Comment by captainpiggies

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.