Comment by pm215
21 hours ago
There's an example of this in railway electrification: if you scroll down to the graph in https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5801/cmselect/cmtran... it shows that the UK tends to do electrification as occasional big projects, whereas Germany has consistently done about the same mileage every year for decades, presumably with the same institutions maintaining their expertise and just moving on to the next bit of track. Their costs are a quarter of the UK's...
Yeah, but whatever Germany is doing is obviously wrong because 62.5% of their stops have trains arriving within 6 minutes of target time https://www.dw.com/en/over-a-third-of-deutsche-bahn-long-dis... while the UK has 85.9% of their stops having trains arriving within 3 minutes of target time https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/performance/passeng...
So whatever the Germans are doing with their rail, thank god the UK isn't.
I don't think you can conclude from overall performance of a complex system that a particular aspect of it (the way of electrifying tracks) is done wrong.
From what I understand, the problems in the German railway network stem predominantly from growing demand meeting the results of chronic underinvestment in infrastructure. That does not automatically mean that all of the work should be done in big chunks instead of continuously. They still could be doing some things right, and I think it is worth pointing that out. I find it more interesting and productive than blanket dismissal.
Iirc that is mostly an issue of the scheduling and not the construction itself. The operator is also known to have reliability problems with many train types (not necessarily the stops or tracks themselves).