DB is weird. They seem to make their own rules and then run the game and “dont tell the rules to anyone”. I was on my way to catch a flight from Munich to my home (Madrid). I didn’t knew that apparently at one point the train splits into two parts and the front part goes to the airport and the other part just goes to the nearby cattle farms and comes back in 3 hours.
Google Maps - No idea
Citymapper - what?
English announcement - nien.
Thanks to an old lady, who told me that i needed to switch coaches to go the airport. Madre mia!!
We took that train, realised when we got to the other end of the line that we hadn't gotten where we expected, then turned back to the place where it separates. Waited for the next advertised train to airport (it's signalled on the electronic board as two separate entries; yes, it says "board whatever carriages for airport, and the rest for ...", or at least I assume it did, as it was in German of course; but again, it literally shows up as two different trains). Train arrives, stays there for a while (it's a big train, so the part in front of us didn't move so we didn't realise it had already separated), then after like 5-6 minutes it leaves. Only as it starts moving I notice that a small electronic board on the side of the carriage said "airport". The notice board then changes and obviously "both" trains disappear.
We were so lucky that we'd decided to go to the airport much earlier than we needed.
And don't get me started on the ticketing machines not accepting Visa, Mastercard, or Amex at the central station in Munchen. Or the web ticketing interface which was at least as annoying as the train to use.
I've never had trouble buying train tickets with a credit card in Germany. If I had to guess, your issue was that you were trying to use a card that didn't support chip-and-PIN or contactless payments.
Two years back the S-bahn ticket machines at the aiport only supported chip+pin, not contactless. Had to open my banking app to figure out my pin code, as I wanted to use my corporate Amex
Chip and signature, which often means just the chip without further authentication.
EMV has multiple options. Many countries (including the US) chose the signature option for credit cards for convenience and use PINs only with debit cards. Before contactless payment apps became common, that was a major source of friction when using American credit cards in Europe.
I'd argue we picked it for legacy reasons - Americans are not used to the chip/pin concept, and adopted EMV very late because of a variety of legacy reasons (massive installed base of mag stripe equipment, and systems to deal with the inherent slightly higher fraud).
No the US stuck with signature for profit and cultural reasons. Europe also had a huge install of mag stripe equipment, and has the same fraud systems, what else do you think Europe was using before EMV was developed?
But Chip-and-PIN makes using credit cards marginally less convenient, and forces people to authenticate themselves to perform transactions, unlike swipes and signatures, something that many Americans don't like. The US is happy with crazy high fraud rates, and crazy high interchange rates (fees for using credit cards). Those interchange rates also fund all the fancy points and rewards programs in the US, and primarily are paid for by the poorest in society (who can't access those programs, but are still paying the interchange rates). Plus high interchange rates mean more money for banks and the card networks themselves.
The EU on the other hand capped interchange rates, so either banks had to get fraud under control, or pay for fraud out of their own pockets. I'll give you two guess which route they chose.
The legacy reasons are part of why we waited so long to adopt EMV - my belief is that the US had much higher density of credit card adoption which significantly delayed EMV/Chip adoption - to give you an idea, even in the mid 90's a place that didnt take a credit card was an exception rather than common.
I dont disagree with you about interchange rates etc - we should cap them - but as a high earner I'm also going to maximize what I can from that system while I can ;-)
Nobody was. That's what happens when something new is invented, nobody is familiar with it until they're educated. Nobody in Europe were not used to the pin concept when Chip & PIN was originally created (except of course for access to ATMs, which I assume also existed in the US).
> my belief is that the US had much higher density of credit card adoption which significantly delayed EMV/Chip adoption - to give you an idea, even in the mid 90's a place that didnt take a credit card was an exception rather than common.
I don't know why you think Europe was any different, credit card adoption and acceptance in Europe matched that of the US in the 90s. Europe did take longer to hit the same levels of adoption as the US, but remember credit cards have been around since the 1950s, and were computerised in the 1970s. By the time you get to the 1990s, credit cards were pretty much ubiquitous across the entire western world. The US wasn't some futuristic bastion of banking technologies, if any thing, it was starting to fall behind. Today, US banking systems look comically outdated compared to anything you find in Europe.
Your "belief" for the reasons US banking tech lags so far behind the rest of the world are pretty easy to disprove with some fairly superficial research.
My point is we (in north america) often seem retain outdated technology because of early adopter problems - be it the T1 vs E1 conversation, how credit cards are processed, all of it. We tend to adopt V1 of a technology and have too much of an installed base to easily adopt the considerably improved V2.
And my point is that V1 technology for credit cards happened in the 1950s, V2 in the 1970s and by the time chip and pin came around, credit cards were hardly new technology anywhere in the western world.
Claiming that the US had too large of an install base for chip and pin to work would be like claiming the US had too large of a propeller air craft install base to adopt jet engines (also developed in Europe), but somehow the US managed that transition just fine. Americas failure to adopt chip and pin has nothing to do with legacy, and everything to do with US culture has a different relationship which money and how it’s spent.
In Europe people generally expect to be challenged when spending money using credit cards, and that’s always been true. So chip and PIN was always an easy to sell to consumers. In the US, people simply don’t expect to be challenged, and even get up upset when challenged, when using a credit card. So selling chip and PIN to consumers is much harder, especially when the US so happy to accept exploitative banking practices, and crazy high fraud rates.
Both my DNB and Nordea cards, as well as my personal and corporate Norwegian AMEX cards all have magnetic strip, and they’ve all been issued somewhat recently.
I’ve never received a debit or credit card in Norway without a magstrip. One of the points of having one is to use it in places abroad where chip or contactless isn’t implemented. It’s become thinner but the stipe is still there.
Prepaid gift cards (please note: those are not store issued) dont have chips and it is sometimes a problem to use them. But I doubt someone would buy a plane ticket with them.
I am not sure if it counts as a debit or credit card, because from technology point of view the division is blurry.
They are perhaps prepaid debit cards.
But you can change and set a pin on them just like on the old credit cards. Because that's what they are - old technology.
They dont have a chip, so you have to swipe them.
Some employers give those gift cards instead of cash and I think those cards use the older technology in order to be cheaper (the chip costs few cents to manufacture). After you clear your card balance you basically throw the card away (very ecological), but if they wanted they can also add more money to the same card again. They usually dont do it since people lose the cards, so they issue new ones. So you get a lot of plastic.
Think of this as some pocket money every 3-6 months.
It says VISA on the card.
The companies could give cash, but due to some obscure law and psychological reasons they give cards. The card is still better than the paper sodexo gift cards they would give out years ago that were a pain to use since few shops accepted them.
But still it is a pain, since you often end up with a small balance and you need to pay part with this gift card (to clean it up to zero) and part with cash.
Perhaps this is to facilitate the transition towards a cashless society and to provide the bundle of social benefits that companies advertise to stay competitive in the market and attract employees. Just like company shares or RSUs.
If this story was more than a few years ago it's plausible that the card didn't have a chip. I still have a VISA debit card without a chip, and it was issued only two years ago.
Also chip-and-pin is mostly not enabled with American credit cards or card payment terminals
A couple years ago, I was at a station waiting for a (delayed) ICE train.
I couldn't buy a ticket at the machine or with the app, since the train had already departed (if it had been on schedule).
The ticket machine also wouldn't take VISA / MasterCard, only the more common Girocard (most people still call it EC)
Later, in the train, when I asked the conductor to buy a ticket with my Girocard, he said "That's not a commonly used payment method" and asked for VISA, or cash (not having any to provide change, obviously).
