> Another figure illustrates why the practice is necessary from a Swiss perspective: in 2023, 92.5 percent of all trains in Switzerland reached their destination on time, compared to only 64 percent for long-distance trains in Germany.
To add a bit more detail: SBB (Swiss federal railways) consider a train on time if it reaches its destination with less than three minutes’ delay [1]. DB (Deutsche Bahn) puts the threshold at 15 minutes ("Reisendenpünktlichkeit") [2].
To put this a bit into perspective: long-distance trains in Germany typically travel for at least half a day. "Long-distance" trains in Switzerland can be compared to regional lines in Germany (the country simply isn't that large, and the majority of rail travel in Switzerland happens between Zurich/Olten/Berne/Basel, which are all within 100 km of each other). The likelihood of anything going wrong during a 1:30h train journey from Zurich to Basel is simply much lower than during a 10 hour train journey from Kiel to Freiburg. 3 minutes delay on a 1:30h train journey is a delay of 3.3%, 15 mins delay on a 10 hour train journey is a delay of 2.5%.
The reason regional trains are also delayed is that regional lines, local lines, long distance lines and freight trains are typically using the same tracks in Germany, and delayed long distance trains always get higher priority. A typical situation is that your regional train is perfectly on time, but suddenly stops, and waits for 5-10 minutes for a delayed long-distance train to overtake it. Switzerland has a similar mixed system, but as noted above, does not really have long-distance rail lines, apart from the trains that enter from Italy, Austria, France and Germany, which is the main reason why these trains are not allowed to enter if delayed. This is in contrast to the system in France, where TGV lines typically have dedicated high-speed tracks, where all trains on it travel more or less at the same speed.
Shouldn't you then add redundancy to the system by having time buffers at large stops every 2-3 hours? Or even let replacement trains start at intermediate stops as soon as the delay of the regular train is greater than X to avoid propagation of the delay into to rest of the network? Absolutely, but most stations and rail lines in Germany are either at their operational limit, or above. Having a train wait for 15 minutes in a large station just in case it is delayed would block that track for 15 minutes in the majority of cases, when the train is punctual. Also, DB simply has not enough rolling material to start replacement trains, and the rail infrastructure to even park such trains has largely been dismantled in the years after the privatization (they are doing it sometimes, but not very often).
As someone who used to travel regularly between Zurich and Frankfurt (Zurich - Hamburg line ICE) I can 100% tell you that distance is *NOT* the root cause of DB's reliability problems. Infrastructure decline is. From lack of electrification, badly maintained rolling stock, insufficient tracks you find everything. Swiss railways deal with problems like lack of capacity and geography. Deutsche Bahn deals with a lack of maintenance and investment.
Maybe you are not aware, but swiss trains dont go back to sleep after they arrive at a destination. They stop for 3-5 minutes, and then continue to their next destination. All day long, from morning till evening. Geneve to St. Gallen with like a dozen stops is pretty long way. Especially when you drive it 6 times a day.
Also generally the length of the tracks dont magically change. It is possible to create a timetable: which train should be where when, and then stick to it.
Note that before the DB, SBB were anoyed with some models of french or italien trains, which broke down regularly, putting too much pressure on the integrated timetable.
Fyi, it's actually easier for trains to be on time the longer the journey is - that's because sane travel times aren't calculated at max speeds. So if there is any delay, you can go at a higher speed than what was used in the calculation to catch up. On shorter journeys there are simply fewer opportunities to catch up.
Now, I wouldn't be exactly shocked if DB using too high speed assumptions in their stated travel times was part of their problem with delays.
And its doubtful any statistics from the German side can be trusted. In more than one occasion, I've personally experienced delayed and cancelled trains that were shown as running on time in every information system. DB either doesn't know where their trains are, or is continuously fudging the numbers.
They are intentionally preventing transparency. The operational side of DB knows where the trains are, and the infrastructure to communicate it transparently to consumer side is intentionally hampered. And so information I'd either delayed or not available.
Having read through the links you provided:
You are comparing two different things. DB’s Reisendenpünktlichkeit takes in delays caused by missed connections etc. SBB’s 3 minute delay are just the individual train delays. For that DB has a similar measure which defines punctual as below 6 minutes of delay.
So the difference is big (3 vs 6 minutes) but not that big (3 vs 15 minutes).
DB has the worst company culture that I'm aware of. Everything has to go by plan, and when it doesn't, someone has to be responsible. So everyone is just ass-covering all them time and not taking any risks.
This has removed the potential for improvisation in dispatching (no one wants to be responsible for delaying that other train), making the train network unable to give any trains room to make up their delays.
There is a reason every other dispatcher has problems with alcoholism.
I’ve read an interesting analysis of that situation, or rather the ass-covering culture in government adjacent power structures in Germany: The authors concluded that government agencies and offices are often led by lawyers, and therefore fostered a lawyer-inspired culture—which pretty much follows Conway‘s law. Over time, this has led to a management style overwhelmingly concerned with a fear of liability, and ass-covering instead of innovation.
>So everyone is just ass-covering all them time and not taking any risks.
Heaving lived and worked in Germany for a few years, I realized that's the reason behind all the excessive bureaucracy and processes for everything: extensive ass covering. If something goes to shit under your watch then it's not your fault because you did everything by the book and you have the extensive paper trail to prove it.
And nobody wants to go around the processes or change them, even if they know they're broken because then they would be the ones liable for the outcomes, so the entire society revolves around preserving the status quo even if the ship is heading towards the iceberg.
Change to processes is usually exclusively top-down where a boomer detached from the work in the trenches but with connections, a laundry list of a academic credentials and a pompous CV of management positions at large consultancies/companies, makes the decisions and those below execute without question while mumbling at the canteen lunch how stupid and out of touch the decisions are.
That's just my opinion as an outsider, it's not a fact I can provide citations for in case anyone asks, so it can be incorrect as all opinions go, feel free to disagree or correct me.
>Heaving lived and worked in Germany for a few years, I realized that's the reason behind all the excessive bureaucracy and processes for everything: extensive ass covering. If something goes to shit under your watch then it's not your fault because you did everything by the book and you have the extensive paper trail to prove it.
I've heard it said that the idea that Germans are efficient is a myth. (The new Berlin airport is one example.)
I worked technical support at a mid sized company that sold some equipment that had very expensive support contracts. These support contracts made up a large % of the company income and our customers were happy to pay them.
When I joined the team first thing the director told me was "everyone fucks up, you will to, just tell the truth and you'll be good". I learned quickly that there was no finger pointing allowed in that team. If something went wrong we'd figure it out later and in the meantime do the right thing to help the customer.
It was a great culture in that group. There was surprisingly little bureaucracy in the tech support team. You could do what you needed to to get things done / got the help you needed. Almost every call that came in was immediately answered, and our customers loved us.
Later (after a series of other acquisitions and etc) we picked up a company that had more than 4x the number of support techs and they solved less than half the number of tickets. Even the tickets weren't "solved" as much as they went through the motions and they hit their metrics.
That group was all about finger pointing, they didn't seem to know how to do anything else. They weren't even good at finger pointing. One manager who loved to come up with theories as to why our team was "cheating". He somehow triggered an "investigation" into his theory as to why his team didn't solve tickets and others did. That investigation found found that his very specific theory as to how other teams were messing with the number of closed tickets .... that his team was the only one playing that game. It was so bizarre.
Unfortunately, due to the bad acts / crappy culture from the new team we ended up with a slowly evolving / massive bureaucracy too all designed as CYA type setups where everyone "did what they should have done" but really never solved any problems.
I feel like that's often the source of bureaucracy.
Its not a transport company after all. Main buisness is speculation and building on inherited areas in inner cities and tax evasion on revenue gained from that. Incentives are aligned wrong.
I visit Germany more or less regularly. The deterioration in the overall experience with DB is very noticeable. Last time I was unfortunate enough to take an ICE, they started an informal poll with the passengers to decide whether to cancel a stop in Frankfurt. I was astonished. They eventually decided not to cancel it, seemingly after a lot of time deliberating or waiting for something, but most of us lost our connections thanks to the resulting delay. It was 4am +/-.
I wonder what's going on over there. I understand that there are complex organizational issues involved, but, besides this long-term rotting, there seems to be some more recent, abrupt diseases affecting them too.
By the way they decided to fire 30k employees to save costs just a couple days ago.
Enjoy it while it lasts... it is going to be much worse very soon. Some renovation plans are completely bonkers, they will close important railways for years without any replacement.
Well their finances were broken by a series of changes:
1. Lockdowns wrecking everything. Ticket revenue plummeted etc.
2. Soon after, the government there decided to make train travel nearly free. 9 EUR a month to travel as much as you want anywhere in Germany. Justification: climate change. This doubled short-distance usage of the network immediately. Huge increase in usage + hardly any new ticket revenue = network damage. There were subsidies but you can't place that kind of load on a system without everything being stripped to the bone to try and handle it.
3. When that scheme expired they decided to replace it with a new similar ticket at 49 EUR per month, but the rail companies complained they couldn't afford this and the financial risk was huge. https://www.railjournal.com/policy/germany-introduces-e49-ti...
DB losses have exploded and debt grows as a consequence:
DB had a net loss for 2023 of some EUR 2.4 billion (compared with a net loss of EUR 227 million in the previous year). One of the negative factors here was the significant increase in interest paid, which was driven in part by higher borrowing for capital expenditures. The DB Group's results were also affected by the additional burdens of inflation-related cost increases, a sharp rise in personnel expenses and multiple strikes.
So basically you have a socialist government that is giving sops to its base by trying to pump rail usage for climate reasons, but without making people pay for that increased usage, at a time of high inflation. The system creaks and groans under the weight.
Those are reasonable arguments, which I've heard previously indeed. But, truth be told, although the pandemic had an impact, all this mess started to become visible at least a couple of years before it — maybe even earlier.
This is so foreign to my American perspective - our public transport is more like, "maybe it'll be on time, probably not, you'll have no way of knowing, also screw you"
> so foreign to my American perspective - our public transport is more like, "maybe it'll be on time, probably not, you'll have no way of knowing, also screw you"
New York’s Metro-North and LIRR have 95%+ on-time rates [1]. (EDIT: On time is defined as less than 6 minutes late [2].)
BART's on-time definition is "within 5 minutes of scheduled arrival at final station". I recall in NYC's Metro that trains would frequently "go express" and start skipping stops at arbitrary moments. Do these systems do this as well and have that definition? I think I now understand why they do this stuff: they're trying to juice metrics because skipping stations speeds up the train a lot.
