Comment by marcyb5st
1 year ago
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.
Italy's geography is not universally worse. The mostly linear shape limits the number of required connections between stations: you only need a couple 1000km long distance lines to connect everything on the north-south axis, whereas in Germany they must go 500km+ in every direction for full coverage.
Yes and no. If you need to go from cities east to cities on the west you need to tunnel a lot and those choke points also make maintenance more tricky because you can't really re-route trains elsewhere without adding hours to the trip. Germany, as you said, it's mostly open ground and so you can go in any direction. Rerouting trains in this setting using viable alternatives for effective maintenance should be easier.
And those longer trips wouldn't even count as delays since they were hopefully announced weeks ahead of schedule and so passengers know it will take longer to get to their destination.
Long distance with Deutsch Bahn is an embarrassment. I don't know if they have any line where a car isn't faster.
> I don't know if they have any line where a car isn't faster.
Berlin-Munich
Depends on the conditions. It is 6 hours by car, but with a BMW or Mercedes you can easily make that 5 hours (averaging just 117km/h). Meanwhile it is 4,5 hours by train, but will likely be over 5 hours due to delays.
In France, Paris to Lyon is 2 hours by train and there is simply no way going by car is faster (legally).
These are just examples, my point is that a high-speed line should be a lot faster than going by car. Not slightly faster, and sometimes even slower.