For other readers' benefit: Girocard is not related to Girobank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girobank or using said Girobank's Girocard to pay bills or collect dole.
American Express I get. No one uses that in Europe. Visa and Mastercard debit cards are what everyone uses and they work in all German ticket machines. You weren't trying to use a credit card where you?
Are you seriously asking why Airport infrastructure should support English or is it rhetorical?
If you are not a backwater that doesn't get any travelers, you should cater to tourists who, as a rule, do not speak your language. Even those tourists who do speak a few phrases will absolutely be unable to understand something as complex as a the train spilling up into two before going to the Airport.
> Why should anywhere cater to my failure to learn their language and systems? It’s nice if they do but I don’t expect it.
I certainly don't see this attitude from Germans in Spain.
> you should cater to tourists who, as a rule, do not speak your language.
Why should tourists be supported? Tourists are trashing my country nearly as badly as our largest industry (dairy). Without infrastructure they shouldn’t be encouraged.
I have no interest in having more.
We also have no trains, but I’d like that to change.
How were you using it? I have only ever used Wise for bank transfers. There are travel credit cards without any foreign transaction fees and that’s what I always use.
I’ve used it like a debit card/credit card. On phone and as a physical card for tap-and-go on transport. I’ve used it for booking accommodation bookings online too.
Fees are low/non existent and conversion rates good.
I doubt that it is popular with the actual users, only with the company that they work for. When I had a company issued AMEX card the damn thing was practically useless. In fact even in the US there were plenty of places that wouldn't accept it.
AMEX cards are being used by both large and small businesses. It's accepted by hotels, restaurants, airlines, suppliers, utilities, etc... Small shops are of little importance.
Yeah and already in 2025 it's quite common to be able to pay with a credit card in bars and restaurants too, which was almost unheard of a few years back. Of course these machines break all the time, and suddenly the business can only take cash. This seems to be a very specific problem that only happens in Germany.
I would never expect a Western European country to not accept Visa and Mastercard. I say this as an Eastern European. But I do remember that in Germany (and Austria) it's not that accepted to pay by card.
This just happened to me a couple days ago trying to get from Luxembourg to Heidelberg, got on what I thought was the right train at a transfer but was apparently the wrong half, announcement only in German, rushing to find a spot for luggage in packed train and getting scolded by various Germans and we missed it. 3 hours of travel to end up back in Luxembourg and we got a very expensive rental car to get to our next couple destinations, not proudest travel moment. Next train we took was easiest possible scenario, Nuremberg to Munich, one train no transfers, assigned carriage, app helpfully shows you where to stand, arrived with time to spare. Except the platform changed as train was arriving, announcement again only in German, asked an attendant if train on other platform was our train, “No that train is on platform 9” rush up and down platform 9, carriages and train number don’t match ask another attendant if the original train on the other platform is ours, says you have no time, jump on that train, it is right but we are on opposite side of train and walk through the entire train with luggage again with various Germans giving scolding looks. Peaceful way to travel.
Splitting trains is a quite common thing in Germany (though more long distance) and communicated in the official app.
If third party apps don't show that information that's on their part. Usually it's also said after departure inside the train by the conductor, though maybe just on long distance trains.
They still get it wrong quite often. Worst case is when the train arrives in reverse cart order, and the carts are labeled wrong. Bonus points if your reserved seat is in a cart that's missing.
Reserved seat in a missing cart is boring - 95% of the time you'll find an empty seat. Much more fun is a reserved bicycle rack in a cart that's missing. The number of bicycle racks is limited, and they're quite often sold out.
Yes, although quite often they forget not everyone speaks German.
I once had a bit of Schadenfrunde while travelling in Netherlands, having the conductor telling us to switch trains in Dutch, and all my German fellow travellers wondering what it was all about.
I wonder what's the level of mutual ineligibility between DE<>NL (probably DE is easier to NL) but it's funny how Germans sometimes seem to play dumb and not understand a thing in NL
I don't know about the Dutch but apparently the Flemish don't understand German without having learned it at school.
I speak both some German and some Dutch (as nth languages, I can understand them fine but speaking is hit and miss) and sometimes I don't notice which is which and answer in the wrong language, to me they're almost the same language with a different accent. I translate the German into some Frenglish mess for my Flemish friends to help them understand and it works great.
Your Dutch friends have it right: In German high schools you don't get Dutch, Polish or Czech as a rule but you do get French and English. But in Dutch schools you do get German.
I'm German, I don't speak Dutch. But I was able to follow a Dutch tour guide in Den Haag just fine when she was explaining things in Dutch. She kindly repeated everything in English for my benefit (I was the only foreigner) even though I told her I understood her just fine in Dutch.
You have to "adjust your ears" a bit but I think if you know German and English then you can understand Dutch just fine if it's not slang.
It also depends on the particular dialect a German speaks. Dutch is effectively old German before all the various alterations and "reforms" to the German language that were instituted to create fragmentation between the germanic people of Europe, i.e., English, Dutch, Germans, Austrians, Swiss, Belgians throughout the ~16th-20th century by aristocrats driving wedges between peasants between kingdoms and dukedoms in order to define their own nations/ethnicities through language and culture so their royal families could rule over and would find it difficult to associate with each other. It is one of the things that also contributed to the fragmentation of Germany before unification, language barriers that even created unique cultures between sides of a valley that were in different dukedoms.
A similar thing has caused the tension between the germanic and Romance languages that followed the Roman border line N to S that separates Europe.
dutch is a bit harder to understand. like some german dialects that not every german understands either, like swiss german, luxemburgian or friesian (also spoken in the northern parts of the netherlands), or plattdeutsch.
i grew up in austria and in the north of germany so i got an early appreciation for understanding dialects. yet learning dutch took me a few months of staying in the netherlands. on the other hand when i visited luxemburg people were shocked that i could understand them when they spoke amongst each other
Frisian is not a dialect, and is not usually spoken outside of Frisia (the Dutch province). In German Ostfriesland they do speak a German dialect with Frisian roots.
i was simplifying. the difference between dialect and language is fluid. plattdeutsch (low german) is also considered a language, as is luxembourgish. frisian btw is also spoken in nordfriesland (in schleswig-holstein) and there are a few speakers of saterfriesish which is the last remaining dialect of east frisian.
Ironically, technically speaking, there are seemingly more similarities between British English, i.e., Anglican German and current High German due to various perversions and "reforms" of the German language over the last many decades, in order to drive the Germanic people away from each other.
If the EU were a serious and legitimate institution, there would be an effort to implement reforms that nudge English, Dutch, and present day German all towards better mutual intelligibility, NOT diversion from each other through perversion and "simplification", or what seems to be a pollution and destruction of the current German and Dutch language through what at least Germans have a term for, "Verdenglichung", i.e., the portmanteau of German (De..) and English, prefixed with "ver...", meaning the transformation or application of.
Do you seriously believe that the German spelling reforms were done to "drive the Germanic people away from each other"? If so that's quite the insane conspiracy theory you got yourself there. And lmao at "Anglican German".
Does it matter to the OP's point how well-spoken you are? Biting down some non-constructive snark here.
Yes, English is a good lowest common language, and it is mostly that announcements are in English. But learning enough of the native language that you are at least puzzled enough to ask another passenger seems like a not very high and reasonable bar for travel-speak to pick up.
