, the few times I had to cross the border to Germany by train were hell.
I appreciated the NS from that moment on more...
We had a lot of issues in the past with the first leaves falling on the track or a bit of snow. And they ordered trains without toilets. So also cattle trucks.
And have I mentioned that you pay a lot for this "service"? second class, normal costs: €18,80 to get from Utrecht to Amsterdam and back, 50 kilometers.
The opening paragraph contains some factual errors (you can only get kicked off a train when you do something illegal) and the whole story lives by exaggeration and missing facts.
It is as moronic as saying people were kidnapped when a plane had to divert because of the weather. Also he would have been entitled to get a paid cab ride to his destination when that happens. But that is just one of the facts he did not mention.
This story should be ignored and tossed into the local legends garbage.
People do get kicked off trains, usually it’s the entire train that is being emptied. Happened to me in NRW. Happened to me in Brandenburg. When there’s a problem with the train, then sometimes it has to be evacuated.
He would have not been entitled to a cab ride by the way, he was travelling with Deutschlandticket. Your entire comment is not only pedantic, it’s also completely wrong lol.
What facts are missing in your opinion?
He could try to do it on his own accord - they have leverage to decline and he'd have to take it through several other over burdened agencies.
He could also try getting into contact with DB, and good luck with that.
My own DB story was from Hamburg hbf where 3 huge DB employers was standing guard in front of reisenzentrum (the customer service counter) and yelling at every own being incredibly rude.
DB is a joke, and it is imploding on itself. Staff seems so stressed and embarrassed by being a part of it.
Of course the train could not stop. It was not registered!
A bit like "no frills" airlines in the west.
I've been trapped inside my landlord's house and my employer's office and they keep trafficking me between each other using a train.
They take turns raping me mentally and financially. S.O.S. Help!
Many are cancelled without a decent reason being given. I rarely take British trains now they are so expensive and unreliable. Only long distance maybe because buses are unpleasant.
> It is twenty minutes late. I consider this early.
The one good thing about frequent long-distance delays is that you might be lucky and catch an earlier delayed train and actually arrive a bit earlier than planned ;)
(also JFC, does the author like to whine about nothing - I'm travelling frequently with DB for about 25 years now, and while shit happens from time time, most of it is merely a slight inconvenience).
I travel from Basel to Hannover and back every two weeks on DB. Trains south are almost always late, trains north usually late. Frequently the train is already late in Hannover having come from Hamburg. The worst was when I was kicked out in Frankfurt and had to stay in a hotel. The delays were so bad there were no more trains left that could connect me to the last train out of Basel.
Things have been getting better for the past couple of months I think though.
My biggest gripe with DB is not that it's late, but that it quite often cancels the trains. If you decided to go by regional trains with 1-2 hops instead of direct (bc you can go much cheaper with Deutschlandticket), there's a high chance that at least one of your trains get cancelled and things will not go according the plan.
Recently while driving an hour journey turned into a three hour journey, and not because my car broke down. I've never experienced any delay anywhere near that significant on British trains.
I'm french, my first trip in this country was epic. First time going to Köln ( Cologne ), the train back to the airport never arrived, with no explanation. I was literally stranded in another country without money.
it should be 100%. A delay of 1h is extremely inadmissible. Try doing this in Japan
What should be the sweet spot?
I'd rather go through dante's inferno than live in Germany. What a bleak existence.
German bureaucracy. They should just learn from the Swiss. Because the Swiss actually understand how to be effective in bureaucracy.
Is it possible that running a railway at a national scale is harder than people who merely travel on it reckon?
They have some policy that they need to give you a reason for a delay and they'd happily announce something like "we're late because of another train in front of us" and the irony is, of course, the train in front of us is probably late, too, and you never get to know the real reason. No, strike that. The real reason is because the entire system is completely messed up. Train time tables are fantasy by now.
> In DB’s official statistics, a train counts as “on time” if it’s less than six minutes late.1 Cancelled trains are not counted at all.2 If a train doesn’t exist, it cannot be late.
This is true and it is ridiculous.