The Swiss rail lines are used close to capacity. If a train is too much late, it has follow-on effects on other trains, and the whole railway system can start to run into problems. So for the whole system to work, there can't be any overly late trains. This applies to all trains, not just German trains.
So this doesn't really have anything to do with that single train not being on time, or with differences in culture or something like that, it's about keeping the system running. If you have a system that isn't used at capacity, then it doesn't matter much if individual trains run late, the system itself will still keep on running.
It's absolutely crazy to me! I can see my uber driver on my phone stopping to pick up a pretzel from the convenience store, but I can't see where the bus is or get any kind of estimate of when it's going to arrive at the busstop.
On vacation this summer in europe, all tram stops had estimated arrival times. Ridiculous, 5-10 minutes out at worst, they wouldn't even need the electronic signs, just a placard that says "just skim your phone for a bit, it'll come".
You are describing a well-off high density city in Western Europe.
I unfortunately live in "we used to have trams, most of them were scrapped in favour of bus lines, then the bus lines were scrapped because they were not profitable enough, go buy a car" Europe.
I've taken transit in a few US and Canadian cities. Most of the time there was some app that reported the live location of the busses and trains in transit.
Often I could get the data through Transit, but sometimes they have their own app.
Trams and buses tend to be more unreliable because they use the same streets as cars (sometimes they get extra lanes, but not always). Metros tend to be more reliable in my experience, I can usually trust what it says on the electronic sign (one big exception is Cologne where the metro isn't a real metro and runs on the street half of the time).
North American trains have a huge amount of level crossings, which, predictably, cause tons of accidents when oblivious drivers get hit by trains. Although most of the world considers high speed trains to be incompatible with level crossings, the recently built Brightline in Florida has several level crossings and has already hit many cars. [0][1]
Caltrain routinely has delays due to accidents involving grade crossings. Despite spending decades and hundreds of millions of dollars, they still haven't managed to fully grade separate the line. [2]
Fun fact, Canada's Turbotrain was one of the earliest examples of high speed rail in the world in the 1960s and was even faster than the Shinkansen at the time. However, it hit a truck only one hour into its debut run. This is often cited as the main reason why there's no high speed rail in Canada despite the density and proximity of Toronto and Montreal being ideal for such a line. [3]
Not sure why you'd want to lump all of America in to one category of failure when it's demonstrably untrue. Quick example - BART in the Bay Area has a 92-93% on-time rate.
There must be some definitional trick here (like canceled trains not counting, or something) because my memory of BART (as a daily multi-commuter: home to work, work to sports, sports to home) was frequent moments of "10 CAR SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT / MILLBRAE TRAIN IN FOR-TEE MINUTES" and shit like that. Enough of that in the year 2019 led to me switching to e-bike/car and frequently this is a much faster trip than the train.
Swiss trains define on-time as within 3 minutes of schedule, and this includes all mechanical issues, suicides, etc.
And this includes multi-hour intercity train lines, double-decker trains, trains that stop inside of airports, local trains, everything. If you have just a couple lines in a single city, under a single jurisdiction, with no interdependencies and no freight on the same lines, then of course it gets a lot easier.
The issue is that trains need tracks. Tracks are very expensive and a limited resource. The stricter you are about time the more trains you can pack into a given amount of trackage.
A bus uses a road and doesn't have a problem like that because there is far more road than the buses need.
The Dallas Area Raipd Transit on-time rate is about the same as this Swiss train system at 93%. The Trinity Railway Express is 97%, so higher on-time rate than the Swiss system.
That's like Italian trains, but it's more like "nobody knows what platform it's gonna be at; keep a look out and run when you see it; also, screw you".
Deutsche bahn is horrible, privatizing it in the 90s was one of many failures of that movement and was leading to crumbling infrastructure, an insurmountable hardware and technical debt and now to the most complex train system probably in the world.
Hopefully some people learn from it - privatizing critical infrastructure like this is doomed to fail. You get the bad from a public company and the bad from the government bureaucracy.
Deutsche Bahn is wholly owned by the federal government (https://www.deutschebahn.com/en/group/ataglance/aufsichtsrat...). This is exactly the same relationship as SBB has to the Swiss government. I don't think the corporatisation (not privatisation) is the problem in this case.
> now to the most complex train system probably in the world.
Having seen the US attempt and lived with the UK railway, the German one is definitely a huge improvement. Yes, it does go wrong sometimes, but my experience at university in the UK was the end of term had two carriages with twice as many passengers as seats, that regularly terminated 20 minutes before the official destination, and my experience visiting the UK now that I live in Berlin is that the UK rail fares are (or often were pre-pandemic) more expensive than the flights to the UK. There's even a standard "money saving trick" on UK fare prices where you split a journey from A to B into A->C, C->B, where C is one of the stops in the route from A to B so you don't need to disembark.
That doesn't mean there's no room for improvement, neither the UK nor the US railways are role models. (I assume Japan is still a role model for rail? Not heard much since the 90s…)
Honestly it's a very low bar and Germans should aspire for better and not for a meager "we are not the worst there is".
I would say you need to compare DB to other Western European railway operator/networks. In my personal experience, DB comes dead last and it's not even close to the 2nd to last. Renfe (Spain), Trenitalia/Italo (Italy), SNCF (France) have much better services, at least on the long-distance routes (> 200KM). So much so that they are a viable alternative to domestic flights.
Additionally, most of those countries also have a much worse geography to contend with (e.g. Italy with the Alps and Appennini) and they still manage to have a nice high-speed rail network that works.
Finally, answering your last point, Japan still is THE role model. So much so that you can get stuff delivered to a train station your train is transiting through (at least with the Shinkansen lines) because the carrier knows exactly when your train will be there. I was astonished by that.
And we're talking about high speed rail here (ICE trains). The UK has exactly one line that qualifies - from the channel tunnel to London St Pancras, and I don't think the US has any.
Privatization has brought some truly crazy incentives into the spotlight. Like how bridge maintenance is paid by the company, but when a worn out bridge needs replacing it's suddenly a government investment.
I consider it safe to assume that the reason for this is that it had been just the same when it was still a government org, but a government org will see its responsibilities very different from a company eagerly cosplaying shareholder-value while the sole shareholder happens to be the government they can freely rip off because of an ongoing legacy approach to the principal-agent problem.
As for delays, I think one reason, besides lack of maintenance and the massive interdependence in that large network that allows neither a star nor a main axis simplification is the high speed Autobahn: if they weren't overambitious in terms of travel times they would perhaps put bigger time buffers in their schedule and that would certainly help a lot.
"Privatizing" is not the correct word for it - DB was reformed and is now a company instead of a government agency, but it's still 100% owned by the state. Which however didn't stop it from acting like a profit-oriented private company, favoring short term savings over long term sustainability, which led to the sorry state in which German rail infrastructure is today. IMHO the major issue with the reform is that the trains and the infrastructure were left in the same company (with other train operators forced to use the tracks provided by the "incumbent"), which leads to all kinds of conflicts of interest.
" Which however didn't stop it from acting like a profit-oriented private company, " Except it does not make any profit. It is tightly controlled by the government. They could change any management behaviour. But they don't.
I think it's worth adding the fact, that not only the Deutsche Bahn has been privatized, but also the Deutsche Bundespost (mail service/telecommunication) has been privatized and split into Deutsche Post and Deutsche Telekom coming from the same policy.
As far as I know this all boils down to the fact, that the European Union (or better it's predecessor) wanted to get rid of state monopolies. It did work out for the "Deutsche Post" (more or less) and very good for "Deutsche Telekom".
But "Deutsche Bahn" was a failure coming from that policy.
Besides the point that Deutsche Bahn is goverment owned, it is worth pointing out that Western and Eastern German had " to crumbling infrastructure, an insurmountable hardware and technical debt and now to the most complex train system probably in the world. " + much much debts.
Calling the Deutsche Bahn private is a very good indicator that the person isn't able to look up Wikipedia Article and think critically.
Translating that to english is train privatization. Does this lead to a privately OWNED company? I never said that.
The decision to privatize and to make austerity measures instead of investments shows today. In the past 30 years the streets were more important for governments and it shows.
Can’t comment on the 90s, but it only seems to have become truly unreliable in the last 5 years maybe? I take a train through Germany 2-3 times a year, and delays and faults are pretty much inevitable on every journey.
I’ve been to Germany twice to visit family. All of my trains had delays (one was because a suicide though), and every time Ive heard from family, they are also having train delays. It’s very unreliable.
My experiences in France were quite the opposite. So much for stereotypes.
I can't say what it was like 5 years ago, but I take a DB train 2-3 times a week and I can never be sure that I'll get to my destination on time, or that I'll even get there on the train.
If you privatize with the right rule structure and policing from the government, with payment as a function of being on time or not. You can have a good system.
(The land is not enough to fix trains and the land next to it was reserved but somehow sold to build a sports arena because the train land section became a company that had to post good numbers)
It's actually a different system - Japan's network was privatised and split into competing companies with all shares publicly traded (bar some exceptions), the Deutsche Bahn was privatised into a single, state-owned company. As such it is beholden to slow, non-deciding German governments, including investments into the network.
It worked OK for the UK. Passenger numbers, which had been steadily falling, started to increase. On the other hand, there are complaints about high fares.
Japan did it differently than the EU counterparts:
>The most basic, fundamental difference between the British and Japanese railways is how they were privatised. In Britain, the tracks were split from the trains.
from a ft article I apparently can't link
The split of infrastructure and the invisible hand of the train operator market seems to be a correlation.
For context German trains over the last few years have become increasingly delayed. To the point that it is now the norm.
Official Deutsche Bahn figures are likely underreporting the extent of the problem as the reported times and actual timetables are -aggressively- out of sync (to the frustration of many riders).
It's hard to dissect the true source of the problem as there are various factors at play. However the central cause is starving the system of funds. This presents a strong warning for countries that are trying to encourage the use of public transport in order to meet their climate goals.
The problem with the legislature about funding is that regular maintainance of the railroad network would has to be paid by Deutsche Bahn itself, whereas creation of new infrastructure or complete rebuilding of completely degraded railway infrastructure is to be paid out of the federal budget. Taking preventative/regular maintainance also is at the discretion of the Deutsche Bahn as a corporation. Of course this incentives the executives of the Bahn to let the railroads rot.
I have a hard time imagining that the perverse incentives in the system have not been obvious to those in power at its inception.
I didn't do a deep dive into the issues as there are many - but a contributor to the tardiness is the decommissioning of track switches/overtaking lanes. While this allowed for a short term economy, it harmed the reliability of the network and causes flow-on traffic.
I include this detail as the source of the largest problems are not necessarily about creation of new infrastructure (although that of course would be the solution), but the deletion of existing infrastructure.