Well it's generally a good idea to ask a fellow traveller when you hear an announcement you don't understand. Especially if it doesn't use words you've commonly heard before. And maybe tell them instead of having Schadenfreude?
I think you still should be able to expect a bit of accommodation on trains that cross country borders or go to airports.
The EU makes travel between EU countries as easy as travel between US states. You can just get on a train from Germany to Spain without any prior planning.
It's also unusual given how much English you'll hear in Germany nowadays (at least in major, tourist-attracting cities) in just about any other context.
English has been in a hegemonic position over German for the past sixty years, not vice versa.
The majority of popular German language films tend to have English language titles when aimed at the English market, and nearly always when aimed at children: "Goodbye Lenin", "Run Lola Run" etc. I was pretty amazed at "Ice Age", because it would be easy and concise to translate.
They can. But they should also not be assholes with everybody else. And no not just local trains, I got information in English exactly zero times when there were huge delays on international trains. And it happened 2 times from 3 when I tried to cross Germany by train. And Germans (and Austrians btw) are terrible with this, even compared to others. The German site at my multinational company at the time was the only site on Earth which had to introduce an internal regulation about mandatory English, because they just switched to German all the time even when there were people on the call from different countries. I’m living now in Wien, and they are terrible with this even in friendly environments.
YMMV. I worked in three different German startups in Berlin and I almost never heard anybody speaking German in the company, even though more than half of the people were from Germany. Maybe it's different in bigger companies, or outside Berlin?
I would rather say older companies, and Berlin is definitely a different beast. That’s the only place where I had similarly good experience in Germany/Austria, and heard consistently good hearsay regarding this. It’s still way worse averagely than Nordic countries, Netherlands, or even some Eastern European countries. And here, I specifically mean when they can speak English, they just choose not to.
Yeah. I know, I'm from Finland originally. People in Berlin are quite often just rude, but it's just something you have to deal with when living in this city.
I've been living in Berlin for 15 years now, and every time I visit Finland I'm shocked when for example the cashier in the supermarket smiles to me and is friendly. Are they mocking me, is this a joke? It takes a few days to adapt.
Naturally living in Berlin means you learn to hate and love your city at the same time. You hate so many things in here, and when you travel, you're happy to come back because the place you were in of course misses all the unique aspects of Berlin.
> The German site at my multinational company at the time was the only site on Earth which had to introduce an internal regulation about mandatory English, because they just switched to German all the time even when there were people on the call from different countries.
So Dutch and German? Actually, those ICE are staffed by Dutch NS personnel until Köln where they swap with their German DB colleagues. Usually that means Dutch and German messages from Amsterdam to Köln (sometimes English too), and German afterwards.
This is a bad faith argument. English is (like it or not) the international language. If you want tourists to understand what's happening, do announcements in your local language and in English.
Making announcements in German in the US makes little sense.
Or.. english-speaking people forget not everyone speaks english. If you go to another country you have to learn a bit about how things are done there, ask for help, etc.., most people consider this a normal part of traveling.
idk man, I get it's nice if things are clear for you, but it's misplaced IMO to have this level of entitlement over people speaking their mother tongue in their own country
I hope you get to learn Portuguese well enough that my fellow country folks never force themselves to speak any other language, in case you happen to visit us, if not, oh well.
I am fluent in several European languages and dialects, human languages is second nature alongside learning programming languages.
As for entitlement, the expectations on international trains crossing borders aren't the same as local trains, which I left out from the comment, it was an ICE after crew change.
It seems to me long-distance transportation services should make the most important announcements in the second language most likely to be understood by international travelers. In Europe, that usually means English.
Side note: as of now, I have 14 various "travel" apps installed on my phone. Buses, trains, local buses, etc. In every EU country and city there's something else being used.
I suppose it isn’t required technically, you can still purchase tickets at the stations. But oh boy, the “official” app for the Shinkansen in Japan might be the worst piece of garbage I have ever used.
Proper push notifications for train line delays are quite nice, and unfortunately half of us own phones that decided to shoot PWAs in the back of the head (there's still no vibrations for iOS PWA notifications?), so here we are.
Had something similar from Nuremberg to Suhl and accidentally ending up in Bad Kissingen for a bit.
But I don't think DB is unique in this weirdness.
Back in the UK, I think something similar happens on routes going past Gatwick; I've only heard English announcements on that train despite the airport being one of the ones serving London.
There's also the way my first leg home from university was Aberystwyth to Birmingham New Street, but the train regularly terminated early (Shrewsbury? Or was it Wolverhampton?) to game the rules.
What language would you pick first, if you're going to add non English to London trains?
The problem with UK announcements is that they are piped to multiple places in the station, which is all hard surfaces and produces lots of reverberation and echo. This often makes them hard to understand even for natives. Also there are some stations with really terrible old speakers , such as horn speakers.
I'd ask the airports themselves for the nationalities of the tourists departing through them, and specify whichever secondary language was most relevant for trains likely to be used by tourists accessing those airports accordingly.
If I had to guess, French, German, or Spanish, in that order. But it may well be that e.g. Heathrow has a lot more Arabic, Stansted gets a lot more German, and Gatwick gets a lot more French, Luton gets the Spanish tourists, and City is mostly business trips or something.
You're correct about the acoustics, but foam panels are a thing that can be installed (or not) independently of this.
This is pretty common in other countries. I almost got screwed multiple times by SNCF (french trains) where they don't announce which half of the train goes where on the speakers. Even in the official app, it's buried deep: for some reason, it's under "Travel Details" and not "Train Details".
It was partially on me because there are assigned seats and carriages, but I was late and had to jump in the train. But still no vocal announcement of "cars x to y go to z, the others go to w".
Hah! We had the same situation taking a train from Marseille to Paris. Looked at the seats, entered the proper carriage, sit down, and at the next stop someone came and told us we took their seats. I was like 'this is 74B' (or whatever), 'the ticket is for that seat', until someone managed to tell us that we got in the wrong part of the train, and we need to move forward.
Now, the train itself was two trains connected together, and at the next stop we literally had to run like 100 meters or so to make it on time to enter the front part, because there was engine near the end/stop.
Not sure would the 2nd half of the train depart, but it was super stressful experience.
When was this? Took the train (S1) last week and every single screen at the stations and in the train explains this in detail and there are probably 20 announcements both in German and English telling everybody which coach goes to the airport and which to Freising.
Those announcements in English have been in place for 20 years. Neither train to Munich airport (S1, S8) goes to cattle farms. Tourists can get confused if they're unaware in which part of the train they sit.
Splitting trains is not uncommon. Generally for Amtrak there will be two conductors one for each part of the train. On the platform both conductors will tell you which part of the train goes where. They often check tickets more frequently than usual just to make sure you are on the right part of the train.
Train splitting is quite acceptable when the customer service is alright.
I'm pretty sure there should be english announcements. Maybe they were broken. You also get this information via the displays on the wagons and on the screens inside.
There is a bus/train from Freising to the airport every 10 min that takes 15min, so you are not trapped there for hours.
Google maps also has all the public transport connections available for navigation. That it does not support certain things like train splits or instant train changes is not DBs problem.
The preferred way to get to the airport is via S8 (not S1). Idk how one could push/guide people more to take this one.
S8 does not split and it definitely has announcements in english.
They also prioritize keeping S8 running above anything else.
I'd also recommend buying tickets via app, not via ticket machines.
It’s likely some utilitarian reason, i.e. sacrifice the riders on the train for the good of all the other schedules.
