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Comment by Milner08 | Hacker News Reader

Worst during the interrail trip. It was for me and it wasn't even close.

> Worst during the interrail trip.

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 guess it depends on what you expect. If you expect the train to be on time .. yes, India is much better than Germany. ~80% trains delayed 15 min or less vs Germany 36% trains delayed 15 min or less. It can get pretty bad when your train is delayed so you miss your connection and now you’re stranded in a random town waiting for the next train .. which is coming .. at 5am the next day. Or you can take the regional and hopefully make it in 12 hours with 3 connections instead of your original 4 hour leg. :D

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 guess it depends on what you expect. If you expect the train to be on time .. yes, India is much better than Germany. ~80% trains delayed 15 min or less vs Germany 36% trains delayed 15 min or less.

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...

Hey, I’m sorry for the delay, had to take a train yesterday (how fitting). I think you have a point. I got the German statistics from the official site https://zbir.deutschebahn.com/2025/en/interim-group-manageme... and yep.. I missread, dbahn marks passenger trains as delayed after >5 min. Only cargo passengers are marked delayed after >15min.

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.

The problem with Indian rail is the eccentric booking system. All intercity trains are booked out days or weeks in advance. This is because Indian Railways deals with excess demand not by varying the prices (yield management) but rather by allowing people to cancel reservations at no cost, with a waiting-list system for latecomers. I suppose it allows poor people to travel cheaply by planning in advance, but then so would yield-management pricing. A bit of a mystery.

doesn't it say quite a bit about the german train system when you have to compare it to india to make it seem not that bad?

Not at all, India is great at many things, I think this comment might say more about you than what you replied to or trying to say :)

the comment i replied to used India as a bad example, all my comment says is "doesn't it say something about X if you have to use the worst example which comes to your mind to use as a counterpoint"

i have no clue about indian railway, just tried to make a point about the fallacy.

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