So as a fanboy, I am saddened by how bad DB has become. Once you’re on the train, and it actually goes, and it goes all the way to the destination, it’s still fantastic. All of the above generally still holds. But the many hours I’ve spent in the dark in cold windy places like Duisburg Hbf gleis fünf are uncountable, and it really does discount from the experience. I don’t remember the German trains being this late, this often, a ~decade ago. I really hope DB will get its shit together because there’s a lot worth saving.
Except: they were - over 20 years ago, I did my „Grundwehrdienst“ in the German army, travel with DB from Nuremberg to Munich and back every weekend for 8 months.
The number of times the ICE was on time I can count on one hand. 15 minutes delayed regularly, sometimes more.
After a while we planned to use the last train to arrive in Munich, and having to go a bit further with S-Bahn, we most of the time missed the last one (on purpose).
We then went to the DB counter and got free coupons to head our final destination by Taxi.
Also already happening back then: broken aircon, often in comical ways - I.e. totally non working in one wagon, with everyone sweating at some 45 degrees Celsius or more, next wagon: freezing at 16 degrees…
Well, I'm all pro public transport, but please make it work first.
As you can probably guess, this is not at all what happened. Shit started to disintegrate around Viersen, we did some shuffling and waiting for later trains, and wound up in Aachen around midnight. The hotel across from the train station was closed for the night, we weren't going to stay in the nearby hostel after seeing one too many horror movies, and so we walked over a mile to a nearby hotel. Staff was lovely. We got in to a room by 01:00, showered, plugged in all our devices, and passed out around 02:00. Up at 05:00 and back to the train station to catch a ride to Rotterdam (very full train), and then on to Amsterdam. We hit our hotel about 12 hours behind schedule, changed clothes and got on with it.
Germany and France had the worst trains. Italy was insanely efficient/on-time.
While there's valid issues to complain about, this blogpost is really hyperbole. And frankly, to someone who has lived in the area, it reads purposefully disingenuous.
Just enter the places he mentions on Google Maps. Everything in NRW is so close together that to travel between cities you can often choose between international trains, regional trains or even just public transport.
The connection he needed, is serviced several times per hour by several different train lines.
Why did he stay on that specific train when he heard his stop would be skipped? The only reason I can think of is to write this blogpost. Since he's local to the area he should have known better.
Also it's worth noting that driving that same route by car, at that time, just a couple of hours before everyone starts their Christmas dinner, might've taken even longer.
I'm not trying to deny common issues with the DB but the author tried to travel through the densest urban area in the whole of Europe during the busiest 2-hour window of the whole year. AND he made a bad judgement call. To leave the transportation hub, staying on a long distance train which was already being re-routed.
Funnily enough, the fact that every "Kuhdorf" needs to be connected by train is one of the difficulties the DB faces for which there is no easy solution. And if a long-distance train needs to decide between dropping some stops which can also be reached by short-distance trains or delaying the whole train, I think that dropping those short-distance stops is absolutely the correct choice.
Because the train didn't stop?
I visited the Dachau concentration camp several years ago on one of the hottest days of the year. Me and my GF packed water, but on that day is just wasn't enough and we ran out towards the end of the day.
We got around the camp and just before leaving we went into the cafe and asked for a drink, but they said sorry the cafe was closed.
Okay, fair enough. In that case we'll just fill our bottles with some tap water then.
"No, you can't do that".
Huh? We really need a drink... We've been on coaches and walking around all day and we've ran out of water.
"Sorry, I can't help".
We have our empty bottles here, could you please just pour us some water?
"No, sorry I can't".
I get she probably wasn't suppose to serve customers after close, but we just wanted her to fill our water bottles with tap water. I may be misremembering now but I'm like 80% sure I asked if I could fill the bottle in the toilet, but she also refused to open to toilets because they were closed.
This whole situation would have been absolutely absurd in the UK.
Germans really seem to like doing everything as per the rules regardless of how inconvenient and ridiculous it is. Even things like crossing roads where generally most Brits will wait for a green light, but if in a hurry many will look for a gap in traffic and just cross. Germans seem to rarely ever do this and you get the sense you are being judged if you do it.
I had lots of weird little experiences like this in Germany but almost passing out from dehydration at a German concentration camp had a certain level of irony to it.