This is the one benefit of living in an overly-litigious country that has news media which can pick up on a story like this. They’d rather have the masses suffer to avoid the legal fees and bad press, so instead of sacrificing a train, they’d make everyone’s lives worse overall.
I’m not arguing for utilitarianism, though. Ir allows dictators to thrive.
In general the S-Bahn in Munich is a massive s*t show I can report more info about this if needed. However, in the S1 going to the airport (the train you took) it is quite well described that the train splits and it's both on German and in English.
To be fair (and I am not fan of DB and many other rail companies), DB is not the only rail system that splits trains, and it is rather clearly indicated, but you have to 1) expect something like trains that split at specific stops and 2) know what you are looking for on a ticket or billboard, partially because indicating that, especially far in advance is a bit of a UI/design challenge.
Also, I believe you were trying to write "nein". But why would you expect an English announcement in Germany on a German train? Google Maps? What does that have to do with that; it's an unofficial and only like an 80% solution.
Yeah, the S1 from Munich to the airport splits regularly, and you have to be in the rear half of the train. The first time (as a not-perfect-German-speaker) I'd have missed it but for the kindness of another traveller.
Now, at least, the announcements are also in English, which frankly is very positive - that DB are improving anything noticeable. (And to be clear, Bavaria/Germany are absolutely not given to accommodating non-German speakers, like, ever.)
DB is infinitely better than Trenitalia. I once took the train equivalent of what airlines call a code-share from Venice to Munich and Trenitalia just straight-up forgot half the train somewhere. It was a total gong show.
But then you already entered the wrong train. The destination of a train is usually clearly written on the train, unless it's a very old one where it's not visible on every coach
I agree that it's not that intuitive that a line can have multiple end stops (like Stuttgart - Munich ends in both Stuttgart and Munich, depending on the direction you are entering?
I guess you took the S1 S-Bahn. Yes, it always splits in Neufahrn. Part of the train goes to the airport, the other section to Freising (a cute University city, by the way)
That is indicated on the platform screens before getting on the train. It tells you which part of the train goes where so you know which wagon to take.
I found it also not very intuitive first time I took it. But hey, when travelling there’s always local peculiarities to take care of ;)
Strong disagree. For most parts travelling is a non-event these days.
A train that splits, on the way to the airport where there will be a lot of non-german speaking people, and for some reason only shows it on the platform is insane.
Having a train that splits on that route is already bad enough, but you HAVE to emphasize it on the train.
I know that I need to pay attention to this, because I've grown up with DB pulling all sorts of fucked up shit, but we should not accept that this is reasonable.
You get repeated hints like 20 times outside and inside the train. Announcements (also in english, recorded, by an english native speaker, repeatedly), the train displays explain it and when you get to the station where the train splits, every display in that train shows you whether you're in the right carriage and you get an extra announcement exclusive to the carriages that go somewhere else that you should change now if you want to go to the airport.
From the top of my head I know three cities which have peculiarities when it comes to public transportation to the Airport. In two cases, it's obvious they do this to push the private train to foreigners, at 5x the ticket rate.
This sort of used to be the case with Heathrow Express in London. There was a lot of signage that suggested to the unwary that Heathrow Express was the "right" way to get into London. Now, especially with the Elizabeth Line, while you can save a few minutes with Heathrow Express, that's really not a cost-effective alternative for a lot of people. (And Piccadilly may be a better option depending on your luggage and where you are staying.)
Stockholm (SL Bus/Train via Märsta 47kr vs. Arlanda Express 340 SEK)
Vienna (S-Bahn S7 4.40 EUR vs. City Airport Train 24.90 EUR)
While with the Stockholm one, the public transport option is cheap but a little bit more complicated (there are convenient medium priced options too), the Vienna one is really just branding and a non-obvious exit to the train station.
Ah, Stockholm. Been there as a student, went to Uppsala the day I was flying from Arlanda, and the only trains to the airport were the insanely expensive Arlanda Expresses. Had to take the normal train to Märsta, then walk the five kilometers to the airport. Fun times.
London for sure. All three of the Stanstead, Gatwick and Heathrow Express services are an absolute rip off compared with the alternatives that don’t take much longer.
Many people use them out of ignorance, expense accounts or they have the disposable income not to care.
That fucking Sbahn is the bane of the existence of many tourists. It happens so much that there‘s now a bus line from those cow fields to an airport. You will be late.
I had similar experience only in Poland. Where this part of the train goes was posted on the glass window on the doors. Somehow I missed it and went to a city I didn't intend to.
Same we missed the right stop on our way back to France.
We just managed to get in a train going the other way but dB personal almost ticketed us a penalty...
I am German and the three times I took an ICE from Cologne to Berlin and then back, EACH TIME I boarded at a wrong wagon. The entire system, their app, the signages at the tracks... it is all complete and utter dogshit.
It's still an expectation I have, even as a native German speaker. I work for a well-known German company (our storefronts are sometimes called "the German embassy"), and our day-to-day business language at work is ... English. We hire from all over and want people to be able to get around effectively. This is infrastructure. Make it work.
Шановні пасажири, цей потяг який слідує від станції Івано-Франківськ Головний через Житомир до станції Київ-Дарниця буде розділено дві частини, вагони з першого по п'ятнадцятий прослідують до станції Київ-Головний, а вагони з шістнадцятого по двадцять перший поїдуть у пекло, муахаха. Дякую за вашу увагу.
English is much more diffuse around the globe and can't be attributed to a single empire. There is no risk in dubbing in English and many benefits, from encouraging tourists and workers.
Also people are forgetting that railway announcements both at the station and inside the carriage are usually a complete incomprehensible trash tier. I honestly can't decipher half of the words in the Ukrainian or Russian announcements. Imagine needing to do that in the foreign language.
In my opinion it is way past time that EU has officially adopted English as a standard language for all communications. Especially with the crazies preparing for invasion right at the border.
Honestly, it should be an obligation. DB should make it one for themselves. DB carries millions of people a year that do not speak the language. Important information like route changes should be available to them. English just happens to be the most likely language to be understood at least enough to ask staff/other passengers as to what is going on.
If preventing people that struggle with the local language from getting confused or missing stuff is the goal then they're likely better off doing it in Turkish or Arab.
Not being under any obligation doesn't mean it is not a sensible a courteous way to do. You like it or not, english has become a defacto common international language.
While I speak 5 languages and try to learn some basic words of the local languages of any country I visit out of courtesy (how to say hello, bye, thank you, ask where are the toilets, etc), I wouldn't expect any traveller to know enough to understand this kind of specificities in any country they visit.
Near international airports and capitals usually yes you can usually get help in english accross europe, at least enough to get basic help and instructions.
Of course they’re under no obligation to do so. In fact, they’re under no obligation to let in foreign tourists at all, or to not make their lives arbitrarily hard in various ways. But not being obligated to not be a dick doesn’t mean you should in fact be one.
They aren't though. That's the point. English speakers are determined to force their language on everyone else. I've seen it abroad on many occasions. It is often painful to watch. Sometimes they even make fun of the person for speaking poor English.
You're also assuming the tourists themselves are all fluent in English, which is another issue. In some parts of Germany, many of their tourists are likely to speak French or Polish as a primary language, not to mention Mandarin etc from further afield.
This is the sort of immature "well, actually" response that you can't afford anymore once you actually take responsibility for things. I wish more people trained themselves to have a "what if I had to do it" habit before having an opinion.
