> Waning reliability is but one of many problems for state-owned Deutsche Bahn, which is operating at a loss and regularly subjects its passengers to poor or no Wi-Fi access, seat reservation mix-ups, missing train cars and "technical problems" — a catch-all reason commonly cited by conductors over the train intercom.
As someone who fairly often travels by German ICE (not their regional trains), I've only ever experienced the timetable unreliability
WiFi is fairly reliable and much much better than for example the Dutch railway (NS) WiFi which never seems to work, and I can't remember the last time it didn't work on an ICE. I've never had any seat reservation mix ups or (knowingly) missing train cars, the last two I've experienced only once in Europe even, on a train from Slovenia to Austria, with the seat booked via the ÖBB.
When these ICE's are on time and show up, I like them a lot. The seats are very comfortable, there's food service in the train, the seat reservations aren't thát high, and are optional, unlike say high speed rail in Italy, where there's a 15 euro required seat reservation on top of the ticket price, and the staff is consistently friendly.
More so, I really really like the Deutsche Bahn app and use it for trains all over Europe.
Reading this article makes me ask myself if the route and type of train matters, but also that the article didn't really add anything new from what wasn't already known. With their ongoing frequent delays DB made them an easy target for anything under the sun, but comparatively to other trains in Europe, at least for DB ICE's and except for their delays, I feel they're doing quite alright.
Cancelling trains to preserve on-time statistics is the kind of perverse activity you get when metrics aren’t correctly setup.
A cancelled train should be counted as delayed until the next train (close to the worst-case scenario) so as to discourage it.
But the real problem with deteriorating service is that people will put up with it for a long time - as long as they get to where they’re going eventually.
But they’ll stop choosing the train, and over 20 years you’ll find that everyone has moved to private vehicles or alternate transportation methods.
And then you have no riders and trying to get back on track will take 20 years or more.
People claim that they cancel trains to try and preserve the statistics, but there's not really any evidence of it.
The actual reason is that if a train is too late, it will conflict too much with the other scheduled trains and there's simply no room for it. Keeping the delayed train will just cause more delays for other trains on the same route, because German trains are scheduled with very high frequency.
E.g. where I live in Cologne, there's typically a high speed train every 20 to 30 minutes to Frankfurt. If one train is delayed by 30 minutes, then suddenly you have two (ore more) trains right on top of eachother heading to the same destination, both on very very congested lines that theyre simultaneously trying to do repairs and expansions to.
Those are the sorts of situations where it makes sense to just cancel the train, not because of metrics but because of actual track constraints.
The main thing people dont understand about Germany's train system is the scale of it. The network is physically very large, but also very densely packed, and has very frequent trains.
It looks more like a circuit board than a traditional transit map. That's why this problem is so hard to solve and will take a long time and a lot of investment before it improves.
> The main thing people dont understand about Germany's train system is the scale of it. The network is physically very large, but also very densely packed, and has very frequent trains.
And that's a wonderful thing, you can reach "everywhere" with a train in Germany. That's something I wanted to say that we need to keep in mind when we see a headline like this. It's a sense in which Germany's train service is one of the best in the world.
I’m curious how Japan’s train network deals with these issues. That map looks like the train network in Tokyo alone. Japan’s network is also quite large, densely packed, and with very frequent trains. Despite Japan being well known for timeliness of its trains, it does have its occasional delays, but not often enough to think about.
What they should be tracking is average delayed journeys. A train may be late by 15 minutes, but if that means I'll miss a connecting train, that might delay my journey by an hour or more. That would also take care of the issue you're describing.
Indeed, that'd be a more useful metric. Very hard to measure well though and probably actually leaves open more room for them to game the metrics than the current system does.
Keep in mind that for the majority of trains in Germany, nobody bought a specific ticket for that journey. We just use the DeutschlandTicket which is a flat subscription of 58€/month, which gives unlimited access to busses, trams, and regional trains (basically everything but high speed trains).
With the deutschalnd ticket, you typically just walk onto a train of your choice and go wherever you want. They dont actually know where all the travellers are going or even how many people there are
>> The main thing people dont understand about Germany's train system is the scale of it. The network is physically very large, but also very densely packed, and has very frequent trains.