"The network is simply overloaded," said Böttger. In contrast to Luxembourg and Switzerland, which invested around €575 (about $625) per capita and €450 per capita in rail infrastructure respectively, the figure in Germany is just €114.
"The network is simply overloaded," said Böttger. In contrast to Luxembourg and Switzerland, which invested around €575 (about $625) per capita and €450 per capita in rail infrastructure respectively, the figure in Germany is just €114.
Last fall I almost missed my ferry because my train up to Hamburg was so delayed that it missed my connection to Kiel, and my backup connection pulled out just as my arriving train was stopping.
I knew things were getting bad in Germany so I had planned for enough time for a secondary backup. It left on time, but kept getting slower and slower. Then they announced that due to rail works, there was a bus from Neumünster to Kiel.
At Neumünster, I instead got a taxi, which (thanks to all the taxes going to the Autobahn instead of rails, I presume), got me to the ferry with a peak speed of 150kph, and 10 minutes before loading ended - some four hours after I had planned to be there.
If you question something like public transportation being climate friendly as being scietific sound, maybe you should bring up some evidence or data to back this up.
Also some anecdote about how buses where used at some major event does not allow any conclusions to be drawn about public transportation in general.
Also "there is a lot of marketing and money involved - especially in green energy" is a rather general polemic statement, which could also some clarification.
Just compare the colored rings (green = on time, orange = delayed more than 3 minutes, red = delayed more than 9 minutes) between the trains in Germany, Switzerland, and France here to get a general feeling of how bad things have become with Deutsche Bahn:
My favorite anecdote from riding a German train in Switzerland was a journey from Interlaken (Switzerland) to Frankfurt in Germany. Now if you're not used to train schedules: Stops are quick, and trains are punctual. It's fairly common for stops to just be 2-3 minutes. Connections between trains are often around 5 minutes, sometimes shorter.
So, this Intercity Express departed Interlaken perfectly on schedule, made a bunch of scheduled stops in Spiez, Thun, Bern, and continued on to the border city of Basel. Everything running perfectly on schedule, the train arrived at the Swiss station in Basel, continued (on time) to the German train station that's still in the same city, just a few minutes farther. Having had 3-5 minute stops all the way from early morning to lunchtime, the train then sat in the German station for about 15 minutes, departed with only a minor delay, and just a few yards after exiting the station proceeded to stop, sit on the tracks for half an hour ("to catch up with the prevalent delay conditions on the German rail network"), before starting to move again.
Waiting in a comfy seat on a train with working AC isn't the worst of fates, and we made the final destination within half an hour of the scheduled time, so it all went well -- just funny to observe how different parts of this interconnected network had very different ideas of scheduling.
Swiss railways optimise for punctuality, sacrificing line capacity (compensated for with double-decker cars).
Meanwhile every other European rail transport authority seems to be bent on squeezing out the most of the lines it has.
I grew up in a city that had two parallel rail lines in the east-west axis - one for long-distance connections, cargo and everything else, the other a refurbished old main line with trains only once per hour.
The latter was punctual almost to the minute(even if comparatively slow at an average 30km/h including stops), while the former was a mess and you were often better off driving instead.
My friend living in the suburbs close to that refurbished line always boasted how it took him a grand total of 18 minutes to get to the city centre and he could rely on the train to always arrive. That was quicker than I could get there by any means, despite a similar distance.
What you said goes against what the other commenter have said, that is Swiss trains cannot inject late trains into the system because the tracks are used at capacity, I.e. there is no buffer for trains to “queue”. Every train is always at the expected place, at the expected time. Hence the system is always at maximum throughput and on-time.
> SBB grants Eurocity trains on the Munich-Zurich route a buffer of ten minutes before reallocating their train path, and even 15 minutes for ICE trains between Freiburg and Basel.
Emphasis mine. This whole system works because they account for delays by having a time buffer in each route that can be consumed by going slower.
During my commutes along Lake Zurich I noticed that the trains would rarely arrive earlier than 30s before schedule - even if it meant going below the maximum allowed speed, as evidenced by instances where the train used the same section to restore the buffer by going faster.
What to do with late trains is a very interesting problem from a network stability perspective.
It’s somewhat akin to the packet dropping question, though packets don’t complain as loudly as passengers.
In a rail network with one train a day it’s not a big issue, but with regular service you can’t let a late train get out of control or it blows the entire network out of sync until you have some dead time - which is one reason some systems have an “hour of the dead” where no trains run - it lets it reset and get back to something sane.
Trying to build a system that has 15 minute heads and can handle a train going late or dying on the rails is really, really hard without ridiculously complexity like quad tracks everywhere and spare train sets at every station.
I agree that it's a hard and interesting problem. Yet other countries seem to be managing it better, or there is something structurally different.
I read somewhere that one of the key issues in Germany is that freight and passenger trains share the same network. While a delay of 15 minutes can be wildly problematic for a passenger train (missing connections, stranding at some godforsaken train station etc.), it is virtually irrelevant for freight. Then again, that should make it easy enough to always prioritize passengers over freight, but either that isn't being done or it's still insufficient.
The USA has the freight problem because trains can't pass each other unless there is a siding long enough for the train that is being passed; and the freight trains are too long.
Where there's double-track (or more) it's not as big an issue because the train can pass on the other side of the track (tracks are often handled as if they were a road with one lane going in one direction and the other going the other way, but you can swap around with signaling).
The other major solution (bandaid) is to add dwell time at stations so that there's room to make up - the timetable says when the train will leave not when it will arrive, and if it normally arrives five minutes early, it just waits; if it lost time and arrives one minute before departure, it will just be there a minute and the lost time is made up.
But while that may reduce the "worst case" scenario, it does make the average travel time longer.
Reading this on a German train that is expected to arrive in Zurich 25 minutes late, hoping that the connection will not be cancelled at the boarder as per usual.
Note that trains to Zurich and Basel SBB then end in Basel Bad (or sometimes they let it go to Basel SBB). It’s a separate train station in Basel which is run by Deutsche Bahn so it’s not literally “turning back at the border”.
IIRC Swiss passengers waiting in Basel SBB get a replacement train travelling at the original time.
When I was living in Germany circa 1999 I was riding the train from the former East Berlin to Dresden and remember watching the engineer look at his watch and at the clock on the platform, making a point to push the driving lever forward at the exact moment the seconds hand hit zero.
Seems fair. You can't make it right for everyone, and at one point they need to draw a boundary, to care for your citizens and keep up the standards.
Otherwise everything would fall to the lowest common denominator.
I don't think it's fair for the article to say that a "temporary measure" has now become a permanent one, it likely is temporary until the problem is solved.
Sometimes I ask myself why the schedule of those always-late trains isn't changed. If it would be planned that it always arrives "15min later", people and other transportation could work with that timing so much better.
There's an old anecdote about this, almost certainly false, but worth sharing, goes something like this:
The Swiss trains arrive on time, more often than any other country. Second place is the Germans. What's the difference?
The Germans set the timetable, and carefully measure arrivals. Then the famed German engineering kicks in, and they move Heaven and Earth to identify and fix any problems which are keeping the trains off schedule.
The Swiss set the timetable, and carefully measure arrivals. They use these measurements to identify when trains aren't arriving on schedule and... adjust the timetable.
The German train system isn't awful, when talking about long distance trains. It's not good, but it's not awful.
Look at the regional feeder lines, though. Unmaintained tracks, ancient trains, diesel instead of electric. Many towns have no connection at all - where I used to work, there was an old train station, but the tracks had been ripped up years earlier.
I used to (have to) rely on the German train system. Thankfully, I am now in Switzerland. It is a huge difference.
That probably strongly depends on where exactly you're living, though. I can't complain about my local trains, which are nothing like what you describe.
The long-distance network in Germany has routes that take more than 8 hours. Delays of 15 minutes are because of network complexity not uncommon.
SBB - Swiss rail - doesn't want its schedule to be affected by the long-distance DB - German - services. So it doesn't allow the DB service to enter the country after a given cut-off delay.
This means that travellers need to transfer to an SBB service for the final 1-2 hours of their trip. This transfer typically takes 15-30 minutes.
You can travel across Japan, similar or even larger distances, with practically no delays.
As a passenger it's not always about the bare number of minutes, the problem is that I might get stranded somewhere, and train stations in Germany are generally very dirty and somewhat unsafe at odd hours.
> Delays of 15 minutes are because of network complexity not uncommon.
If the delay is that likely, due to the long distance of the route, isn't the obvious step to take then to adjust the schedule? So that at some stations along the route trains have a buffer.
I don’t buy the idea that it’s mainly because of network complexity and line length. Local lines, even ones that don’t share tracks with any other trains, are routinely cancelled or delayed, as well. Other large countries manage to run trains on time (Japan, Spain…).
DB is uniquely bad and I don’t think we should be making excuses for them.
The delays in Germany can also be felt here in Linz/Austria.
For years the train from Linz to Vienna was always punctual.
However, recently (Last ~9 Months or so) all trains are super later. The reason is, all of them go through Germany (Innsbruck (via German) -> Salzburg -> Linz ->Vienna), and given everything is delayed in Germany it also delays Austrian trains.
Not that I can blame the Swiss for wanting to make the trains run on time, but I laughed at this part:
> SBB introduced the regulation back in July 2022 in consultation with Deutsche Bahn. Introduced as a "temporary measure" at the time, it is now permanent.
Just a reminder to folks that there is nothing so permanent as a “temporary” government program.
I wouldn't mind the delays that much if we had more direct connections between cities. But the reality is that you book a connection to another city, and that connection was never possible in the first place because of some construction work or bad rails or something else. They know they can't make that connection but they never update their schedule to reflect that. And then you are on the first leg of the journey and everything goes to hell. You have to find a replacement train, your reservations are void, you have to wait hours.
And the worst is that you have no recourse. You get 25% of your ticket after ONE HOUR! It makes me so angry.
> And the worst is that you have no recourse. You get 25% of your ticket after ONE HOUR! It makes me so angry.
Unfortunately, it's not as if airlines were any better. Less than 3h of delay and you get nothing.
At least, with DB you can get the money for your reservation back if they cancelled your original connection. Still sucks to be in an overcrowded train without a reservation, though.
Direct connections are definitely better, as you say.
As a foreigner, I am currently travelling for work in Europe and had a DB train from Munich all the way to Ljubljana (Slovenia) through multiple connections. Interestingly, the trains were on time until we were in Germany but when I reached the last connection in Villach (Austria), suddenly they cancelled the train from Villach->Ljubljuana without any notice at last minute. As a foreigner without any understanding, I had to scramble through and find a Flixbus which thankfully I was able to buy tickets online.