Imagine you're in charge of the train network. You have to pay for the announcements on trains. You can't reasonanbly pay 10 announcements because that's silly and expensive. If you add any language other than German, which are you going to add?
Pragmatic is multiple languages in locations where it's highly relevant.
For example, the UK Gatwick Express train makes announcements in English, French, German and Spanish.
The Thameslink service (which also happens to travel on the same tracks and also happens to stop at Gatwick Airport) makes announcements in English only.
I wouldn't expect local or regional trains in Europe to make announcements other than in that country's native language – except perhaps where it's a service designed for airport connections or similar international travel.
Look, as an EU country citizen, English is more or less the defacto language of the EU, regardless of what politicians declare. Everyone in the EU speaks english in some form as even traveling to a next door country like you state requires communication.
There are cases where in Belgium you will see signs in 4 languages (Dutch, French, Flemish and English)
Also if you ever travel in Japan, they have signs, especially on trains, all in, Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English all in one. (usually rotating signage). So the precedent is there to do it on mass transit but :shrug:.
Point is, when your customer base is logically needing more language options, it should be considered.
Don't you think same could be said about German and French? I still remember the time when passports from my (now EU) country used French instead of English, and when signs for tourists were in German.
An English announcement wouldn't hurt but we don't have them on our trains here either.
Mostly fair, I really appreciate the grasp that almost all Scandinavians have on English.
Don't forget French though! I wouldn't make the assumption that travelling French people would have enough grasp of English or German to understand the announcements.
My comment is mostly a poke at the two assumptions: that non-English speaking countries should universally support English-speaking travellers, and that English is the predominant (and only other) language which should be supported.
I’m baffled that any other language would be considered - the only language that comes close to English in number of speakers is Mandarin, and Mandarin has nearly half a billion fewer speakers than English.
We should be happy there is a language that has emerged for people to communicate globally without borders, and support it’s role as the worlds second language rather than work to re-fracture how people communicate
I would say that for long distance trains only English and the local language should be enough.
For international trains, we should have all languages of all traversed countries and English. So for example a train from Paris to Frankfurt should have announcements in French, German and English (and it is actually the case for that train, I already rode it).
But for example, the Berlin - Warsaw train has only English announcements besides the local language depending on the country the train is in (so no Polish when it is in Germany, and no German when it is in Poland), I consider this to be wrong. It should have announcements in Polish, German and English for the whole route.
Agree with your last point. That's a weird choice. At least the stops either side of the border are guaranteed to have people who natively speak the other language.
I seem to recall lines in Belgium that do announcements is 4 languages: french, Flemish, German, and English.
I take trains like those for work, not to France but to Amsterdam, and I don’t speak German, French or Dutch.. if we want a train system that allows Europeans to use it there needs to be announcements and signs in the language 50% of EU citizens speak
Because even in countries less developed(by western standards), there are more English announcements, so visiting tourists can also use the public transport. This isn't lack of speaking the language as well, it is more about not wanting to speak another language because "In Deutschland muss man Deutsch sprechen." It is reaching French level of racism at this point. Funny for a country that wants to attract so many international expats.
This assume that a country should please english-speaking tourists but not everyone speaks that language. Here our perception is biased because we're in a english-speaking-forum. Tourism isn't a central concern for many people/countries and not supporting it is a valid choice.
> French level of racism
Racism really ??? As a Parisian I'll struggle to make tourists feel unpleasant but I assure you there's absolutely nothing to do with race. French from outside the capital get the same treatment, they just happen to understand our insults.
English is the international language. It is mandatory to learn it as the second language in most parts of the world, even places you never heard of. It is especially a no-brainer for a person who grew up in Germany(which is one of the most developed countries in the world, and definitely has the means to educate its own people). Again, this is a problem of choice. And since Germany is a country that relies on importing educated people to keep its economy afloat, choices like these are self-sabotaging.
This isn't an english-speaking-forum, its an international one. That is the reason English is being spoken.
I get why the French is still angry about this issue and refuses to speak English, since it isn't French that is considered the international language, but English.
I wouldn't expect a French to understand this though.
France can be afforded such idiosyncrasies because the French are generally rational thinking people, not clockwork slaves to a bureaucratic machine like Germans are made to be by their culture.
Lingua Franca predates colonialism. Latin predates Lingua Franca, although one can argue Latin was forced down due to the Roman Empire's extensive reach and size. Ancient Greek also served a similar role. One doesn't need to learn each others language as long as they all know one common language. One could argue for Esperanto, or a purely symbolic language like traffic icons, but you need to learn that one too. So it makes more sense to use a fit for purpose language for travel that has no ambiguities. You can even create a graph that can be queried. There's all sorts of ways to solve this with as little pain as possible as long as you care to. And wanting people to just learn the local language to traverse a transport network is chauvinism.
The term "lingua franca" comes out of the Holy Roman Empire and Norman expansion, and later French imperialism, which gave it high status.
But I have long wondered whether many European languages will end up in the same state as Welsh or Basque or Sorbian. Icelandic is already much of the way there. Will Dutch and even German go the same way?
It is chauvinistic and colonial-minded to expect everyone to speak your language in their country. Not to mention arrogant.
If you visited Japan as a tourist, I believe you learned enough to say hello, ask someone where your hotel is, and so on. I don’t for a second believe you learned enough to understand arbitrary train network change announcements. Unless you spend years studying the language before visiting any country as a tourist, which would be absurd.
No, I didn't learn vast amounts of Japanese, but I did learn phrases and the kanji for various destinations. It sped things up. I did not stand around and speak English to people slowly and expect them all to understand.
Personally I worry about the Maltese/Irish supremacy that will arise as a result.
More seriously, I suspect that
> Since the exit of the United Kingdom from the EU in 2020, the government of France has encouraged greater use of French as a working language
will hasten the move to English in official proceedings. Almost 44% of the population understand it already, and it’s unclear why the teens of the EU who already speak near-perfect English would want to learn French other than for recreation.
Sure, but it never caught on. Not sure the point of your “/s” sign, since what you’re claiming is in fact true, and if it’s a joke it’s not a particularly funny one.
To be fair, it’s announced in the platform screens in a language abstract way, by indicating the destination and the platform segments (A,B vs C,D) to take to reach the destination.
The key is that on hundred of trains around the world this is done to indicate the convenience - these doors will be closer, etc.
Trains splitting in half are rare enough that THAT is what needs to be described.
The US equivalent is the empire builder which splits in Spokane (I believe) but it’s much more old fashioned and you have a tag above your seat showing your destination- if you somehow end up on the wrong car the conductor will wake you up and move you to the right one.
A similar one that can catch you (and has caught me) are express elevators or the two-story ones which mean you only can stop at even or odd floors depending on where you got on.
Not only unpopular, but pretty daft too. If you think the basics of a language should include "this train will separate into two at station X, please sit in the front Y carriages to get to Z" then enjoy doing a cross-Europe trip.
Not that I agree with the post you are replying to - I think having announcements in a few of the best-known languages is very reasonable to deal with tourists - but the fair expression/announcement would be something simpler like "Airport carts 1, 2 and 3. so-and-so-place carts 4 through 8". A tourist could make do with "aiport", "cart" and basic numbers in their vocabulary. If I recall, I was able to get to the correct train(s) in Italy with no more Italian than "treno", the name of the city, and "linea gialla" or something.