> A train may be late by 15 minutes, but if that means I'll miss a connecting train, that might delay my journey by an hour or more.
Speaking from experience taking the subway in Shanghai, if a train is 15 minutes late, and it still manages to arrive before the train that was scheduled to follow it, it cannot be true that the network is "very densely packed" or that it has "very frequent trains".
> But they’ll stop choosing the train, and over 20 years you’ll find that everyone has moved to private vehicles or alternate transportation methods.
This is a country with a $2.68 per gallon gas tax, compared to $0.51 on average in the US (€0.60 v. €0.11 per liter). This is partly justified as nudging people to use less carbon intensive transport. That nudge works a lot less well when the lower carbon alternative is painfully worse than your car.
Car ownership is pretty expensive. But holistically speaking it's not more expensive than the Deutschland Ticket, because it gives you access to cheaper housing options that you wouldn't be able to live in if you depended solely on public transport.
Can confirm for the US too. I live in a rural county with zero public transport, but when I tell city friends what the lot cost and the property tax on it, they have to hold back tears.
>This is a country with a $2.68 per gallon gas tax, compared to $0.51 in the US.
Irrelevant comparison since US is a widely different animal to most European countries.
It might be expensive compared to the US, but Germany is still one of the countries with the most affordable income-to-cost ratios for car ownership in the Eurozone, so car commuting is incredibly common, especially for those not living in densely populated metro areas.
Well yes, not difficult to see why. Germany is quite big and quite sprawled, and given how expensive home ownership is in big metro areas people choose commute longer in exchange for affordable housing.
And also the government gives you tax rebates for your gas money expenses the further you have to commute for work which is a double edged sword.
Not sure about Germany but in Spain tax on petrol is 44%. At current prices for petrol (1.3€/l) you need to pay around 78€ to fill a sedan (assuming 60 litre deposit) of which 34.3€ will go to the government.
One time I did a cross-country move from Germany to the NL. Booked myself a 1st class ticket, because I had a ton of luggage and wanted a chill experience. Of course-- train is canceled, which means my seat reservation is also canceled. Next train comes and it's standing room only.
So I paid 3x for comfort, only to get stuck standing in the aisle with all my luggage for 6 hours and an additional transfer. Yes, I can get the ticket refunded, but the point is not about the money. What should I expect out of a service that can so easily be completely downgraded at a moment's notice?
At least you were able to make a seat reservation. In The Netherlands I frequently had to stand in first class while paying €600+ a month for the subscription. Ended up buying a car, that way I had a guaranteed seat with climate control.
Something similar happened to me, but with Lufthansa. Canceled my flight 1 day in advance and told me to take a hike, didn't even bother to find/recommend another flight. Germany has really deteriorated, it's no longer matching its past reputation of getting things done.
This summer I took a DB train from Amsterdam to Berlin. Being from the midwest USA, I didn't have a lot of experience with trains so I bought a first class ticket. The air and power in my car weren't working. There was no beverage car or service so we sat sweating to death. After a couple hours they gave in and told us to go to another car. Then at the next stop someone got on and yelled at me because I was in his assigned seat.
Last time I had to go somewhere in Germany I used a Flixbus instead of their "high-speed" trains. The fact that I was willingly subjecting myself to a Flixbus, not because of price but because of reliability, really tells you something about the state of trains in Germany.
For Americans: Flixbus a cheap bus service which is often used by people who are not really bothered by social norms.
It's really a pity for a large part of international train travel too, given Germany's central position in Europe. Many people I know (moi incluis) would really like to take the train for holiday or work travel (instead of airplane) but it's just not worth the risk of having to deal with Deutsche Bahn. Holland to Denmark by train, tried it once, never again.
I've been told that since the privatization, the funding was split between DB paying for maintenance while the state provided funds for replacement and new lines. Allegedly this provided an incentive to let things deteriorate until they needed replacement.
Projects are planned, coordinated and funds allocated far in advance, so if the government can't agree on a budget and projects are shelved or canned, restarting the process causes a significant delay.