Look for using Bus like Flixbus as an alternative if possible. They are not perfect but more reliable than the DB train for sure.
> Look for using Bus like Flixbus as an alternative if possible. They are not perfect but more reliable than the DB train for sure.
I wouldn't recommend that, at least not for longer rides. Apart from the fact that I don't trust their overworked drivers (there was a big accident this year that may have been caused by a conflict between the drivers, according to some witness reports), its cheapness also tends to attract rather unsavoury individuals. I have all sorts of horror stories, from the guy (probably on some drugs) who started shouting multiple times in the middle of the night, to some dude who fell asleep with his orange juice bottle still open, which then spilled all over me, to the guy who thought it was a good idea to take drugs across the Swiss border (which caused a massive delay as, of course, his baggage was then extensively searched), etc. I've met weird people on trains too, but Flixbus is a whole other level.
Villach to Ljubljana is a joined ÖBB and SŽ line, not Deutsch Bahn. Your ticket was with DB, but the train getting cancelled had absolutely nothing to do with them.
If you had asked at the Reisezentrum at Villach station you would have been presented with options to continue your journey, or get a refund.
Understood but from my perspective, the cause doesn't matter. I booked through DB and it was not a good experience. Was my very first Time and I had a few minutes to decide what to do as I had people waiting in Ljubljuana. Didnt even have time for a refund for that portion of the journey.
I have decided to not take the train next time for sure if I can. Will try bus first.
This is one of the worst parts of European train travel these days - while airlines are forced to find you replacement connection, give you hotel and even pay you a fee if they're late, there's nothing like that for trains.
So you can end up with a blame game of "well, you bought a ticket from DB, but OBB fscked up, good luck being stuck in the middle of nowhere!" situation that makes you wish you took a plane.
I always avoided German trains when riding in Switzerland: they were often late or canceled, dirty, and full. Especially given that I could take a cleaner, punctual SBB train with the same ticket and for the same price.
The situation with trains in Germany is appalling. Our kids need to go to school by train. Even though it is the only line using that route, there are constant delays and cancellations. DB (Deutsche Bahn) often does not even care to inform the passengers of such events over the loudspeakers or displays. I routinely take at least one train earlier to increase the probability of reaching my destination in time. Working from home has saved me a good amount of stress over the years.
This is not motivating anyone to switch from cars to trains.
Just to add one more voice to the choir of outraged DB customers: in Russia, for a long-distance train to get cancelled, it takes something like a new World War to begin, I don't remember a single case. And as you may imagine, Russian Railways are not hiring the brightest talent awailable.
In Germany they don't even express regret when they do it.
That‘s what we got for privatization and many years of „conservative“ ministers of transport and public infrastructure.
Just wait for the first bridge to fail with a train or a car on it and the calls for public-private partnerships…
(Writing this on a moderately ICE-train)
This pretty much is the case in the US. People complain all the time about amtrak being delayed by freight, but the law has been that amtrak gets priority for decades.
It's just that they only get priority if they're actually on time (the initial booking of the rail essentially). Since they're constantly late they always miss this time and therefore have to wait.
Interesting culture if that's seen as a punishment. In my school half of the kids would try to be a minute late (so they can't enter the school and 'have to' slack off the whole day).
Why?! How does this help? That sounds insane and pointless to the education process. Unless the point was to educate your kids to be obedient slaves with childhood trauma for their corporate overlords.
We used to have something similar during communist rule in my European country, to teach kids who's boss and to respect authority.
There is no saving the Deutsche Bahn. Everyone who knows someone working there knows this. Just ban everyone currently working there from ever working there again and reshuffle the cards.
They're already severely understaffed, I doubt kicking out the current people working there would help.
On a top management level, maybe, but I don't think train conductors can do much about a train schedule that is impossibly failure-prone, based on ageing and inadequate infrastructure and trains in disrepair.
"...in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
But it reminds me of the famous quote from Bertrand Russell
> My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others.
(Bertrand Russell / 1872-1970 / Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization? / 1930)
I think the food and climate of England were a huge driver of British Imperial expansion. The elite were desperate to get out and so the British always had a large supply of soldiers and administrators for their colonies (until they were decimated in WWI).
James May bettered Gordon Ramsay in a practical cooking competition. The gearhead from TopGear baked the better fish pie. And on Ramsay's own cooking show no less.
Apart from the root issue here someone need to remind that Switzerland is the parasite of EU. Basically they have all EU rights and no obligations. EU should tax them heavily so that they contribute to solve e.g. EU transportation issues.
Why in Heaven's name should Switzerland be (heavily!?) taxed to solve EU transportation issues? Should Switzerland then tax the EU as well to pay for its own transportation?
Until today I believed that the world had solved these problems by charging transportation fees but you seem to have very different ideas.
> Basically they have all EU rights and no obligations.
Switzerland certainly doesn't have all EU rights. For instance, they are not applicable for any EU subsidies. They do not have any voting rights. They are exluded from certain scientific cooperation programs (e.g. the ESFRI). And the list goes on.
I do consider Switzerland doings as hostile to EU.
1) Switzerland gain on using EU transportation and free market but does not contribute fair fee to maintain and build it.
You can tax EU - we will see who will survive.
2) Switzerland does unfair tax competition
3) Switzerland helped hide EU citizens untaxed money (maybe still does)
4) Switzerland helps Russian oligarchs maintain their wealth and many other criminals all around the world.
5) Last but not least:
If Switzerland does not care about Ukraine dying because it is ‘neutral’ and yet still wants safe borders, then I don’t fucking care about Switzerland well being.
What are you talking about, my marginal tax rate in Switzerland is 50%. When I last went to Prague, I changed trains at a station that prominently said it was financed by “friendship funds” from Switzerland. My taxes already are paying for Germany’s transport infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Swiss students couldn’t go on Erasmus for a year, because someone in Brussels threw a hissy fit.
I’m a fan of the EU, but let’s not pretend it’s not throwing its weight around, just like any other huge federal government.
These aren't EU transportation issues, these are GER transportation issues. The most powerful "parasitism" argument against CH is probably the tax arbitrage you can get from Zug/Lucerne, but a lot of that already happens inside EU itself with Luxembourg/Ireland/etc.
But yes, a fight over bigger contributions/more harmonization is inevitable within the next 10 years.
> Another figure illustrates why the practice is necessary from a Swiss perspective: in 2023, 92.5 percent of all trains in Switzerland reached their destination on time, compared to only 64 percent for long-distance trains in Germany.
To add a bit more detail: SBB (Swiss federal railways) consider a train on time if it reaches its destination with less than three minutes’ delay [1]. DB (Deutsche Bahn) puts the threshold at 15 minutes ("Reisendenpünktlichkeit") [2].
[1] https://company.sbb.ch/en/the-company/responsibility-society...
[2] https://www.deutschebahn.com/de/konzern/konzernprofil/zahlen...
To put this a bit into perspective: long-distance trains in Germany typically travel for at least half a day. "Long-distance" trains in Switzerland can be compared to regional lines in Germany (the country simply isn't that large, and the majority of rail travel in Switzerland happens between Zurich/Olten/Berne/Basel, which are all within 100 km of each other). The likelihood of anything going wrong during a 1:30h train journey from Zurich to Basel is simply much lower than during a 10 hour train journey from Kiel to Freiburg. 3 minutes delay on a 1:30h train journey is a delay of 3.3%, 15 mins delay on a 10 hour train journey is a delay of 2.5%.
The reason regional trains are also delayed is that regional lines, local lines, long distance lines and freight trains are typically using the same tracks in Germany, and delayed long distance trains always get higher priority. A typical situation is that your regional train is perfectly on time, but suddenly stops, and waits for 5-10 minutes for a delayed long-distance train to overtake it. Switzerland has a similar mixed system, but as noted above, does not really have long-distance rail lines, apart from the trains that enter from Italy, Austria, France and Germany, which is the main reason why these trains are not allowed to enter if delayed. This is in contrast to the system in France, where TGV lines typically have dedicated high-speed tracks, where all trains on it travel more or less at the same speed.
Shouldn't you then add redundancy to the system by having time buffers at large stops every 2-3 hours? Or even let replacement trains start at intermediate stops as soon as the delay of the regular train is greater than X to avoid propagation of the delay into to rest of the network? Absolutely, but most stations and rail lines in Germany are either at their operational limit, or above. Having a train wait for 15 minutes in a large station just in case it is delayed would block that track for 15 minutes in the majority of cases, when the train is punctual. Also, DB simply has not enough rolling material to start replacement trains, and the rail infrastructure to even park such trains has largely been dismantled in the years after the privatization (they are doing it sometimes, but not very often).
As someone who used to travel regularly between Zurich and Frankfurt (Zurich - Hamburg line ICE) I can 100% tell you that distance is *NOT* the root cause of DB's reliability problems. Infrastructure decline is. From lack of electrification, badly maintained rolling stock, insufficient tracks you find everything. Swiss railways deal with problems like lack of capacity and geography. Deutsche Bahn deals with a lack of maintenance and investment.
Maybe you are not aware, but swiss trains dont go back to sleep after they arrive at a destination. They stop for 3-5 minutes, and then continue to their next destination. All day long, from morning till evening. Geneve to St. Gallen with like a dozen stops is pretty long way. Especially when you drive it 6 times a day.
Also generally the length of the tracks dont magically change. It is possible to create a timetable: which train should be where when, and then stick to it.
Note that before the DB, SBB were anoyed with some models of french or italien trains, which broke down regularly, putting too much pressure on the integrated timetable.
To put this into a bit of perspective, DB once was much better:
[0](https://www.france24.com/en/20180322-record-2017-deutsche-ba...)
Fyi, it's actually easier for trains to be on time the longer the journey is - that's because sane travel times aren't calculated at max speeds. So if there is any delay, you can go at a higher speed than what was used in the calculation to catch up. On shorter journeys there are simply fewer opportunities to catch up.
Now, I wouldn't be exactly shocked if DB using too high speed assumptions in their stated travel times was part of their problem with delays.
Slightly longer stops solves the problem. :-/
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DB is in major crisis with the workforce with tens of thousands of boomers retiring soon. They don’t have enough people for any redundancy.
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And how many passengers are on those 10h+ train rides that you compare to?
Because your entire point is that most passengers in Switzerland travels on those short distances. How are the riders distributed in Germany?
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And its doubtful any statistics from the German side can be trusted. In more than one occasion, I've personally experienced delayed and cancelled trains that were shown as running on time in every information system. DB either doesn't know where their trains are, or is continuously fudging the numbers.
They are intentionally preventing transparency. The operational side of DB knows where the trains are, and the infrastructure to communicate it transparently to consumer side is intentionally hampered. And so information I'd either delayed or not available.