You can't just learn a few words and expect to follow a train announcement, particularly when it's not obvious from context (anything other than announcing the next station).
I planned my trips (read: spent a couple of minutes on them). I went through all countries from Budapest to London. I was only 16 years old at one time. I did fine. Adults, in the age of smartphones are having issues? It actually is wild to me.
Being 16 was a benefit - you didn’t know anything so you checked basically everything.
This kind of thing captures older adults who know everything and have never heard of a trainset split.
I made a similar mistake years ago in NY - I assumed that the impressive subway system could get me to the airport, but you transfer onto a bus that gives you a VERY detailed tour of some neighborhoods.
Basics for a casual traveller are 'hello, 'please', 'thank you', 'two beers', 'can I have the bill', and 'I'll take the schnitzel please'.
Perfectly understanding rapidly-spoken German explaining something esoteric about the splitting of a train is magnitudes, years of study beyond casual traveller level.
Going from the Netherlands to Budapest I started my journey with Deutsche Bahn. My train also did the split in half and go different directions trick. Was I supposed to learn Dutch, German, and Hungarian in order to buy my train tickets?
I said "travelling TO", and most of the time you do not need to know anything apart from the name of the city... and then I presume you have a smartphone as well. Come on.
What did you do once you arrived in Budapest? Did you do your research or did you get scammed by the taxi mafia as well?
If you travel to Budapest from Berlin you buy the ticket from DB and the crew changes as follows: German, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian. None of the first three crews would speak Hungarian. Luckily all will be able to communicate in English.
(regular announcements oftentimes won't be in Hungarian until you are in Hungary, that depends on the train origin, but I would only expect local+English)
You will be perfectly fine staying in Budapest with just English; you can learn hello, please, and thank you to be polite. This goes for most bigger European cities, outside of France I guess.
I took French for 5 years and I don't think I learned enough to understand a tannoy announcement that the train was being split into two parts. Tannoy announcements aren't the easiest to understand even for native speakers.
Knowing the basics is knowing how to salute, thanks, ask basic directions. You can't ask everyone to know every single language they visit and be able to understand stuff mentionned in a foreign language in a possibly noisy environment and from an only half decent speaker system.
> Unpopular opinion: you should learn the absolute basics of the language used in the country you are travelling to.
As a German I disagree with this. Europe is a single market, we want to have people getting around crossing borders at all times to get stuff done. It pays to make things easier.
If you're going for a three-weeks leisure trip, sure, learn how to say hi and thank-you.
Belgium gave me one of the more annoying train experiences when I was a younger man. I was in Leuven for a conference, and had decided to bring my then girlfriend (now wife) for a trip, after which we would take the Eurostar to London. On the ticket, it said Brussels-Midi, but after happily boarding the train, we only saw the following related options on the train map for stops:
1. Brussel-Noord
2. Brussel-Centraal
3. Brussel-Zuid
So here we were, not speaking the language, rushing for a train that we were at risk of being late for, and not having a clear idea of the actual stop to get off of.
And the people on the train? Totally unhelpful. "Eurostar"? Shrug. "Train to London?" Blank looks.
Anyway we winged it and made it, but still a damn stupid set up if you want to be welcoming to tourists (and their money).
Hah nope! Even as a Belgian I find the naming of the Brussels train stations maddening. Brussels-Midi is the south station, so Brussel-Zuid. Midi allegedly means south in French, but I've never actually heard it being used over "sud", also south.
In conversation, midi also means noon (e.g. used as "meet me at noon"), which for my brain correlates more with central than south, given the context of a day.
Not a linguist, so what do I know, maybe someone else can chime in.
This is indeed the bizarre convo I was having with myself, having (allegedly) taken some French classes, I was racking my brain on which was the correct answer. We always used "sud", and Midi didn't seem to be south, eliminating Zuid (Since Zuid/Sud seemed similar), and yes Midi seems "mid-day", so maybe "Central" since it's the center of the day, but then there's "Centraal", so why would there be Centraal and "Brussels Middle"?!
So we winged it and got off at Zuid (since Noord felt wrong and Centraal definitely seemed wrong) and luckily it was the right one.
We did have a wonderful evening (perhaps too much so) the night before at a nice craft beer bar in Leuven which had 100 beers on tap, and it had just bought over by a nice young couple as well. So perhaps neither of us were in the right state that morning to navigate a confusing train map! Good memories.
BTW, Ukrainian shares the same logic, but it also calls the north "midnight" (північ). Meanwhile, Armenian calls the east and west "sun exit" and "sun entrance" (արևելք, արևմուտք) respectively.
In Europe (and anywhere else north of the Tropic of Cancer), the sun is always approximately due south at noon. That’s the reason for the connection, and “midi” indeed means both south (in some contexts) and noon in French.
Brussels in particular perhaps is sort of non-intuitive because, even (or perhaps especially) if you know a little bit of French, the station names don't obviously correlate to their relative locations. There is a logic but it's not obvious to someone not used to it--and, honestly, I'd have to go online to figure it out again.
I was in Belgium going to Antwerp and sometimes the French name -- Anvers -- was used. At least in e.g. Valais in CH cities that have dual names are shown with both, e.g. Sierre/Siders.
The term "kidnapped" is kinda over the top, but I can understand the author. I've travelled with Polish trains a lot when studying, and there were a few situations like this. Especially frustrating, if the train stops because of "some issue" while you can literally see the platform 200m away. No, you can't get out and walk the track (which will be guaranteed to be empty, because well, the train is broken) and take a bus or something, no, you have to sit there for ~2h until a replacement engine gets there.
We had similar occurrences on Amtrak but there was a trick - the conductor could let people out of a stopped train to “smoke” on their own reconnaissance and risk.
And if you went to smoke with your bag and disappeared, well, they never saw it.
I was in this sort of circumstance on a SEPTA train (using the same rails and stations as Amtrak fwiw) and they let us walk to the next station with no pretext. It was just the common sense thing to do and the SEPTA personnel running that train felt empowered to exercise common sense.
The more bureaucratic an organization becomes, the more inhuman it becomes. An unwillingness to bend rules when the circumstance rationally calls for it is extremely dangerous. One might think that Germans in particular would be highly tuned to this problem, but no. They still put following orders first. Typical.
You would think so (and so would I), but my experience with Amtrak is that the conductors and engineers exercise a lot of individual discretion.
(I think it "helps" that Amtrak covers a very large area, most of which only sees a train once or twice a day at the most. So the practical reality is that there are a lot of stops where you pretty much exit the train right off onto the rails.)
If you got in a taxi to take you 35km away and he drove you 60km away to a random other town instead, would you consider "kidnapped" to be over the top?
Does it only count as "kidnap" if you are not eventually released? Or is it just that it's not kidnap when a corporation does it?
kidnap:
to take a person away illegally by force, usually in order to demand money in exchange for releasing them.
The "usually" refers to the money, but the part that is "always" is the existence of an intent.
There was no intent here. This was a mistake, not on purpose. Nobody would say, unless to make a joke, "i was kidnapped by an elevator" Because the elevator works automatically, it has no intent to take the person by force and hold them hostage.
The train operator deliberately drove the train, with passengers on it, to places they knew the passengers didn't want to go, and did not allow them a chance to get out sooner.
If a taxi driver were to do the same thing we would say he kidnapped his passengers.
The fact that trains are operated by big corporations does not absolve them of responsibility. If anything they should be held to a higher standard, not a lower one.