Right out the gate 1st class tickets being half the price of standard tickets on same train does not fill me with confidence that this is organized in coherent fashion
I've only encountered flexibility and slight discomfort in a few cases where something has happened. I'm not entirely sure what Germans expect DB to do. A car had an interconnecting door problem and had to remove that car from the train. Everyone had to filter in to other cars to compensate for the lack of seating. Should they instead cancel those tickets? Or make them stand? It was a full train, and no answer is the correct one for everyone involved. I ended up giving my seat to an elderly gentleman and sat between cars on the ground. Mild discomfort but literally nobody was to blame for this. I suppose I could have gotten the next train but I didn't want to wait - that's also not DB's problem to fix.
Another time, my train was delayed for several hours. Of course I was quite annoyed but found out the reason was that someone had offed themselves in front of one of the trains before it, bringing the line to a standstill while it was dealt with.
Most of the whining I've heard about DB boils down to inconvenience in situations nobody could have predicted nor helped, and this almost insatiable attitude by some Germans that any inconvenience is an offense to Germany seems always to be directed at an otherwise highly reliable and robust trnasporation system whilst having zero other frame of reference. Seriously, come to the US or, from what I've heard, the UK. Then tell me Germany's is awful with a straight face.
This article reads exactly like that. You weren't kidnapped. You were rerouted. Don't dilute words like that, it just undermines your point.
Somehow doesn't happen in most other countries I lived. These things are easy to deal with with a bit of redundancy, which as I've heard is lacking in Germany these days.
I've had much better experience with trains in Russia despite much harsher weather conditions, much larger distances and much older cars. This problem is absolutely fixable, just let the trains go around problematic sections with redundant routes.
> "Apparently we were not registered at Troisdorf station, so we are on the wrong tracks"
If the train was on the middle track, stopping would introduce risk and disruption by slowing/stopping the other trains travelling on the high-speed non-stopping line, and also endanger passengers who would have to dismount at height from the train onto an active track, cross the active track, and climb up to the platform.
Once the train was routed onto the incorrect track, correcting it was likely to be impractical (infrequent track transfer points) and stopping on the high-speed track would would be excessively disruptive and dangerous.
They simply told me: this behavior ought to be punished. Which is a euphemism for but I'm not going to do it. They didn't want the hassle of potentially dealing with one out of many students filing a complaint or worst-case go to Karlsruhe (Germans know what that means). Which is exemplary of German bureaucracy, nobody wants to make decisions and carry responsibility.
I love Germany, but this is really something they need to fix going forward, because it stifles society and the economy in many ways.
Obviously. There's a joking undertone in those words. If they were serious, they would've called the police.
DB has gained its reputation for good reason. In this case, taking someone away into another federal state without giving them the option to get out of the train to find alternative transport. Their reasoning for not stopping seems to be purely bureaucratic.
Maybe the UK is worse; the UK is famous for its extremely high prices. The US probably is worse with the way their trains are operated. That still doesn't excuse the absolutely awful service DB provides in a country as wealthy and developed as Germany.
The worst part is that DB wasn't always this terrible. It's now playing catch-up with itself, taking care of overdue maintainance causing seruous disruptions that should've been minor annoyances years ago.
I have been advised by rail enthusiasts to make sure my train is scheduled to arrive two to three hours before my transfer, because DB will be late. A foolish friend once tried to make their transfer with only an hour and a half of scheduled margin; they missed their connection and lost their (paid-for) seat reservations.
Then there's the government side of things: we, the Dutch, want to run more and better train connections to the rest of Europe. Germany just doesn't want it to happen, though. Even when the Dutch offered to pay to have a broken bridge upgraded, the Germans turned down the offer, leaving plans for their old, outdated single track bridge in place.
DB probably works fine a lot of the time, but you shouldn't accept DB's incompetence as normal. You deserve better.
Or how a bridge Friesenbrücke was hit by a ship in 2015 and the replacement is still under construction (supposed to be finished in 2026 now). As a result no train could drive between Groningen and Leer.
To make the whole thing more sad, the replacement bridge has to be open 40 minutes every hour because a shipbuilder has convinced the Wasserstraßen- und Schifffahrtsamt to do so, severely constraining train traffic. No one on the other side of the border understands why they haven't built a bridge that would allow ships to pass through without opening the bridge.