I don't really understand the downvote, as cancelled trains do indeed not count towards the delay.
So often trains are cut short and do not reach their final destination, which is arguably even more inconvenient for the customers.
Having read through the links you provided: You are comparing two different things. DB’s Reisendenpünktlichkeit takes in delays caused by missed connections etc. SBB’s 3 minute delay are just the individual train delays. For that DB has a similar measure which defines punctual as below 6 minutes of delay. So the difference is big (3 vs 6 minutes) but not that big (3 vs 15 minutes).
You are of course right, "Reisendenpünktlichkeit Fernverkehr" hasn't even been published by DB before January 2024 - my bad.
15 min already? Damn, I remember, when the threshold was at 5m59s and that was already kind of outrageous.
Isn't moving the goalposts convenient?
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DB has the worst company culture that I'm aware of. Everything has to go by plan, and when it doesn't, someone has to be responsible. So everyone is just ass-covering all them time and not taking any risks.
This has removed the potential for improvisation in dispatching (no one wants to be responsible for delaying that other train), making the train network unable to give any trains room to make up their delays.
There is a reason every other dispatcher has problems with alcoholism.
I’ve read an interesting analysis of that situation, or rather the ass-covering culture in government adjacent power structures in Germany: The authors concluded that government agencies and offices are often led by lawyers, and therefore fostered a lawyer-inspired culture—which pretty much follows Conway‘s law. Over time, this has led to a management style overwhelmingly concerned with a fear of liability, and ass-covering instead of innovation.
That rings very true with me as a German.
>So everyone is just ass-covering all them time and not taking any risks.
Heaving lived and worked in Germany for a few years, I realized that's the reason behind all the excessive bureaucracy and processes for everything: extensive ass covering. If something goes to shit under your watch then it's not your fault because you did everything by the book and you have the extensive paper trail to prove it.
And nobody wants to go around the processes or change them, even if they know they're broken because then they would be the ones liable for the outcomes, so the entire society revolves around preserving the status quo even if the ship is heading towards the iceberg.
Change to processes is usually exclusively top-down where a boomer detached from the work in the trenches but with connections, a laundry list of a academic credentials and a pompous CV of management positions at large consultancies/companies, makes the decisions and those below execute without question while mumbling at the canteen lunch how stupid and out of touch the decisions are.
That's just my opinion as an outsider, it's not a fact I can provide citations for in case anyone asks, so it can be incorrect as all opinions go, feel free to disagree or correct me.
>Heaving lived and worked in Germany for a few years, I realized that's the reason behind all the excessive bureaucracy and processes for everything: extensive ass covering. If something goes to shit under your watch then it's not your fault because you did everything by the book and you have the extensive paper trail to prove it.
I've heard it said that the idea that Germans are efficient is a myth. (The new Berlin airport is one example.)
Germans are, rather, *rule followers*.
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I worked technical support at a mid sized company that sold some equipment that had very expensive support contracts. These support contracts made up a large % of the company income and our customers were happy to pay them.
When I joined the team first thing the director told me was "everyone fucks up, you will to, just tell the truth and you'll be good". I learned quickly that there was no finger pointing allowed in that team. If something went wrong we'd figure it out later and in the meantime do the right thing to help the customer.
It was a great culture in that group. There was surprisingly little bureaucracy in the tech support team. You could do what you needed to to get things done / got the help you needed. Almost every call that came in was immediately answered, and our customers loved us.
Later (after a series of other acquisitions and etc) we picked up a company that had more than 4x the number of support techs and they solved less than half the number of tickets. Even the tickets weren't "solved" as much as they went through the motions and they hit their metrics.
That group was all about finger pointing, they didn't seem to know how to do anything else. They weren't even good at finger pointing. One manager who loved to come up with theories as to why our team was "cheating". He somehow triggered an "investigation" into his theory as to why his team didn't solve tickets and others did. That investigation found found that his very specific theory as to how other teams were messing with the number of closed tickets .... that his team was the only one playing that game. It was so bizarre.
Unfortunately, due to the bad acts / crappy culture from the new team we ended up with a slowly evolving / massive bureaucracy too all designed as CYA type setups where everyone "did what they should have done" but really never solved any problems.
I feel like that's often the source of bureaucracy.
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It seems to me the underlying issue is that mistakes are punished and taking initiative to solve problems is not rewarded.
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How is that different from US corporations
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Its not a transport company after all. Main buisness is speculation and building on inherited areas in inner cities and tax evasion on revenue gained from that. Incentives are aligned wrong.
I visit Germany more or less regularly. The deterioration in the overall experience with DB is very noticeable. Last time I was unfortunate enough to take an ICE, they started an informal poll with the passengers to decide whether to cancel a stop in Frankfurt. I was astonished. They eventually decided not to cancel it, seemingly after a lot of time deliberating or waiting for something, but most of us lost our connections thanks to the resulting delay. It was 4am +/-.
I wonder what's going on over there. I understand that there are complex organizational issues involved, but, besides this long-term rotting, there seems to be some more recent, abrupt diseases affecting them too.
By the way they decided to fire 30k employees to save costs just a couple days ago.
Enjoy it while it lasts... it is going to be much worse very soon. Some renovation plans are completely bonkers, they will close important railways for years without any replacement.
Well their finances were broken by a series of changes:
1. Lockdowns wrecking everything. Ticket revenue plummeted etc.
2. Soon after, the government there decided to make train travel nearly free. 9 EUR a month to travel as much as you want anywhere in Germany. Justification: climate change. This doubled short-distance usage of the network immediately. Huge increase in usage + hardly any new ticket revenue = network damage. There were subsidies but you can't place that kind of load on a system without everything being stripped to the bone to try and handle it.
3. When that scheme expired they decided to replace it with a new similar ticket at 49 EUR per month, but the rail companies complained they couldn't afford this and the financial risk was huge. https://www.railjournal.com/policy/germany-introduces-e49-ti...
DB losses have exploded and debt grows as a consequence:
DB had a net loss for 2023 of some EUR 2.4 billion (compared with a net loss of EUR 227 million in the previous year). One of the negative factors here was the significant increase in interest paid, which was driven in part by higher borrowing for capital expenditures. The DB Group's results were also affected by the additional burdens of inflation-related cost increases, a sharp rise in personnel expenses and multiple strikes.
https://www.dbschenker.com/tw-en/insights/news-and-stories/p...
So basically you have a socialist government that is giving sops to its base by trying to pump rail usage for climate reasons, but without making people pay for that increased usage, at a time of high inflation. The system creaks and groans under the weight.
Those are reasonable arguments, which I've heard previously indeed. But, truth be told, although the pandemic had an impact, all this mess started to become visible at least a couple of years before it — maybe even earlier.
This is so foreign to my American perspective - our public transport is more like, "maybe it'll be on time, probably not, you'll have no way of knowing, also screw you"
> so foreign to my American perspective - our public transport is more like, "maybe it'll be on time, probably not, you'll have no way of knowing, also screw you"
New York’s Metro-North and LIRR have 95%+ on-time rates [1]. (EDIT: On time is defined as less than 6 minutes late [2].)
[1] https://www.metro-magazine.com/10217862/metro-north-lirr-exp...
[2] https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/pdf/report-9-2025.pdf
That seems... poor? A one in twenty trains late stat will basically mean every person will have to deal with a late train roughly every week?
I bet, however, it's not uniformly distributed and some lines are late more than others.
Hopefully that 95% is them being honest about the current state, while they push higher.
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My memory from a few months of commuting on LIRR is that on-time is within ten minutes of schedule.
CURRENT TIME: 9:45
NEXT TRAIN: 9:42
STATUS: ON TIME
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BART's on-time definition is "within 5 minutes of scheduled arrival at final station". I recall in NYC's Metro that trains would frequently "go express" and start skipping stops at arbitrary moments. Do these systems do this as well and have that definition? I think I now understand why they do this stuff: they're trying to juice metrics because skipping stations speeds up the train a lot.
The correct comparison in this case is probably Amtrak, which has much lower on time rates.
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The Swiss rail lines are used close to capacity. If a train is too much late, it has follow-on effects on other trains, and the whole railway system can start to run into problems. So for the whole system to work, there can't be any overly late trains. This applies to all trains, not just German trains.
So this doesn't really have anything to do with that single train not being on time, or with differences in culture or something like that, it's about keeping the system running. If you have a system that isn't used at capacity, then it doesn't matter much if individual trains run late, the system itself will still keep on running.
It's absolutely crazy to me! I can see my uber driver on my phone stopping to pick up a pretzel from the convenience store, but I can't see where the bus is or get any kind of estimate of when it's going to arrive at the busstop.
On vacation this summer in europe, all tram stops had estimated arrival times. Ridiculous, 5-10 minutes out at worst, they wouldn't even need the electronic signs, just a placard that says "just skim your phone for a bit, it'll come".
You are describing a well-off high density city in Western Europe.
I unfortunately live in "we used to have trams, most of them were scrapped in favour of bus lines, then the bus lines were scrapped because they were not profitable enough, go buy a car" Europe.
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> but I can't see where the bus is or get any kind of estimate of when it's going to arrive at the busstop.
Not true in New York City. See all the busses and all the stops. Estimated number of passengers and arrival times.
https://bustime.mta.info/#m4
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I've taken transit in a few US and Canadian cities. Most of the time there was some app that reported the live location of the busses and trains in transit.
Often I could get the data through Transit, but sometimes they have their own app.
https://transitapp.com/
Trams and buses tend to be more unreliable because they use the same streets as cars (sometimes they get extra lanes, but not always). Metros tend to be more reliable in my experience, I can usually trust what it says on the electronic sign (one big exception is Cologne where the metro isn't a real metro and runs on the street half of the time).
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North American trains have a huge amount of level crossings, which, predictably, cause tons of accidents when oblivious drivers get hit by trains. Although most of the world considers high speed trains to be incompatible with level crossings, the recently built Brightline in Florida has several level crossings and has already hit many cars. [0][1]
Caltrain routinely has delays due to accidents involving grade crossings. Despite spending decades and hundreds of millions of dollars, they still haven't managed to fully grade separate the line. [2]
Fun fact, Canada's Turbotrain was one of the earliest examples of high speed rail in the world in the 1960s and was even faster than the Shinkansen at the time. However, it hit a truck only one hour into its debut run. This is often cited as the main reason why there's no high speed rail in Canada despite the density and proximity of Toronto and Montreal being ideal for such a line. [3]
[0] https://www.wptv.com/news/region-s-palm-beach-county/delray-...
[1] https://wsvn.com/news/local/broward/brightline-train-hits-ca...