I was imagining something more Kafkaesque. There are some transit systems that have transfer only stations. If DB dropped you off at such a station, and then cancelled the only trains leaving that station (due to weather, holidays), I'm sure you could end up spending Christmas there, and you'd be entitled to €3.75 compensation.
Almost had this somewhere in Northern Germany in early december.
The train stopped at "Kuhdorf", as the author says, at 10:30pm. The driver told us he couldn't continue because "the track was wet" (in Northern Germany in december, how unlucky!) and to wait for "replacement circulation" (usually buses or trains).
The driver then left the train. In fact he had reached his hometown and exceeded his work quota because of the delays.
Like the fabled German roadworker and the (more frequently observed) Krampus, the DB replacement bus is a fairy tale creature.
The passengers got out and forced the driver back into the train and he drove us to the terminus then took a taxi back to said Kuhdorf.
On the nightbus home a class of French highschool girls elected me the best-looking man in the bus (they thought I didn't understand) so I went back home with a smile.
Electric trains don't get power via the tracks like that, they use power lines. Metros are a different matter, but that's not what the article is about.
Interesting, TIL. Trains don't do that where I'm from for obvious safety reasons, but I understand infrastructure everywhere comes with different baggage.
Anywhere with third rail (which is predominantly London and the South-East of England) tends to be fenced off along the sides of the tracks or other things in place to strongly discourage you from walking onto the tracks.
Given that a considerable amount of the UK rail routes date from the late 1800s there are a lot of places where tracks cross roads and therefore mix with other forms of transport (including pedestrians). It's surprising just how little there is in between a pedestrian and a live rail in these situations, here's an example 5 miles or so away from central London: https://maps.app.goo.gl/nPcJM1YxBexaDDKY6
One of those live third rails start less than 5 yards away from where pedestrians regularly walk, with just some angled planks of wood to stop you walking towards them.
We just take it for granted here in the UK. The number of people who die accidentally on the tracks each year is very low, and much lower than those who choose to commit suicide that way.
There's a strong "stay away from train tracks" education whilst growing up.
Metros may have electrified third rail, but the ones next to DB train tracks are all with a top covered third rail. Usualy power deliviery is via catenaries.
Way back in 90's, when I arrived on an Indian Railway station about 10 minutes before the train's scheduled time, I was pleasantly surprised to find the train at the platform.
Only when I checked the passenger reservation list, I found this was train from yesterday, late by 23:50 hours.
(for the curious... No, I could not get my reserved birth and had to travel on unreserved ticket, but at least I reached destination on my planned time.)
DB last year: I took train last year from Frankfurt airport to Bonn only to see Bonn sail past the window and train to go to Cologne.
I asked locals what is going on, turns out that all trains were late, and this train departed from the platform already marked for Bonn! “You should watch what train number you board on DB, not trust sign on platform!” locals helpfully advised me.
I was in a similar situation in Egypt once. At the specified time a train arrives, I board it. Only to see that my seat is occupied. We started to discuss the situation and the other passenger showed me his ticket - it was one of the previous delayed trains. We figured it just in time for me to jump out of the wrong train before it left the station :)
This has certainly happened to someone if not the OP.
I did wait in a single spot for almost 10h, my 5-6h journey became a 15h one, in Serbia in the late 2000s. IIRC, a large part of the railway was down that day, couple hundred km, electricity issue or something. Some people walked off the train, which was in between cities but near the road. I was a student, didn't have an alternative, so I didn't. They didn't organize a replacement bus.
This kind of thing was (maybe not to that extent) common, like once every year or two. They rarely reported on it in media if the cause wasn't notable.
No. The problem with DB are not the trains or the personnel on the trains. The problem is that the tracks are in miserable condition and that they are operated in a terrible way. The fault in this case is 100% with DB. Nobody else is to blame.
Shifting the blame away from DB, who is responsible for creating the terrible track conditions and is responsible for the operations, to the train operator, who zero ability to influence what DB is doing is just totally unfair.
DB is at fault here, they lead the train onto the wrong tracks and they also caused the previous delays. Regional trains in Germany have many different kinds of operators. Taking any of them is always miserable in exactly the same way, which is in almost every case caused by DB, because they can not operate the train network.
What is worse is that these operators also get into conflict with the DB trains. E.g. they prioritize a DB train, which is already late, over a regional train, causing delays for regional trains.
Would you happen to know if they would be using their own branded/livery trains, or would they be using DB trains, or maybe just DB cars pulled by a British locomotive?
It just raises so many questions in my mind that of all entities, a British train operator would be operating a train that is bounded within the German rail system.
My first thought is that it's some kind of counter-union effort through fake "competition" by bringing in foreign, private operators into the network.
They are running their own trains and their own liveries. What happens a lot of the time in German regional services is that private operators run routes for DB, because they are required to offer them. There is some actual competition forming in German long-distance trains (Flixtrain), but the important bottleneck in Germain train travel is the rail network, which is owned and (at least supposedly) maintained by the recently formed DB InfraGo
Competition on the railways is mandated through EU law.
Most regional services are tendered to the (in theory) best operator. The details on how, both which governing body organises the tender and whether the trains are branded by the region or the operator, varies across Europe. In Germany, these contracts are operated by a mix of DB, foreign state-owned operators and private operators. DB sells tickets for all region-organised trains regardless of who is the current operator.
Most countries have decided to have no or limited tenders on long-distance trains. In Germany, government support is prohibited for long-distance.
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.
I appreciate you sharing the positive experience as a neighbor, but unfortunately, the Deutsche Bahn is as bad as presented here. (I spend several years commuting to college via DB). Once my train stopped in a small village with the announcement "the train ends here". Thankfully, kind people picked me up.
I used to complain about the French SNCF, then I discovered DB and stopped complaining. I've been a Bahncard 1. Klasse holder for a few years.
Last time I took the train in Germany I was 30h late and had to spend a sunday between Cologne and Karlsruhe (not that I was really surprised).
The punctuality is a joke, ICEs are unpractical, train management comically incompetent (remember when the ICEs cars would never come in the announced order and there was luggage room for maybe 15% of passengers?).
The cars are very dirty, especially in 1st class where eating a full meal at your seat is encouraged but the cars are cleaned once every two days.
However, the train attendants are usually very arranging for every aspect of the trip on board.
Cheap tickets are cool, but have been there for so long (the regional ones) Germans take them for granted.
As a French I feel that the SNCF is pretty good. We like to complain about it but I have had a few minor problems (3 hours pause from locomotive breakdown, or 2 hours stop to allow cleaning after a suicide) but nothing too bad.
There are on times and rarely canceled.
The major issues are with pricing and lack of investment outside of TGV but it's not too bad.
I live in Berlin but grew up in the US. Yep, Germany has much more train coverage than where I'm from originally. And that's great. But to understand the complaints you really have to spend some years living with the uncertainty created by the DB.
It depends which route you take, but for a wide swath of the German population, your chance of an absolutely wretched experience seems to be around 1 in 4. That means that people are constantly weighing the desire for affordable, sustainable, comfortable transport that may go horribly wrong, against the (similarly unpredictable) endemic traffic jams and exhaustion of driving, and often choosing wrong. If you have no car, you're weighing more reliable but slow and uncomfortable and traffic-jam-prone buses, or simply avoiding the travel. Constantly making decisions on penalty of deeply unpleasant consequences without any way to actually reasonably judge your decision is a special form of miserable.
At least in the US, most of the time, there is no decision to make: you drive.
