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Before the DB became a public limited company, their services worked remarkably well. I know from first hand experience because I was already a customer then.

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.

The main issue is over-utilisation and under-investment of the rail network. Like in many other EU countries. There is no evidence that a state monopoly would perform any better given today’s state of infrastructure and increased traveler numbers.

The under-investment stems from the neoliberal idea that it should be run at a profit and that competition will make everything super efficient.

The under-investment is predominantly in infrastructure, which is owned by states or regions and not under any competition.

And this under-investment stems from the neoliberal idea that transport should run at a profit rather than be treated as a service that has a cost.

> The main reason for this is lack of competition for DB in Germany

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.

Things work well in Switzerland because the Swiss spend a lot more money on rail. That's unfortunately the secret.

> If you get lucky the train arrives at the destination ahead of time

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.

> Unfortunately nowadays traveling with DB has become a game of Russian roulette.

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.

Being on time over thousands of kilometers is a lot easier than being on time over dozens of kilometers. Especially if you share the same tracks with cargo trains, regional trains, and high speed trains and stop at every other village because that was the condition the nimbys required for allowing you to build the track in the first place.

Local trains in Moscow and Saint Petersburg ("elektrichka" with all local stops) may get delayed by a few minutes sometimes, true. But e.g. several trains being delayed by ten minutes because of an ice rain is newsworthy. At least that was the case on several directions I knew about.

I don't really buy that this is the core issue, even though it may very well be one issue. Rail was operated efficiently and on time in the past when competition did not exist even in a contrived manner, and rail is not really an industry in which real intra-industry competition is really possible. Rail competes with flight, and personal and mass surface transportation. It cannot really compete among rail operators in an efficient manner.

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.

In the UK the railways used to be kind of bad in the nationalised British Rail days. People moan about the current privatised rail but it mostly works.

It is also extraordinarily expensive, and since the cuts in the 1960s you have a fraction of the railway lines. It is absolutely terrible.

Who knows if it was better in the nationalised days, but it sure needs some unification and central governance without a profit motive today.

> Who knows if it was better in the nationalised days

I do. I was there. It wasn't.

Also if you look at the usage numbers they dropped off in the nationalised days and picked back up after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport_in_G...

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.

Swiss trains are run by a national company and they’re great.

Yeah, I don't think you can simply say public ownership vs private is necessarily better or worse. Overall competence and values seem more important.

> 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

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).

That’s pretty strange about this competition thing. I’ve been repeatedly informed that the government is much better at running things like this.

What do you find strange about it?

I believe general wisdom in the US is that trains are best when run by the government at zero cost. This is presumably the best way to get transit. So the idea that competition would improve things is odd.

The irony is that OPs train, the RE5, was actually not run by DB but by 'the competition': a private company called National Express.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Express_Germany

Classic. Capitalism ruins another perfect system.