[2] https://www.caltrain.com/projects/ccs
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAC_TurboTrain
Not sure why you'd want to lump all of America in to one category of failure when it's demonstrably untrue. Quick example - BART in the Bay Area has a 92-93% on-time rate.
There must be some definitional trick here (like canceled trains not counting, or something) because my memory of BART (as a daily multi-commuter: home to work, work to sports, sports to home) was frequent moments of "10 CAR SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT / MILLBRAE TRAIN IN FOR-TEE MINUTES" and shit like that. Enough of that in the year 2019 led to me switching to e-bike/car and frequently this is a much faster trip than the train.
Swiss trains define on-time as within 3 minutes of schedule, and this includes all mechanical issues, suicides, etc.
And this includes multi-hour intercity train lines, double-decker trains, trains that stop inside of airports, local trains, everything. If you have just a couple lines in a single city, under a single jurisdiction, with no interdependencies and no freight on the same lines, then of course it gets a lot easier.
The issue is that trains need tracks. Tracks are very expensive and a limited resource. The stricter you are about time the more trains you can pack into a given amount of trackage.
A bus uses a road and doesn't have a problem like that because there is far more road than the buses need.
The Dallas Area Raipd Transit on-time rate is about the same as this Swiss train system at 93%. The Trinity Railway Express is 97%, so higher on-time rate than the Swiss system.
And how do they define “on-time”? In Switzerland a train is considered on time if it reaches its destination with less than three minutes’ delay.
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This is by no means true across the country but I’m sure it plays well to the “American public transport sucks” sentiment some folks like to cling to.
Across the whole country it's absolutely true. There are car only distances for a lot of stuff.
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That quote sounds like my experience with Deutsche Bahn.
“Missed your connection? Sounds like a you problem.”
"Skill issue"
That's like Italian trains, but it's more like "nobody knows what platform it's gonna be at; keep a look out and run when you see it; also, screw you".
Hard but entirely relatable.
Deutsche bahn is horrible, privatizing it in the 90s was one of many failures of that movement and was leading to crumbling infrastructure, an insurmountable hardware and technical debt and now to the most complex train system probably in the world.
Hopefully some people learn from it - privatizing critical infrastructure like this is doomed to fail. You get the bad from a public company and the bad from the government bureaucracy.
Deutsche Bahn is wholly owned by the federal government (https://www.deutschebahn.com/en/group/ataglance/aufsichtsrat...). This is exactly the same relationship as SBB has to the Swiss government. I don't think the corporatisation (not privatisation) is the problem in this case.
DB is just a holding company. The companies below are not 100% state owned.
> now to the most complex train system probably in the world.
Having seen the US attempt and lived with the UK railway, the German one is definitely a huge improvement. Yes, it does go wrong sometimes, but my experience at university in the UK was the end of term had two carriages with twice as many passengers as seats, that regularly terminated 20 minutes before the official destination, and my experience visiting the UK now that I live in Berlin is that the UK rail fares are (or often were pre-pandemic) more expensive than the flights to the UK. There's even a standard "money saving trick" on UK fare prices where you split a journey from A to B into A->C, C->B, where C is one of the stops in the route from A to B so you don't need to disembark.
That doesn't mean there's no room for improvement, neither the UK nor the US railways are role models. (I assume Japan is still a role model for rail? Not heard much since the 90s…)
Honestly it's a very low bar and Germans should aspire for better and not for a meager "we are not the worst there is".
I would say you need to compare DB to other Western European railway operator/networks. In my personal experience, DB comes dead last and it's not even close to the 2nd to last. Renfe (Spain), Trenitalia/Italo (Italy), SNCF (France) have much better services, at least on the long-distance routes (> 200KM). So much so that they are a viable alternative to domestic flights.
Additionally, most of those countries also have a much worse geography to contend with (e.g. Italy with the Alps and Appennini) and they still manage to have a nice high-speed rail network that works.
Finally, answering your last point, Japan still is THE role model. So much so that you can get stuff delivered to a train station your train is transiting through (at least with the Shinkansen lines) because the carrier knows exactly when your train will be there. I was astonished by that.
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And we're talking about high speed rail here (ICE trains). The UK has exactly one line that qualifies - from the channel tunnel to London St Pancras, and I don't think the US has any.
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The ticket splitting thing you refer in the UK to works in other countries also.
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Privatization has brought some truly crazy incentives into the spotlight. Like how bridge maintenance is paid by the company, but when a worn out bridge needs replacing it's suddenly a government investment.
I consider it safe to assume that the reason for this is that it had been just the same when it was still a government org, but a government org will see its responsibilities very different from a company eagerly cosplaying shareholder-value while the sole shareholder happens to be the government they can freely rip off because of an ongoing legacy approach to the principal-agent problem.
As for delays, I think one reason, besides lack of maintenance and the massive interdependence in that large network that allows neither a star nor a main axis simplification is the high speed Autobahn: if they weren't overambitious in terms of travel times they would perhaps put bigger time buffers in their schedule and that would certainly help a lot.
Japan did it in 1987 and the shinkanzen is still well known for its on time percentage.
And they don't cheat either with an x minute grace period. On time means the minute on the timetable.
So it's certainly possible.
Japan is also heavily consolidated compared to other countries.
The largest shareholders for all the privatized rails in Japan are a mixture of Mitsubishi Group, Mitsui Group and Mizuhou Group.
Western anti-trust doesn't allow that level of consolidation - everything is basically owned by a handful of Keiretsu.
I highly recommend reading "Corporate Financing and Governance in Japan" by Takeo Hoshi and Anil Kashyap to learn about this [0].
[0] - https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262582483/corporate-financing-a...
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"Privatizing" is not the correct word for it - DB was reformed and is now a company instead of a government agency, but it's still 100% owned by the state. Which however didn't stop it from acting like a profit-oriented private company, favoring short term savings over long term sustainability, which led to the sorry state in which German rail infrastructure is today. IMHO the major issue with the reform is that the trains and the infrastructure were left in the same company (with other train operators forced to use the tracks provided by the "incumbent"), which leads to all kinds of conflicts of interest.
" Which however didn't stop it from acting like a profit-oriented private company, " Except it does not make any profit. It is tightly controlled by the government. They could change any management behaviour. But they don't.
So its just a goverment agency.
I think it's worth adding the fact, that not only the Deutsche Bahn has been privatized, but also the Deutsche Bundespost (mail service/telecommunication) has been privatized and split into Deutsche Post and Deutsche Telekom coming from the same policy.
As far as I know this all boils down to the fact, that the European Union (or better it's predecessor) wanted to get rid of state monopolies. It did work out for the "Deutsche Post" (more or less) and very good for "Deutsche Telekom". But "Deutsche Bahn" was a failure coming from that policy.
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It's the words that were used in the 90s. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahnprivatisierung
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Besides the point that Deutsche Bahn is goverment owned, it is worth pointing out that Western and Eastern German had " to crumbling infrastructure, an insurmountable hardware and technical debt and now to the most complex train system probably in the world. " + much much debts.
Calling the Deutsche Bahn private is a very good indicator that the person isn't able to look up Wikipedia Article and think critically.
The process was called Bahnprivatisierung.
See Wikipedia article here. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahnprivatisierung
Translating that to english is train privatization. Does this lead to a privately OWNED company? I never said that. The decision to privatize and to make austerity measures instead of investments shows today. In the past 30 years the streets were more important for governments and it shows.
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Can’t comment on the 90s, but it only seems to have become truly unreliable in the last 5 years maybe? I take a train through Germany 2-3 times a year, and delays and faults are pretty much inevitable on every journey.
I’ve been to Germany twice to visit family. All of my trains had delays (one was because a suicide though), and every time Ive heard from family, they are also having train delays. It’s very unreliable.
My experiences in France were quite the opposite. So much for stereotypes.
I can't say what it was like 5 years ago, but I take a DB train 2-3 times a week and I can never be sure that I'll get to my destination on time, or that I'll even get there on the train.
If you privatize with the right rule structure and policing from the government, with payment as a function of being on time or not. You can have a good system.
> privatizing critical infrastructure like this is doomed to fail
It worked great for rail in Japan, so I’m not sure that’s the obvious lesson to learn.
It HAS NOT worked great for Sweden.
Source: I live in Sweden there was a DN article recently about it. Here it is
https://archive.is/zaGtb
Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20240721074607/https://www.dn.se...
(Its all too segmented, the trains, the track all different companies now nobody sees the full picture)
and https://archive.is/MztnY
Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20240726054426/https://www.dn.se...
(The land is not enough to fix trains and the land next to it was reserved but somehow sold to build a sports arena because the train land section became a company that had to post good numbers)
I hear UK is not too happy about their rail too. https://youtu.be/DlTq8DbRs4k?si=yNWcAUZ69nN1B29O
Seems like it just does not work to separate rail and traffic like that.
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It's actually a different system - Japan's network was privatised and split into competing companies with all shares publicly traded (bar some exceptions), the Deutsche Bahn was privatised into a single, state-owned company. As such it is beholden to slow, non-deciding German governments, including investments into the network.
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It worked OK for the UK. Passenger numbers, which had been steadily falling, started to increase. On the other hand, there are complaints about high fares.
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Japan did it differently than the EU counterparts:
>The most basic, fundamental difference between the British and Japanese railways is how they were privatised. In Britain, the tracks were split from the trains.
from a ft article I apparently can't link
The split of infrastructure and the invisible hand of the train operator market seems to be a correlation.
For context German trains over the last few years have become increasingly delayed. To the point that it is now the norm.
Official Deutsche Bahn figures are likely underreporting the extent of the problem as the reported times and actual timetables are -aggressively- out of sync (to the frustration of many riders).
It's hard to dissect the true source of the problem as there are various factors at play. However the central cause is starving the system of funds. This presents a strong warning for countries that are trying to encourage the use of public transport in order to meet their climate goals.
Some detail is available here: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-whats-wrong-with-the-deutsche-...
The problem with the legislature about funding is that regular maintainance of the railroad network would has to be paid by Deutsche Bahn itself, whereas creation of new infrastructure or complete rebuilding of completely degraded railway infrastructure is to be paid out of the federal budget. Taking preventative/regular maintainance also is at the discretion of the Deutsche Bahn as a corporation. Of course this incentives the executives of the Bahn to let the railroads rot.
I have a hard time imagining that the perverse incentives in the system have not been obvious to those in power at its inception.
I didn't do a deep dive into the issues as there are many - but a contributor to the tardiness is the decommissioning of track switches/overtaking lanes. While this allowed for a short term economy, it harmed the reliability of the network and causes flow-on traffic.
