Comment by mosura
1 day ago
German trains, as recently as the 90s, were phenomenal, and integrated superbly with the Swiss and others. It is in the 21st century that Germany has gone off the rails.
1 day ago
German trains, as recently as the 90s, were phenomenal, and integrated superbly with the Swiss and others. It is in the 21st century that Germany has gone off the rails.
In other words: it's going downhill ever since the DB was privatized.
DB is not privatized. It is 100% owned by the state.
DB has been reorganized as an AG in the 90s, i.e. a corporation under private law. They are forced to (at least try to) make a profit for their shareholders, which is a common trait of private organizations. They consistently do so via short-sighted (mis-)management, another common trait with many private organizations. This privatized corporation is indeed fully owned by the state as its only shareholder, but unfortunately that doesn't manifest in the DB being run as the critical infrastructure that it is. I suspect that the indirections in power over the corporation that the privatized structure imposes is a key reason for why it became such a disaster.
12 replies →
"Off the rails" hehe
The Netherlands has a very similar problem: the train system was privatized in the late 90s/early 2000s and has been going downhill since the 2010s or so. While it's still better than Deutsche Bahn, it's just so much worse compared to how it used to be.
The Dutch train system is not privatised, the government owns 100% of both the tracks and the main carrier: the NS.
Same in Germany and basically all of the EU.
Dutch trains aren't as perfect as the Swiss, but still far, far, better than German trains. I think it was about 20 years ago when NS was ridiculed because of nonsense delays caused by leaves on the track (who would possibly expect that in the autumn?). I think they're better now. And intercity trains leaving every 10 minutes (between Amsterdam and Utrecht) helps a lot.
German trains were great twenty years ago. I wouldn't be surprised if things went haywire after lockdown. Many things did. It gave people a licence not to work and introduced a sloppiness into everything.
I'm fairly certain it was before that, as someone living in The Netherlands we'd always get warned to make sure there was at least 30-60 minute transit time between each stop in Germany when travelling international, as the expectation was that the train would be (extremely) late.
This was already the case around 2015.
While it is true that that many problems where already visible 10 years ago, it is also true tat during the pandemic more trains were on time because having very few passengers speeds up the boarding/offboarding at stations enormously. So the pandemic somehow delayed the already inevitable fall into the abyss.
Trains are still great. Especially the newer generation ICEs are beautiful trains and very comfortable.
Just don't count on them that they bring you to your destination in a timely manner.
Especially the model 2 is very comfortable but probably also the leader of the incident statistics.