Comment by mike_hearn

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.