Comment by myth2018
1 year ago
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.