Comment by niemandhier
1 day ago
It’s a system run at the absolute border of what is possible and that was designed with the “just enough” philosophy in mind.
You cannot add a stop if the rails are single track and the next train is just behind you.
If you do said train will be delayed, will not be able to switch tracks at its final destination ( since it has a hard slot for that) and errors cascade.
It’s the best possible train system, given how little was invested …
Exactly! When you spend billions on car infrastructure but hardly anything on rails, there will be issues.
What people don’t write clickbaity blog posts about is how in general things work very well. I’m currently sitting on a train from Nuremberg to Berlin and it takes less than three hours, it’s on time, quiet and just a good experience. This trip used to take five hours but then the high speed rail track got completed and cut the time by two hours. Wonderful!
Things do not work well in general. DB is internationally infamous for its garbage service because everyone who has ever taken DB has a horror story. I lived in Germany some years ago and not once did I manage to catch a train that was on time for both arrival and departure. And this doesn't even touch on the topic of being stranded in the middle of nowhere as a regular occurrence.
As someone who has caught DB a fair number of times over the years, I think DB is most hated by Germans (who love to complain) and German locals.
Maybe I've just been lucky so far, but as an Aussie it is hard to overstate the fact it is even possible to travel almost anywhere within the country and between several other countries by train for fairly cheap is already quite miraculous to me. Yeah, I've run into a fair few issues and it was annoying but that goes for every country I've been to (Japan had the least by far but trains still get delayed there more often than people think and I've also run into situations as in TFA where if I didn't speak Japanese things would've ended up worse).
I'm not sure I'd even put DB in my "bottom three" in terms of overall experience. Should it be much better? Of course. But if you listen to Germans it sounds like DB is the worst train network in the universe by a clear margin, and that's just obviously not true.
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Depending on what regions/lines you are exposed to one can definitely land on different sides of "it works well in general" vs. "it doesn't work well in general".
Of course if you cite a Sprinter line like Nuremberg <-> Berlin, which has the newest tracks and newest trains, you will have a far better experience than on lines that have the worst maintained tracks and trains. Sadly, the badly maintained ones seem to make up the majority of the DB network.
The worst parta are in NRW and in particular Cologne (honorary mention: Frankfurt). Unfortunately a lot of people live there and a lot of trains go through there. Don't understand why it's not getting fixed. Every time more money is dedicated to rail the government of the day decide upgrading the stations is what deserves focus.
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As someone said during COVID supply chain disruptions: when a system is very optimal it becomes fragile.
So probably they need to add more parallel tracks, unused most of the time.
The money for that is corrupted away as soon as provided by the state. If there is constructions going on, you won't be taking any regional train any time soon around here.