This kind of nonsense is very typical of German bureaucracy (I have lived there). Nobody has ambitions and nobody wants to stick their neck out.
I might have missed a comma.
I agree with you that there’s a lot of complaining and it does get tiresome. The German train system is one of the most complex in the world and works closer to an interconnected spider web than the typical straight line systems in other countries.
However much of this has been predicted in the past. I think that’s why a lot of people are annoyed. Here are some sources if you’re interested to read more:
(2006) Audit critique regarding the bad state of DB funding after privatization: https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/16/008/1600840.pdf
(2011) DB is not spending enough on the track network: https://taz.de/Investitionen-in-das-Schienennetz/%215117195/
(2014) State of German train bridges: https://www.zeit.de/mobilitaet/2014-09/deutsche-bahn-bruecke...
I know you bought a ticket for a train from the main station in ljubljana, and when you come there (and only then and there, not before, not online), you'll be notified that your train is leaving from a track a 10 minute walk away, because the station is being renovated.
And sure, you were a responsible traveller, came early, so a 10 minute walk is no problem... there are supposedly dots on the asphalt showing where to go, but they're already wiped off, so some granny or a college student will probably point you in the right direction.
So after you walk all that way to the right train tracks, and the train should already be there, you'll be notified that there is no train. Why? Someone jumped infront of the train somewhere. When? A few hours ago. But hey... there's a bus that will take you with your train ticket.
Where is the bus? Back at the main station, 10 minutes away. Surely you were very responsible and came not just 10 minutes early but 20 minutes early, because the bus leaves at the same time the train should leave.
The only thing worse were the international trains in the early 2000s through the balkans... you'd be in Zagreb, croatia, waiting for a nighttime international train towards ljubljana, slovenia, 5 minutes to departure, and dingdong, announcement, it says it'll be 10 minutes late. Wait 10 minutes, so 5 minutes until the delayed departure... dingdong, 20 minutes late. Ok.. 10 more minutes... the display shows 30 minutes. I mean... you could risk it and go for a coffee or something, but it's not worth walking all the way to a nicer bar and back if you only have 10 minutes until the train.
...and then, when the delay says 50 minutes, you get a phonecall from a friend, who's on that same train (travelling from thessaloniki), and she tells you that the train is ~6 hours late and that they just crossed the serbian->croatian border (5-6 hours away from zagreb).
Just after Hannover but before Dusseldorf and such the train stopped: fire next to the tracks. Honestly, not DB fault this time.
Luckily DB trains have a restaurant/cafe in them. I went to get some food but the man behind the counter told me it was closed.
I asked him how since he was the seller, he stood there, there was power and internet. What's the problem?
Well, he said. And I shit you not: my shift is up. I have worked 8 hours. I am done.
And he was serious. Never mind that he was stuck on the train, just like us. Never mind that the replacement obviously wasn't there yet since they were stuck waiting on the next platform.
Nope. He works 8 hours. 8 hours done. He done. A thousand thirsty and hungry (and annoyed) on his train. He has food, drinks and time. But he just didn't give a shit.
He just stood there, for 2 hours, waiting to get off.
To Dutch people German civil servants are like NPCs following a very narrow script. It's baffling.
This is an effect of privatization gone wrong, with the national service, the infrastructure, the regional services (each), the network (not in infra), cargo and then some (sub)companies split for privatisation and an IPO that never happened. The highly segmented network is not digitalized in to any standard, so regional trains have to operate in policy frameworks and network cells that favor long distance trains. Its utter chaos on a daily basis.
You have to understand that Germany is currently led by a mix of trauma and economy as religion rather than reason to get a sense of what is happening.
To simplify, Germany is somehow convinced that any inflation and rules deviation is an unstoppable slippery slope towards a return to the 20s and paving the way to some kind of nazi apocalypse. They therefore follow a rigid economic system, ordoliberalism, which to put it nicely, doesn't have a strong academic following.
As a result, they have implemented a mercantilist economy using internal devaluation while shielded by the euro and stubbornly refuse to recycle their surplus in the union or even in the country. You get this absurd situation where they have enshrined a balanced budget in their constitution while their median household wealth is bellow Italy, their infrastructures is crumbling, a significant portion of their savings finance foreign debts - especially bad foreign debts judging by what they lost with the Lehman bankruptcy - their industry fails to invest and the country is basically non ironically saving itself to irrelevance.