I include this detail as the source of the largest problems are not necessarily about creation of new infrastructure (although that of course would be the solution), but the deletion of existing infrastructure.
I agree except for your „central cause“ hypothesis.
What happens if you throw tons of money on something as dysfunctional and lacking a business model? You get Die Bahn.
Calling for “more money” as a central cause is part of the problem.
"The network is simply overloaded," said Böttger. In contrast to Luxembourg and Switzerland, which invested around €575 (about $625) per capita and €450 per capita in rail infrastructure respectively, the figure in Germany is just €114.
Source:
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-whats-wrong-with-the-deutsche-...
Does Germany spend less on its trains than Switzerland?
To quote the article I linked:
"The network is simply overloaded," said Böttger. In contrast to Luxembourg and Switzerland, which invested around €575 (about $625) per capita and €450 per capita in rail infrastructure respectively, the figure in Germany is just €114.
What is the warning? Don’t starve the system of funds?
Last time I was in Germany (a few months ago) I almost missed my flight because my train was delayed by over half an hour. I was shocked.
Last fall I almost missed my ferry because my train up to Hamburg was so delayed that it missed my connection to Kiel, and my backup connection pulled out just as my arriving train was stopping.
I knew things were getting bad in Germany so I had planned for enough time for a secondary backup. It left on time, but kept getting slower and slower. Then they announced that due to rail works, there was a bus from Neumünster to Kiel.
At Neumünster, I instead got a taxi, which (thanks to all the taxes going to the Autobahn instead of rails, I presume), got me to the ferry with a peak speed of 150kph, and 10 minutes before loading ended - some four hours after I had planned to be there.
Climate goal and public transport is also more of a joke than scientifically sound.
For example, the gear for the participating teams at the latest EM in Germany was transported in parallel by the empty buses the teams usually use.
The whole VIP travel caused a lot of additional cars on the street.
Don’t confuse means for an end. There is a lot of marketing and money involved - especially in green energy.
These 3 reputable, scientifically backed, sources disagree with your anecdote:
United Nations:
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2021/10/trans...
US Department of Transport:
https://www.transit.dot.gov/climate-challenge
WRI:
https://www.wri.org/insights/current-state-of-public-transpo...
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If you question something like public transportation being climate friendly as being scietific sound, maybe you should bring up some evidence or data to back this up.
Also some anecdote about how buses where used at some major event does not allow any conclusions to be drawn about public transportation in general.
Also "there is a lot of marketing and money involved - especially in green energy" is a rather general polemic statement, which could also some clarification.
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Just compare the colored rings (green = on time, orange = delayed more than 3 minutes, red = delayed more than 9 minutes) between the trains in Germany, Switzerland, and France here to get a general feeling of how bad things have become with Deutsche Bahn:
https://travic.app/?z=9&x=890440.8&y=6126327.9&l=osm_standar...
And today is a good day in southwestern Germany, just look at the current general redness in the Ruhr area and Cologne.
You can scroll up and look at Sweden as well. Not a pretty picture.
Unbelievable, >9 minutes delay seems to have become the norm ..
There's an amazing talk about DB's punctuality from the 2019 Chaos Communication Congress: BahnMining, David Kriesel. Available in German, and interpreted to English: https://dkriesel.com/blog/2019/1229_video_und_folien_meines_....
My favorite anecdote from riding a German train in Switzerland was a journey from Interlaken (Switzerland) to Frankfurt in Germany. Now if you're not used to train schedules: Stops are quick, and trains are punctual. It's fairly common for stops to just be 2-3 minutes. Connections between trains are often around 5 minutes, sometimes shorter.
So, this Intercity Express departed Interlaken perfectly on schedule, made a bunch of scheduled stops in Spiez, Thun, Bern, and continued on to the border city of Basel. Everything running perfectly on schedule, the train arrived at the Swiss station in Basel, continued (on time) to the German train station that's still in the same city, just a few minutes farther. Having had 3-5 minute stops all the way from early morning to lunchtime, the train then sat in the German station for about 15 minutes, departed with only a minor delay, and just a few yards after exiting the station proceeded to stop, sit on the tracks for half an hour ("to catch up with the prevalent delay conditions on the German rail network"), before starting to move again.
Waiting in a comfy seat on a train with working AC isn't the worst of fates, and we made the final destination within half an hour of the scheduled time, so it all went well -- just funny to observe how different parts of this interconnected network had very different ideas of scheduling.
It's a classic case of efficiency vs latency.
Swiss railways optimise for punctuality, sacrificing line capacity (compensated for with double-decker cars).
Meanwhile every other European rail transport authority seems to be bent on squeezing out the most of the lines it has.
I grew up in a city that had two parallel rail lines in the east-west axis - one for long-distance connections, cargo and everything else, the other a refurbished old main line with trains only once per hour.
The latter was punctual almost to the minute(even if comparatively slow at an average 30km/h including stops), while the former was a mess and you were often better off driving instead.
My friend living in the suburbs close to that refurbished line always boasted how it took him a grand total of 18 minutes to get to the city centre and he could rely on the train to always arrive. That was quicker than I could get there by any means, despite a similar distance.
What you said goes against what the other commenter have said, that is Swiss trains cannot inject late trains into the system because the tracks are used at capacity, I.e. there is no buffer for trains to “queue”. Every train is always at the expected place, at the expected time. Hence the system is always at maximum throughput and on-time.
> SBB grants Eurocity trains on the Munich-Zurich route a buffer of ten minutes before reallocating their train path, and even 15 minutes for ICE trains between Freiburg and Basel.
Emphasis mine. This whole system works because they account for delays by having a time buffer in each route that can be consumed by going slower.
During my commutes along Lake Zurich I noticed that the trains would rarely arrive earlier than 30s before schedule - even if it meant going below the maximum allowed speed, as evidenced by instances where the train used the same section to restore the buffer by going faster.
What to do with late trains is a very interesting problem from a network stability perspective.
It’s somewhat akin to the packet dropping question, though packets don’t complain as loudly as passengers.
In a rail network with one train a day it’s not a big issue, but with regular service you can’t let a late train get out of control or it blows the entire network out of sync until you have some dead time - which is one reason some systems have an “hour of the dead” where no trains run - it lets it reset and get back to something sane.
Trying to build a system that has 15 minute heads and can handle a train going late or dying on the rails is really, really hard without ridiculously complexity like quad tracks everywhere and spare train sets at every station.
I agree that it's a hard and interesting problem. Yet other countries seem to be managing it better, or there is something structurally different.
I read somewhere that one of the key issues in Germany is that freight and passenger trains share the same network. While a delay of 15 minutes can be wildly problematic for a passenger train (missing connections, stranding at some godforsaken train station etc.), it is virtually irrelevant for freight. Then again, that should make it easy enough to always prioritize passengers over freight, but either that isn't being done or it's still insufficient.
The USA has the freight problem because trains can't pass each other unless there is a siding long enough for the train that is being passed; and the freight trains are too long.
Where there's double-track (or more) it's not as big an issue because the train can pass on the other side of the track (tracks are often handled as if they were a road with one lane going in one direction and the other going the other way, but you can swap around with signaling).
The other major solution (bandaid) is to add dwell time at stations so that there's room to make up - the timetable says when the train will leave not when it will arrive, and if it normally arrives five minutes early, it just waits; if it lost time and arrives one minute before departure, it will just be there a minute and the lost time is made up.
But while that may reduce the "worst case" scenario, it does make the average travel time longer.
Reading this on a German train that is expected to arrive in Zurich 25 minutes late, hoping that the connection will not be cancelled at the boarder as per usual.
outcome?
Note that trains to Zurich and Basel SBB then end in Basel Bad (or sometimes they let it go to Basel SBB). It’s a separate train station in Basel which is run by Deutsche Bahn so it’s not literally “turning back at the border”.
IIRC Swiss passengers waiting in Basel SBB get a replacement train travelling at the original time.
When I was living in Germany circa 1999 I was riding the train from the former East Berlin to Dresden and remember watching the engineer look at his watch and at the clock on the platform, making a point to push the driving lever forward at the exact moment the seconds hand hit zero.
Seems fair. You can't make it right for everyone, and at one point they need to draw a boundary, to care for your citizens and keep up the standards. Otherwise everything would fall to the lowest common denominator.
I don't think it's fair for the article to say that a "temporary measure" has now become a permanent one, it likely is temporary until the problem is solved.
Sometimes I ask myself why the schedule of those always-late trains isn't changed. If it would be planned that it always arrives "15min later", people and other transportation could work with that timing so much better.
There's an old anecdote about this, almost certainly false, but worth sharing, goes something like this:
The Swiss trains arrive on time, more often than any other country. Second place is the Germans. What's the difference?
The Germans set the timetable, and carefully measure arrivals. Then the famed German engineering kicks in, and they move Heaven and Earth to identify and fix any problems which are keeping the trains off schedule.
The Swiss set the timetable, and carefully measure arrivals. They use these measurements to identify when trains aren't arriving on schedule and... adjust the timetable.
The German train system isn't awful, when talking about long distance trains. It's not good, but it's not awful.
Look at the regional feeder lines, though. Unmaintained tracks, ancient trains, diesel instead of electric. Many towns have no connection at all - where I used to work, there was an old train station, but the tracks had been ripped up years earlier.
I used to (have to) rely on the German train system. Thankfully, I am now in Switzerland. It is a huge difference.
That probably strongly depends on where exactly you're living, though. I can't complain about my local trains, which are nothing like what you describe.
The long-distance network in Germany has routes that take more than 8 hours. Delays of 15 minutes are because of network complexity not uncommon.
SBB - Swiss rail - doesn't want its schedule to be affected by the long-distance DB - German - services. So it doesn't allow the DB service to enter the country after a given cut-off delay.
This means that travellers need to transfer to an SBB service for the final 1-2 hours of their trip. This transfer typically takes 15-30 minutes.
You can travel across Japan, similar or even larger distances, with practically no delays.
As a passenger it's not always about the bare number of minutes, the problem is that I might get stranded somewhere, and train stations in Germany are generally very dirty and somewhat unsafe at odd hours.
> Delays of 15 minutes are because of network complexity not uncommon.
If the delay is that likely, due to the long distance of the route, isn't the obvious step to take then to adjust the schedule? So that at some stations along the route trains have a buffer.
I don’t buy the idea that it’s mainly because of network complexity and line length. Local lines, even ones that don’t share tracks with any other trains, are routinely cancelled or delayed, as well. Other large countries manage to run trains on time (Japan, Spain…).
DB is uniquely bad and I don’t think we should be making excuses for them.
The delays in Germany can also be felt here in Linz/Austria.
For years the train from Linz to Vienna was always punctual.