To clarify: Deutsche Bahn is still 100% government owned. It operates both its train service and the railroad infrastructure in fully owned subsidiaries.
And that's exactly what's not reflected in management success metrics. They are basically incentivized to steal from their owners through systematic neglect, what could possibly go wrong.
Heh, isn't this funny? If someone I don't like wins an election, I will compare him to a dictator from another country. Using a completely unrelated thread. I am very intelligent.
If you lookup the details about the decision to build and construction of Stuttgart 21[1] it's an insane mix of corruption, nepotism and incompetence. Partially also a result of laws changing and allowing privatisation of public infrastructure.
This satire [2] about it on German TV is 6 years old now and the project is still increasing in cost and being delayed. It's a pit without a bottom now.
I can confirm. While there is a fair amount of train infrastructure, it is horribly unreliable. Plan for being delayed for 30-50% of the scheduled travel time.
I work in the German healthcare sector, which is partly public and partly private, and I have been doing so for a little over a year. The level of bureaucracy is staggering. There is no shortage of good ideas or genuine innovation, but most of them drown in administrative processes long before they reach implementation and are eventually abandoned.
Deutsche Bahn is a useful parallel. It was once fully public and later privatized, yet it still carries much of the old organizational DNA. The result is a company that adapts painfully slowly to changing market needs, compounded by chronic mismanagement.
Germany’s problem is not a lack of innovation or talent. It is structural: excessive bureaucracy, risk-averse management, and incentive systems that reward process compliance over outcomes. Until those change, progress will remain slow regardless of funding or good intentions.
> Waning reliability is but one of many problems for state-owned Deutsche Bahn, which is operating at a loss and regularly subjects its passengers to poor or no Wi-Fi access, seat reservation mix-ups, missing train cars and "technical problems" — a catch-all reason commonly cited by conductors over the train intercom.
As someone who fairly often travels by German ICE (not their regional trains), I've only ever experienced the timetable unreliability
WiFi is fairly reliable and much much better than for example the Dutch railway (NS) WiFi which never seems to work, and I can't remember the last time it didn't work on an ICE. I've never had any seat reservation mix ups or (knowingly) missing train cars, the last two I've experienced only once in Europe even, on a train from Slovenia to Austria, with the seat booked via the ÖBB.
When these ICE's are on time and show up, I like them a lot. The seats are very comfortable, there's food service in the train, the seat reservations aren't thát high, and are optional, unlike say high speed rail in Italy, where there's a 15 euro required seat reservation on top of the ticket price, and the staff is consistently friendly.
More so, I really really like the Deutsche Bahn app and use it for trains all over Europe.
Reading this article makes me ask myself if the route and type of train matters, but also that the article didn't really add anything new from what wasn't already known. With their ongoing frequent delays DB made them an easy target for anything under the sun, but comparatively to other trains in Europe, at least for DB ICE's and except for their delays, I feel they're doing quite alright.
Cancelling trains to preserve on-time statistics is the kind of perverse activity you get when metrics aren’t correctly setup.
A cancelled train should be counted as delayed until the next train (close to the worst-case scenario) so as to discourage it.
But the real problem with deteriorating service is that people will put up with it for a long time - as long as they get to where they’re going eventually.
But they’ll stop choosing the train, and over 20 years you’ll find that everyone has moved to private vehicles or alternate transportation methods.
And then you have no riders and trying to get back on track will take 20 years or more.
People claim that they cancel trains to try and preserve the statistics, but there's not really any evidence of it.
The actual reason is that if a train is too late, it will conflict too much with the other scheduled trains and there's simply no room for it. Keeping the delayed train will just cause more delays for other trains on the same route, because German trains are scheduled with very high frequency.
E.g. where I live in Cologne, there's typically a high speed train every 20 to 30 minutes to Frankfurt. If one train is delayed by 30 minutes, then suddenly you have two (ore more) trains right on top of eachother heading to the same destination, both on very very congested lines that theyre simultaneously trying to do repairs and expansions to.
Those are the sorts of situations where it makes sense to just cancel the train, not because of metrics but because of actual track constraints.
