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Comment by cowl | Hacker News Reader

rerouted? it was a completly different destination, much further than he was originally. there is nothing "noone can do" about stupid burecracies like "can't stop at this station because we are not registered". First they had time to register the stop when they changed the itinery, Second if they failed that somehow, and most probably because of "there was no manual how to do it", in a sittuation like these, stupid rules like that should go out of the window and the passengers be let off as soon as possible and not 60km away. Somehow they can be flexible with the people's time but not with their stupid checklists.

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The key explanation for failing to stop at the station is that the train was on the wrong track.

    > "Apparently we were not registered at Troisdorf station, so we are on the wrong tracks"

Many stations have a 4 track system: a left track and right track which are adjacent to platforms, and 2 tracks in the middle, which are designed for non-stopping trains.

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.

Lame excuse. There has to be a better alternative than to take them an hour in the wrong direction. Stop and shunt to the right track. Stop at one of those other 15 stations they skipped. But the best would be to simply avoid these kind of unnecessary errors in the first place.

It was extremely easy for that train to stop in Bonn-Beuel, which is anyway far superior to Troisdorf for a train that was originally scheduled to stop at Bonn Central Station. Failing to stop there shows perfectly how little DB cares about its passengers.

This is so typical for German bureaucracy. I used to work at a German university, which included teaching. I once had a small group of students who collectively plagiarized their coursework. Some of the group admitted doing so. I went to the examination office asking them to enforce the punishment for plagiarism (which would increasingly severe with the number of offenses).

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.

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