Honestly, if it wasn't for the beggar thy neighbors policies and them mostly refusing transfers despite benefiting hugely from the currency at the expense of the poorer members, it would be amongst the funniest quirk of history.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2023/oct/08/...
They stopped caring about their main customers and tried to compete with planes.
On top of that everything traffic related seems to be reserved for the least competent politicians.
> Only then I notice: the driver has been speaking German only.
Oh wow a German conductor in a German train speaking German oh how awkward...
No you were not "kidnapped" your train just stopped at a different station.
> “That’s a different federal state.”
Yes and if you go to many cities in Europe and the US you can walk from one country to another. Oh wow shocking I know /s
Of course this is Deutsche Bahn at its best (in getting hand and feet mixed up) and that compensation is ridiculous. It should at least get your ticket back to the place you intended to go.
Neuwied to Troisdorf is 1h by car or train (in a good day of course)
Gotta love the "free" market and "democracy".
My anecdotal evidence is that these public entities usually suffer from lack of funding or incompetence fueled by corruption, that usually takes a few forms: - the contracting of work to a third party with kickback (incentives to continously do sloppy work) - inaction due to lack of corrupting opportunities (leaders try but cant set up a good fraud scheme) - nepotism that leads to incompetence
And lack of funding can and has been weaponized to cause a shitty service to then set the pretext for privatization. Usually there are private interests behind this public policy decision.
The more menial reason for lack of funding is sometimes massive spending or subsidies for capitalists elsewhere which skews the budget.
And of course also the intense bureacracy needed due to lack of democratic control. Yes, im saying people dont actually have a say and they could have a say. IE delegate democracy.
These are just universal problems of modern capitalist economies and their bourgeois politics.
Quite possibly DB suffers from these more intensely than others.
Your country would have to be laughably corrupt if it couldn't build out a public transit system that beats DB.
What did you mean by failed state?
One attribute of a failed state is that it can no longer provide public services. German bridges are in dire need of repair, some just crumbled last year. Trains aren't on time if they ride at all. Bordering countries already complain about this affecting their schedules as well.
Another attribute is crime. We've seen a rise in knife attacks over the last few years. German cities try to curb this via weapon-free zones with no effect because making something illegal doesn't fix the root cause. Then there's this intellectually offensive and unnecessarily expensive security theatre at local christmas markets.
Next is state legitimacy. After last year's elections which followed a government collapse, the old (collapsed!) cabinet was brought back in to support a debt-driven military budget that the new cabinet wouldn't have approved. The Election Scrutiny Committee decided against a recount of the votes for a specific party that didn't make it into the Bundestag because of a missing votes to reach a requirement while there were many reports of votes having been mishandled - even in many previous elections. Not to forget the complete lack of interest in investigating critical infrastructure being destroyed that now affects the entire industrial core of the country.
Then there's corruption: Mask deals, Cum ex, Azerbaijan as just rather recent examples involving national and international scandals.
Economy: Barely any growth, inflation beyond the official numbers, rising energy prices (spot prices partially tripled in the ~5 years).
I could go on. I know it's a far cry from "gangs rule the streets" levels of "failed state" but compared to some slightly saner Western governments and compared to pre-2020 Germany, it's quite the failure with no signs for improvements.
For example in country 400k€ was spend on executives (200 hundred people) Christmas dinner for publicly owned company.
While the scheduling and company management is similar issues as DB. I think we ned a new word for this kind of clusterfuck!! They are "rulesfull", rules that hinder the system and make the user scream in pain and agony.
You may find the train has now "registered" itself at the next station.
It will reveal driver to be using intentionally tricky language. "Cannot stop"
It's not that the train can't stop, trains can obviously stop wherever and whenever they want. It's not that the doors cannot open - train doors can be opened by the driver or by passengers, trains have emergency egress requirements.
The problem is that nobody actually wanted to get off that train. They wanted to complain about it. Comparing it to a kidnapping is offensive and absurd. That's now how people act when kidnapped.