The main thing people dont understand about Germany's train system is the scale of it. The network is physically very large, but also very densely packed, and has very frequent trains.
For instance, here is the map just of the regional (non-high-speed) trains between cities in my state of Nordrhein-Westfalen: https://karteplan.com/deutschland/land/nordrhein-westfalen/s...
It looks more like a circuit board than a traditional transit map. That's why this problem is so hard to solve and will take a long time and a lot of investment before it improves.
> The main thing people dont understand about Germany's train system is the scale of it. The network is physically very large, but also very densely packed, and has very frequent trains.
And that's a wonderful thing, you can reach "everywhere" with a train in Germany. That's something I wanted to say that we need to keep in mind when we see a headline like this. It's a sense in which Germany's train service is one of the best in the world.
I’m curious how Japan’s train network deals with these issues. That map looks like the train network in Tokyo alone. Japan’s network is also quite large, densely packed, and with very frequent trains. Despite Japan being well known for timeliness of its trains, it does have its occasional delays, but not often enough to think about.
What they should be tracking is average delayed journeys. A train may be late by 15 minutes, but if that means I'll miss a connecting train, that might delay my journey by an hour or more. That would also take care of the issue you're describing.
Indeed, that'd be a more useful metric. Very hard to measure well though and probably actually leaves open more room for them to game the metrics than the current system does.
Keep in mind that for the majority of trains in Germany, nobody bought a specific ticket for that journey. We just use the DeutschlandTicket which is a flat subscription of 58€/month, which gives unlimited access to busses, trams, and regional trains (basically everything but high speed trains).
With the deutschalnd ticket, you typically just walk onto a train of your choice and go wherever you want. They dont actually know where all the travellers are going or even how many people there are
>> The main thing people dont understand about Germany's train system is the scale of it. The network is physically very large, but also very densely packed, and has very frequent trains.
> A train may be late by 15 minutes, but if that means I'll miss a connecting train, that might delay my journey by an hour or more.
Speaking from experience taking the subway in Shanghai, if a train is 15 minutes late, and it still manages to arrive before the train that was scheduled to follow it, it cannot be true that the network is "very densely packed" or that it has "very frequent trains".
> But they’ll stop choosing the train, and over 20 years you’ll find that everyone has moved to private vehicles or alternate transportation methods.
This is a country with a $2.68 per gallon gas tax, compared to $0.51 on average in the US (€0.60 v. €0.11 per liter). This is partly justified as nudging people to use less carbon intensive transport. That nudge works a lot less well when the lower carbon alternative is painfully worse than your car.
https://brilliantmaps.com/gas-petrol-taxes-us-ca-eu/
Car ownership is pretty expensive. But holistically speaking it's not more expensive than the Deutschland Ticket, because it gives you access to cheaper housing options that you wouldn't be able to live in if you depended solely on public transport.
Can confirm for the US too. I live in a rural county with zero public transport, but when I tell city friends what the lot cost and the property tax on it, they have to hold back tears.
>This is a country with a $2.68 per gallon gas tax, compared to $0.51 in the US.
Irrelevant comparison since US is a widely different animal to most European countries.
It might be expensive compared to the US, but Germany is still one of the countries with the most affordable income-to-cost ratios for car ownership in the Eurozone, so car commuting is incredibly common, especially for those not living in densely populated metro areas.
From what I can see online, two-thirds of Germans use a car to commute to work.
Well yes, not difficult to see why. Germany is quite big and quite sprawled, and given how expensive home ownership is in big metro areas people choose commute longer in exchange for affordable housing.
And also the government gives you tax rebates for your gas money expenses the further you have to commute for work which is a double edged sword.
So you’d pay roughly $40 in tax to fill a sedan in Germany vs $7 in America at 15 gallons?
Not sure about Germany but in Spain tax on petrol is 44%. At current prices for petrol (1.3€/l) you need to pay around 78€ to fill a sedan (assuming 60 litre deposit) of which 34.3€ will go to the government.
One time I did a cross-country move from Germany to the NL. Booked myself a 1st class ticket, because I had a ton of luggage and wanted a chill experience. Of course-- train is canceled, which means my seat reservation is also canceled. Next train comes and it's standing room only.
