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Comment by tonfa | Hacker News Reader

> Germany trains (and Switzerland trains) as always on time, and the best train system, etc

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

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I'm a heavy public transport user in Switzerland, and even though it's almost a meme how reliable the trains are, reality is different. Yes, they operate in a way that make the stats look good (x% on time), but they take tradeoff to get there. E.g. they won't await connections if another train is a few minutes late. So you might have to wait for 30 minutes for the next one, or even longer if you're unlucky. And there's the occasional big incident, where you get stuck for several hours. I missed flights that way, even though planning in 3 hours of buffer. There is zero compensation in such cases as long as they bring you to your destination on the same day. Plus, several trains are regularly way too crowded.

They changed the policy maybe 5-years ago about a train waiting for a late train to come in because they found that it added additional delays to the entire system. I prefer the new way.

> it added additional delays to the entire system

Yes, obviously. And that hurts statistics. That's like killing sick cattle to be able to say that 100% of yours are healthy.

No, it means they contain the damage and run the system in a healthy manner.

Exactly, seriously complaining about the fact that the system is designed to run on time rather than trickle down delays is beyond me.

In my experience, they do sometimes still wait (at least that was the case for a few trips with delays last summer).

(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)

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