However, recently (Last ~9 Months or so) all trains are super later. The reason is, all of them go through Germany (Innsbruck (via German) -> Salzburg -> Linz ->Vienna), and given everything is delayed in Germany it also delays Austrian trains.
Not that I can blame the Swiss for wanting to make the trains run on time, but I laughed at this part:
> SBB introduced the regulation back in July 2022 in consultation with Deutsche Bahn. Introduced as a "temporary measure" at the time, it is now permanent.
Just a reminder to folks that there is nothing so permanent as a “temporary” government program.
I wouldn't mind the delays that much if we had more direct connections between cities. But the reality is that you book a connection to another city, and that connection was never possible in the first place because of some construction work or bad rails or something else. They know they can't make that connection but they never update their schedule to reflect that. And then you are on the first leg of the journey and everything goes to hell. You have to find a replacement train, your reservations are void, you have to wait hours.
And the worst is that you have no recourse. You get 25% of your ticket after ONE HOUR! It makes me so angry.
> And the worst is that you have no recourse. You get 25% of your ticket after ONE HOUR! It makes me so angry.
Unfortunately, it's not as if airlines were any better. Less than 3h of delay and you get nothing.
At least, with DB you can get the money for your reservation back if they cancelled your original connection. Still sucks to be in an overcrowded train without a reservation, though.
Direct connections are definitely better, as you say.
As a foreigner, I am currently travelling for work in Europe and had a DB train from Munich all the way to Ljubljana (Slovenia) through multiple connections. Interestingly, the trains were on time until we were in Germany but when I reached the last connection in Villach (Austria), suddenly they cancelled the train from Villach->Ljubljuana without any notice at last minute. As a foreigner without any understanding, I had to scramble through and find a Flixbus which thankfully I was able to buy tickets online.
Look for using Bus like Flixbus as an alternative if possible. They are not perfect but more reliable than the DB train for sure.
Flixbus: can book online, include bicycle. Actual bus: we don't take bikes.
I actually use flixbusses a lot. Great for pleasant journeys at a good price to see other places.
> Look for using Bus like Flixbus as an alternative if possible. They are not perfect but more reliable than the DB train for sure.
I wouldn't recommend that, at least not for longer rides. Apart from the fact that I don't trust their overworked drivers (there was a big accident this year that may have been caused by a conflict between the drivers, according to some witness reports), its cheapness also tends to attract rather unsavoury individuals. I have all sorts of horror stories, from the guy (probably on some drugs) who started shouting multiple times in the middle of the night, to some dude who fell asleep with his orange juice bottle still open, which then spilled all over me, to the guy who thought it was a good idea to take drugs across the Swiss border (which caused a massive delay as, of course, his baggage was then extensively searched), etc. I've met weird people on trains too, but Flixbus is a whole other level.
Villach to Ljubljana is a joined ÖBB and SŽ line, not Deutsch Bahn. Your ticket was with DB, but the train getting cancelled had absolutely nothing to do with them.
If you had asked at the Reisezentrum at Villach station you would have been presented with options to continue your journey, or get a refund.
Understood but from my perspective, the cause doesn't matter. I booked through DB and it was not a good experience. Was my very first Time and I had a few minutes to decide what to do as I had people waiting in Ljubljuana. Didnt even have time for a refund for that portion of the journey.
I have decided to not take the train next time for sure if I can. Will try bus first.
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This is one of the worst parts of European train travel these days - while airlines are forced to find you replacement connection, give you hotel and even pay you a fee if they're late, there's nothing like that for trains.
So you can end up with a blame game of "well, you bought a ticket from DB, but OBB fscked up, good luck being stuck in the middle of nowhere!" situation that makes you wish you took a plane.
I always avoided German trains when riding in Switzerland: they were often late or canceled, dirty, and full. Especially given that I could take a cleaner, punctual SBB train with the same ticket and for the same price.
The situation with trains in Germany is appalling. Our kids need to go to school by train. Even though it is the only line using that route, there are constant delays and cancellations. DB (Deutsche Bahn) often does not even care to inform the passengers of such events over the loudspeakers or displays. I routinely take at least one train earlier to increase the probability of reaching my destination in time. Working from home has saved me a good amount of stress over the years.
This is not motivating anyone to switch from cars to trains.
Alternative title blue or OP could have used: "More and more German trains are late and not allowed to enter Switzerland"
would have been more accurate, less clickbait.
Just to add one more voice to the choir of outraged DB customers: in Russia, for a long-distance train to get cancelled, it takes something like a new World War to begin, I don't remember a single case. And as you may imagine, Russian Railways are not hiring the brightest talent awailable.
In Germany they don't even express regret when they do it.
That‘s what we got for privatization and many years of „conservative“ ministers of transport and public infrastructure. Just wait for the first bridge to fail with a train or a car on it and the calls for public-private partnerships… (Writing this on a moderately ICE-train)
https://youtu.be/0rb9CfOvojk?si=2QLVJJM2lizmqKcF
DB Data Mining which showed hacks used to gamble metric
A nice data science ccc talk about German trains https://youtu.be/0rb9CfOvojk?si=dZLY7exrC0SiDxje
> On the Freiburg-Basel route, as many as 12.4 percent of trains had to turn back.
This is not as dramatic as it sounds, since Basel is at the border. There's probably many trains into town.
Switzerland seems so practical. If this sort of thing was done in America there would be endless whining and it would be rolled back.
Their train system is one of the best things about living there.
The grain of salt is that it's a small country that's basically the size of the Bay Area, and it was never car dependent.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/thetruesize.com/mockup.html#?border...
This pretty much is the case in the US. People complain all the time about amtrak being delayed by freight, but the law has been that amtrak gets priority for decades.
It's just that they only get priority if they're actually on time (the initial booking of the rail essentially). Since they're constantly late they always miss this time and therefore have to wait.
As they run into problems with German punctuality, I wonder what happens with the Italian trains!
Man, with that late time percentage, the Germans are trying to compete with Amtrak in the US.
How humiliating. A teacher did the same thing to me, it worked.
You weren't allowed to enter Switzerland?
Based on kdrama, this seems common in Korea. You're 10 seconds late, you can't enter the school grounds.
Interesting culture if that's seen as a punishment. In my school half of the kids would try to be a minute late (so they can't enter the school and 'have to' slack off the whole day).
Why?! How does this help? That sounds insane and pointless to the education process. Unless the point was to educate your kids to be obedient slaves with childhood trauma for their corporate overlords.
We used to have something similar during communist rule in my European country, to teach kids who's boss and to respect authority.
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There is no saving the Deutsche Bahn. Everyone who knows someone working there knows this. Just ban everyone currently working there from ever working there again and reshuffle the cards.
They're already severely understaffed, I doubt kicking out the current people working there would help.
On a top management level, maybe, but I don't think train conductors can do much about a train schedule that is impossibly failure-prone, based on ageing and inadequate infrastructure and trains in disrepair.
I have two train conductors in my extended family. They have an ingrained anti-performance mindset and culture. There is no recovery from that.
> are too unpunctual
ಠ_ಠ why not "aren't punctual"..
Because the later a train is, the more likely it is to disrupt other trains. So the amount of unpunctuality matters.
In that case, "late" would be quantative.
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In heaven the cooks are Italian, the lovers are French, the mechanics are German, the police are British, and it's all organized by the Swiss.
(In hell the cooks are British, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, the police are German, and it's all organized by the Italians.)
Quote from Harry Lime character in The Third Man:
"...in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
FWIW, cuckoo clocks originated in the Black Forest, southern Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuckoo_clock
But it reminds me of the famous quote from Bertrand Russell
> My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others.
(Bertrand Russell / 1872-1970 / Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization? / 1930)
http://atheisme.free.fr/Quotes/Russell.htm
Paraphrased from other Internet threads where that quote came up: Something about their mercenary army, the Swiss Guard, Euler, Einstein, the Bernoulli family, 28 Nobel laureates, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Swiss_inventions_and_d...
I think Euler by himself competes pretty well with all that on behalf of the Swiss.
great quote
I think the food and climate of England were a huge driver of British Imperial expansion. The elite were desperate to get out and so the British always had a large supply of soldiers and administrators for their colonies (until they were decimated in WWI).
No. Swiss arw not good at organizing stuff. Source: I worked in a Swiss company. It was not well organized at all.
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Sounds like in hell you get your food cooked by Gordon Ramsey and Jamie Oliver, with dessert by Mary Berry.
Could be worse.
James May bettered Gordon Ramsay in a practical cooking competition. The gearhead from TopGear baked the better fish pie. And on Ramsay's own cooking show no less.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwPmLwW1-PA
Have you actually tasted their food or just looked at pictures of it on the internet.
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“Hell’s Kitchen”
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Apart from the root issue here someone need to remind that Switzerland is the parasite of EU. Basically they have all EU rights and no obligations. EU should tax them heavily so that they contribute to solve e.g. EU transportation issues.
Why in Heaven's name should Switzerland be (heavily!?) taxed to solve EU transportation issues? Should Switzerland then tax the EU as well to pay for its own transportation?
Until today I believed that the world had solved these problems by charging transportation fees but you seem to have very different ideas.
> Basically they have all EU rights and no obligations.
Switzerland certainly doesn't have all EU rights. For instance, they are not applicable for any EU subsidies. They do not have any voting rights. They are exluded from certain scientific cooperation programs (e.g. the ESFRI). And the list goes on.
I do consider Switzerland doings as hostile to EU.
1) Switzerland gain on using EU transportation and free market but does not contribute fair fee to maintain and build it.
You can tax EU - we will see who will survive.
2) Switzerland does unfair tax competition
3) Switzerland helped hide EU citizens untaxed money (maybe still does)
4) Switzerland helps Russian oligarchs maintain their wealth and many other criminals all around the world.
5) Last but not least: If Switzerland does not care about Ukraine dying because it is ‘neutral’ and yet still wants safe borders, then I don’t fucking care about Switzerland well being.
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What are you talking about, my marginal tax rate in Switzerland is 50%. When I last went to Prague, I changed trains at a station that prominently said it was financed by “friendship funds” from Switzerland. My taxes already are paying for Germany’s transport infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Swiss students couldn’t go on Erasmus for a year, because someone in Brussels threw a hissy fit.
I’m a fan of the EU, but let’s not pretend it’s not throwing its weight around, just like any other huge federal government.
These aren't EU transportation issues, these are GER transportation issues. The most powerful "parasitism" argument against CH is probably the tax arbitrage you can get from Zug/Lucerne, but a lot of that already happens inside EU itself with Luxembourg/Ireland/etc.
But yes, a fight over bigger contributions/more harmonization is inevitable within the next 10 years.