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Comment by huhkerrf | Hacker News Reader

DB is continually the worst train experience I have in Europe. I have never been on a train in Germany that's on time or that stops at the right station. Several times I've had to find someone young (and who speaks English) and say, "I'm just going to follow you to the next train."

I've been told that the UK is worse, but I don't have much experience with it outside of Eurostar.

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Passenger rights are very good in the UK. It's easy to claim Delay Repay, where you get 25% refund after a 15 minute delay, 50% refund after 30 mins and 100% refund after 60 mins. Other train operators are obliged to help you get where you need to go if the company you intended to travel with has cancelled your trains, or you've missed a connection due to a previous train you were on being delayed.

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)

Yes, you'll get a refund. But that isn't much use to you if you need to be in a certain place at a certain time.

Some operators begin at 30 minutes

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

UK has airline-style pricing that goes up extortionately as seats run out, making it prohibitively expensive to use. It's also frequently late and/or trains randomly cancelled, although you can plan around it, you end up 1hr+ late on most long journeys.

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!

My experience of the trains themselves has been fine in the UK.

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.

Deutsche Bahn is completely state owned, UK rail is privatized. They're both pretty bad. China's new high speed rail is state owned, while the Japanese network is largely private. They're both far better than UK and Germany. I wonder what are the main determinants of the quality of large infra networks? State ownership only seems to have a very loose correlation, where even the sign of the relationship is unclear.

You're actually misrepresenting it with that imo.

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.

When the owner of DB is owned by the German federal government, they all rule the whole company, who gets the profit? The German federal government? (It's a sign of stupidity to claim DB is privat. It is not. It is not.)

That's why I said it's incredibly corrupt. It's an Aktiengesellschaft which is fully owned by the state, so profits would remain in the ownership of the company and their leadership to do with as they please, e.g. pay themselves whatever bonuses they want . (Or pay out to their shareholders? Lol, nope).

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..

" It's an Aktiengesellschaft which is fully owned by the state, so profits would remain in the ownership of the company and their leadership to do with as they please, e.g. pay themselves whatever bonuses they want . " That's plain wrong. The owner decides which happens to the profits and how much the leadership got paied. Besides that, it is just rambling. Again calling the DB privatised is a sign of stupidity.

I guess you slept through the last 10 years if you think that. It literally happened, multiple times.

I guess that makes you the person that's...?

DB‘s quality decline started when this move to privatization happened. They didn’t put money into maintenance, closed lot of tracks and ignored all warnings by experts who predicted this exact scenario more than a decade ago. Most of the time now DB issues seem to be connected to a lack of available tracks. A super fast ICE has to wait for some slow train to clear the path. There’s an issue on one track and thus the entire traffic is backed up till that’s resolved.

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?

Welcome to public-private "partnerships", featuring socialism for corporations with extractive profiteering of users.

Not completely. Transport for Wales is state owned, or at least Welsh government, and control most of the local trains in Wales and out to some bits of England. Some of the UK infrastructure is state owned or funded. The state provides the licences as well, so they are not off the hook in that sense.

> UK rail is privatized

50% of operators are now state owned

Not that it's a guarantee for things to get better...

The determinant is the amount of money invested in infrastructure.

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.

I think it depends on where you are going. My local commuter link into London is OK and reliable, if expensive.

Long range trains from, say, London to Manchester are often overcrowded and ridiculously priced.

I take those long distance trains and it amazes me the choice and how low the cost is. You can choose an empty high speed service in peak time with a 20 minute frequency for a high cost (comparable to flying), you can book ahead for a lower price - especially in non peak services, or you can choose a flexible lower speed (comparable with service in the BR days, 3.5 hours) for far cheaper than it ever was.

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!”

> Season ticket prices are under 20p/mile into London

False, as per my other comment

I agree with your other points though

People who claim the U.K. is worse have no idea what DB is like and just think that “nationalisation” makes trains half the price and twice as reliable.

I've used trains in the UK and Germany. The German trains are cleaner and more spacious (two floors in some cases).

When comparing to the UK you have to also factor in how absurdly expensive it is. Eg a monthly ticket to the nearest city ~25km away is 292 EUR (nowhere near London. A city with not very high wages either). And the train is just 2.5 carriages and full every day.

A typical season ticket into London is under 20p a mile. Outside of London it’s far more expensive (35p a mile is common), because the railway has not had the investment London has over decades. Platform lengthening (of possible) is not cheap, requires buying new land in crowded towns and cities. Modern train stock isn’t cheap either

25km each way is 680 miles a month.

Most people will commute ~19 days a month, given vacations and sickness.

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 )

Most people do 5 days a week, 46 weeks a year - with 6 weeks holidays.

Alton to Waterloo is £5520 a year, 50 miles each way or 23,000 miles a year, 24p per mile.

Cool so one single example that doesn't support your claim and zero interest in discussing it on a wider basis.

Southampton 20p/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

Brighton is £559/mo for the Thameslink only ticket (the cheaper one) and 50.5 miles to London Bridge. Even being generous saying 22 days a month, that's 25p/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.

Annual tickets are 40 weeks meaning 5.75 trips per weekly ticket (230 a year). Newbury works out 21p a mile, Ipswich 23p a mile, Cambridge 22p/mile, so yes prices have crept up just above 20p/mile in the last year or two.

UK trains are terrible. I don't have direct experience to know if they are worse than DB trains, except for DB's dire performance being a running joke amongst my German colleagues at work.

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.

> We're currently building the most expensive bit of high speed rail in Europe

Largest most expensive jobs programme in Europe perhaps more accurately... lots of pigs' snouts in the trough.

UK and DE appear to use different punctuality metrics with a train being late after 3 minutes in the UK but 6 in DE.

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...

I’ve taken four international DB trains in the last 2 years, into Germany from Belgium and Denmark, and out to Switzerland and Austria.

In all 4 cases the train was delayed in Germany - the longest by 4 hours, one by a mere 30 minutes.

How does the DE figure take canceled trains into account?

> that won't even go into the centre of our capital city

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.

Oh I have we uncancelled the Euston connection now. Good news finally. Hopefully we'll build beyond Birmingham too, because otherwise passengers travelling north of Birmingham will add extra stress on the overloaded WCML.

UK slam door trains where the door appeared locked but then came unlatched when another train passed and sucked people out to the their deaths before the advent of the safety lock.

If you've never been on a train that stops at the right station, maybe the problem isn't with DB.

> Several times I've had to find someone young (and who speaks English) and say, "I'm just going to follow you to the next train."

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.

> DB is continually the worst train experience I have in Europe

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.

It's so weird. That doesn't seem to be the lesson to be learned from Nazi Germany. The train going on time was not the part to fix.

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