> "If you find yourself in a similar situation and want out - call emergency services, say chest pain, out of breath"
> "The problem is that nobody actually wanted to get off that train."
> "Comparing it to a kidnapping is offensive and absurd."
It is if you instruct people how to best lie to emergency services because your train was delayed.
- the emergency services will wait at the station the train is going to anyway
- your health insurance realizes what you've done and make you pay the bills.
Morally DB (through the driver) is the one lying and saying things like "cannot stop". They don't want to stop - that's different. They've already broken the social contract, I'm free to do the same.
I’m sure you’re going to pose a hypothetical that you would be in the way to save someone’s life, but we both know that’s not true and even in that situation, you could raise that with the train company rather than faking a new, different medical emergency
It's true an EMS call might reduce QALY (quality adjusted life years). It's also true that taking a train full of passengers somewhere they don't want to go also reduces QALY.
Iterate this enough and DB changes their policy. Now we have a new equilibrium. The full game theory of this isn't as simple as wasted doctor time = bad.
However I second your idea that "if the train doesn't stop it's because they decided they didn't want it to stop"- and therefore they should be considered responsible for kidnapping their customers unless it can be proven that it was absolutely impossible to stop the train without catastrophic consequences.
In that situation - you do what is necessary to stop the train, because nobody else will, which might involve killing the driver.
The reason you don't jump straight to shooting the driver is that doesn't achieve your goals. There is a long list of things to do before needing to kill anyone, so do those first.
One simple rule for everybody is: Never ever waste the time of EMS.
What about 100? If you bring an absolute like that to a philosophical argument you're backing yourself into a corner.
How about that? The driver asks for you to sacrifice your life then he will stop the train an let 100 people off the train. According to your logic a good choice.
There is a huge difference between wasted time and being dead escpecially for the relarives of the dead. Maybe you should tell your logic to someone who last someone because EMS was late.
In my case because I do have not mild but moderate autism and panic disorder, it would genuinely feel like a heart attack if that happened to me. I wouldn't be lying about my symptoms.
The problem with that is - why do I get access to this "out" by being able to call EMS to get off the train? (Provided you agree with me that I would be a valid call). Why does everyone else have to suffer?
My worldview is they don't. DB wants to take you past 15 stations? Here's a mechanism to stop them.
I'm agreeing it's an abuse of the system, but it's valid because it scales. If there was a flood of EMS calls every time DB skipped 15 stations - DB blinks first.
Maybe a better example from me would have been an emergency stop button?
The premise here is kidnapping - I don't think using emergency services in a kidnapping is out of the question.
It shows a concerning lack of agency and a concerning amount of conformity.
In Germany in particular, you could be charged for all the expenses. A friend of mine did not fake, was in real panic, but still was at the end of the ”nothing” and had to paid the ambulance costs. Not cheap!
If you think you are being kidnapped or whatever, instead of lying and abusing EMS, you can call the police, and explain clearly what’s going on with the truth. If serious enough they will be able to act better in that case.
They get stopped for speeding near their home in Florida, the police arrest them, take them to the county jail where they are stuck without bond waiting for extradition to the county where the warrant was issued. You might wait a few weeks in a cell, then you can spend another five weeks stuck in the back of a van, pissing into a cup while they drive you 3000 miles to Seattle, stopping at 25 other jails on the way. Only for Seattle to give you a court date and kick you out of the door with nothing except the clothes on your back. Except it's 40°F and you were arrested in a t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops. The cops in Florida have your phone and wallet. You have no phone numbers. You have no money. You're 3000 miles from home. Good luck, champ!
(this is a real thing that happens regularly in the USA)
The constant comparison to cows, for example, suggesting it’s ok and normal to mistreat non humans, instead of making the far more obvious connection that if a human who is understanding exactly what is happening goes through so much suffering with a slight change of schedule, the fear and suffering cows and other animals who are constantly being transported in far worse conditions with no idea what is happening may be going through.
The comparison to kidnapping is also really bad. I’ve taken a plane that had been diverted to the wrong, unfriendly, country and then been unable to leave a tiny terminal, with no to limited access to food, water and restroom facilities for hours, and the idea that we were being kidnapped never crossed my mind, although actual kidnapping by the state we were in was a remote but real possibility.