Prediction: Germany is going to be your worst train experience.
That wouldn't surprise me. "your worst train experience" still would, unless the person only taken trains in Europe. But the world is big, and some places are just on a different level. Ever taken a train in India? I'd like to hear those people complain about the German train experience :)
i have no clue about indian railway, just tried to make a point about the fallacy.
If you expect a comfortable and quiet experience, then I’d agree with you, Germany can be a much nicer experience.
So it’s really about what you value, I guess
I won't defend DB too much here but saying that 64% of trains in germany are delayed more than 15min is just plain wrong. The official statistics put it at 40% for 6min or more for long distance trains and 11% for regional trains in 2025[1]. I think if there would be 15min statistics, DB would be on a sinilar level to India for long-distance. Not something to be proud of, but not as desastrous as you paint it. Though, maybe I misunderstood? Do you have sources for the indian numbers?
[1] https://eisenbahn.de/geramond-vgb/jahresbilanz-2025-puenktli...
It seems that India doesn’t really release this data officially but it can be obtained from third parties. In this specific case, I got my figure from a news article. I am not entirely sure about the primary source, they just quote a gov. official statement.
However, It seems that somebody released a public dataset to Kaggle https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/rxydenxd/indian-railways-del... but it’s older than the news I read.
From what I read, the main criticism is that the 80% just takes into account the delay at the last station, not the intermediate ones and 15 min is indeed a lot.
German train delays are not a big blocker because you normally plan a whole day train travel to go from A to B and being one or two hours late is not too bad.
With Interrail, that is doable. You’ll have to mostly plan for overnight stays in large cities, but that’s what most Interrail users want to, anyways.
But granted if you have a connection with two ICE depending on each other, this gets more problematic. Believe me I had that multiple times, and I was late but usually the next train is also late so it works out.
You can't plan super time constrained, but mostly for me it has been fine if you go in with that expectation.
Again, not defending this overall, in Switzerland I plan my journey I expect it to be on point, but I just dropped that expectation in Germany. And that fine for many situations, you just have to know that's what it is.