So I paid 3x for comfort, only to get stuck standing in the aisle with all my luggage for 6 hours and an additional transfer. Yes, I can get the ticket refunded, but the point is not about the money. What should I expect out of a service that can so easily be completely downgraded at a moment's notice?
At least you were able to make a seat reservation. In The Netherlands I frequently had to stand in first class while paying €600+ a month for the subscription. Ended up buying a car, that way I had a guaranteed seat with climate control.
Something similar happened to me, but with Lufthansa. Canceled my flight 1 day in advance and told me to take a hike, didn't even bother to find/recommend another flight. Germany has really deteriorated, it's no longer matching its past reputation of getting things done.
This summer I took a DB train from Amsterdam to Berlin. Being from the midwest USA, I didn't have a lot of experience with trains so I bought a first class ticket. The air and power in my car weren't working. There was no beverage car or service so we sat sweating to death. After a couple hours they gave in and told us to go to another car. Then at the next stop someone got on and yelled at me because I was in his assigned seat.
Last time I had to go somewhere in Germany I used a Flixbus instead of their "high-speed" trains. The fact that I was willingly subjecting myself to a Flixbus, not because of price but because of reliability, really tells you something about the state of trains in Germany.
For Americans: Flixbus a cheap bus service which is often used by people who are not really bothered by social norms.
Similar to a U.S. Grayhound service?
It's really a pity for a large part of international train travel too, given Germany's central position in Europe. Many people I know (moi incluis) would really like to take the train for holiday or work travel (instead of airplane) but it's just not worth the risk of having to deal with Deutsche Bahn. Holland to Denmark by train, tried it once, never again.
I've been told that since the privatization, the funding was split between DB paying for maintenance while the state provided funds for replacement and new lines. Allegedly this provided an incentive to let things deteriorate until they needed replacement.
Projects are planned, coordinated and funds allocated far in advance, so if the government can't agree on a budget and projects are shelved or canned, restarting the process causes a significant delay.
Same situation in Sweden.
It's a running joke in Stockholm that tracks, trains, signals, and people are owned/employed by 4 different entities
To clarify: Deutsche Bahn is still 100% government owned. It operates both its train service and the railroad infrastructure in fully owned subsidiaries.
And that's exactly what's not reflected in management success metrics. They are basically incentivized to steal from their owners through systematic neglect, what could possibly go wrong.
Don’t worry, at the current trajectory Germany will have a leader who “makes the trains run on time” in 10-15 years.
Heh, isn't this funny? If someone I don't like wins an election, I will compare him to a dictator from another country. Using a completely unrelated thread. I am very intelligent.
Then, when fusion is finally ready? :-D
If you lookup the details about the decision to build and construction of Stuttgart 21[1] it's an insane mix of corruption, nepotism and incompetence. Partially also a result of laws changing and allowing privatisation of public infrastructure.
This satire [2] about it on German TV is 6 years old now and the project is still increasing in cost and being delayed. It's a pit without a bottom now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_21
[2] https://youtu.be/V49b13fYFik
As an American I would take DB over Amtrak any day. At least the country would be covered with fast rail to some extent
I can confirm. While there is a fair amount of train infrastructure, it is horribly unreliable. Plan for being delayed for 30-50% of the scheduled travel time.
I work in the German healthcare sector, which is partly public and partly private, and I have been doing so for a little over a year. The level of bureaucracy is staggering. There is no shortage of good ideas or genuine innovation, but most of them drown in administrative processes long before they reach implementation and are eventually abandoned.
Deutsche Bahn is a useful parallel. It was once fully public and later privatized, yet it still carries much of the old organizational DNA. The result is a company that adapts painfully slowly to changing market needs, compounded by chronic mismanagement.
Germany’s problem is not a lack of innovation or talent. It is structural: excessive bureaucracy, risk-averse management, and incentive systems that reward process compliance over outcomes. Until those change, progress will remain slow regardless of funding or good intentions.
Privatized implies private ownership (not the case). Perhaps a better word would be corporatized.