A lot of the issues are local, some are time constrained. There is a CCC talk on youtube "BahnMining - Pünktlichkeit ist eine Zier (David Kriesel)", that concludes that any train traveling through certain trainstations will most likely end up significantly delayed. Then you have certain train models failing during summer. Or my recent favourite planned construction work with no apparent plan for a reliable replacement service beyond "here is a train, it might leave at some point".
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.
Agree. Cologne/NRW is the worst. Anything going to or through Neumünster also used to be an almost-guaranteed nightmare, but I've heard it's better now.
That said, last time I was there DB was on strike and I lost hours.
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.
> The train starts moving. The driver announces there are “issues around Bonn.” He does not specify what kind. No one asks. We have learned not to ask.
This is one of those issues I keep mulling about; it seems train operators (and airliners for that matter) tend to avoid being technically specific about operation problems, and just say "problems" and - if they are kind - where the problem is. And I cannot decide whether this is the wrong or right approach: how much information is too much? The argument is that travellers don't care why the train cannot move or why it is delayed, they just want to know when the next train is.
The problem - however - is that train operators come off looking like idiots, when they really aren't. As an example, the S-trains around Copenhagen have recently switched to a CBTC signal system, which has increased punctuality to 97% (below 3 minutes, cancelled trains counted). At cold temperatures, railway points (or switches, if you will) might become inoperable, as their mechanism freeze (of course, there are systems to prevent this, but can occur anyway). This happened this November on the S-train lines, but the announcement was "signal failure"; which meant the train operator (DSB) (and the railway owner (Banedanmark)) kind of looked a bit stupid, since the whole point of CBTC was to eliminate signal failures entirely (in fact, if you're being pedantic, since CBTC has _no_ signals, there technically cannot be any signal failures), and had promised as much.
But - then again - travellers really just wanted to know what the next train was, but I still think train operators are doing themselves a disservice by being oblique about the actual problem. Particularly when a problem lasts for several days, "technical problems" just makes people think their engineers are incompetent, when in reality they have no idea about the severity of the problem (because it is not communicated).
I may of course be biased here, since I have a high interest in how trains operate, but friends of mine - whose interest is far lessen compared to mine - are also frustrated by these opaque messages; and I think the reason is a strong sense of lack of control - since (assuming one made it to the station on time) up until this point, the passenger have done everything right, and yet the system failed, and now they are not privy as to why.
Airlines are vague about this (at least in Europe) because different types of problems mean different obligations to compensate passengers.
After the incident they will determine what's the least expensive lie they can plausibly give (perhaps the weather will change fast enough that you can blame the weather, perhaps you can't lie about an equipment failure when everyone in the airport sees you swap out the airplane). If they tell the passengers the truth at the time they risk being held to that later.
Thankfully the EU at least has regulations requiring compensation. On my last business trip to Europe I got 650 euros for an overnight delay. The last time I got delayed in the US I got a hearty "fuck off" from the gate agent.
Heh, on the other hand the one and only time I arrived hours earlier was in the US :) I was flying AMS to SFO via Portland, we cleared immigration unusually fast, and when I got to my gate (connecting flight was in like 4 hours) the lady there asked if I wanted to move to an earlier one, boarding in ~20 mins. I said sure, and I even got the checked-in luggage at SFO (she did say that there was a chance it'd get sent later).
Airlines are often happy to do this as the earlier flight is likely not full, and allowing you on it costs them nothing while it opens a seat on the later flight which they can then sell to a standby passenger.
On paper yes, but every time my flight was delayed in EU the airlines (KLM, Lufthansa, RyanAir) always had a cop out, weather, airport issues, etc. and I didn't get compensated. Even though other planes managed to fly in the same conditions.
If they refuse you can escalate or hire a company that will negotiate for some percentage of profit. In most cases I had this problem they gave me a refund, but sometimes I had to argue a bit.
I used to work at one such company. The process can take a long time but it is mostly hands-off for the traveller and success rates are high once the case has been taken.
Edit: and also, these claim-assistance companies work on a winning fee.
Same, I was luckily just above the 1500 km threshold and got 400€, 3 hotel nights reimbursed (3 stars but 4 stars might have been ok), restaurants bills paid (beer included), a free replacement ticket , made new friends and visited museums. Lovely!
My boss and colleagues weren't delighted though...
Yet the very fact that airlines routinely do put people up in hotels when flights get cancelled is an example of the exorbitant privilege of air travel (another being tax-free kerosene).
Nobody expects this to happen with train travel. Perhaps they should.
I travel mostly by high speed train over very long distances and I fail to see it making more economical sense than air travel, even with taxed kerosene.
The costs of a high speed line are on the scale of 30 millions euros per km, with maintenance of 300,000 €/km/year. A TGV with 740 seats costs around 25 millions euros and has maintenance too. Most of the operating costs are per trip, a TGV typically does 2 to 3 500km trips per day.
A mid-range plane like the A320neo costs around 100 millions euros for 190 passengers and typical operating costs of 5 millions for a 2 flights per day average. A lot of these costs are hourly costs (fuel and maintenance) and airport costs. Fuel is 10%.
In France, trains and especially high-speed trains are heavily subsidised with a lot of tickets paid under various incentivized and subsidized schemes. SNCF (trains and railways) receives between 10 and 20 billions euros per year from various government entities (depending on what you include), i.e. 20% to 35% of revenue. There are also indirect subsidies through corporate tax schemes like commuting exemptions. Finally, long haul buses have long been forbidden and considered a threat to the train monopoly, and after a short golden age of EU-led monopoly breaking, they have been again heavily regulated so they can hardly compete. Similarly, short-haul flights have been almost banned.
The train is more practical but when I hear it is on par with air travel economically and more environment friendly I fail to make sense of the numbers.
My allusion was to environmental sustainability, not to the human construct of economic efficiency.
However counter-intuitive it may be, air travel is indeed far more energy-intensive, and therefore destructive, than train travel. Mainly due to the exponential increase of wind resistance with speed. On a planet of 9 billion people, airplanes will simply not be a sustainably form of transport by any metric.
The EU law applies, but companies get out of it by:
- encouraging you to take multiple tickets (so you can't claim compensation on the whole trip and becaise of missed transfers).
- saying it's not their doing (DB specialty).
- in some cases accepting an "alternate schedule" (typically by changing your ticket at the company's suggestion) will void any claims.
In some cases you have better chances hiring a taxi for 2000km and forcing the company to pay.
On the opposite, on (very expensive) French TGVs you get compensation starting at 30 minutes delay (connections counted) whatever the reason and SNCF will do their utmost to bring you to destination or ensure you get accomodation.
> The argument is that travellers don't care why the train cannot move or why it is delayed
Deutsche Bahn does not think this is true and neither do I. If this was ever the thinking, they've performed or read studies and changed their mind
You can very clearly hear the drilled setup "<delay info> grund dafür ist <error category>" rigidly being regurgitated every. single. time. a delay is announced. The middle words are (per my understanding) a formal way to say "because of" and it's not something you will hear in daily life, so I presume it's the output of a committee and corporate requires them to say this, no matter if they know anything more than "the signal is red". Whether they know or not, the detail is always at a level that sounds like malicious compliance. I'd rather they say "we don't know" or say nothing at all. And if they do know, I'd hope they make up a new sentence like "someone was spotted on the crossing up ahead after the barriers closed. Someone is checking the cameras to make sure it won't come to a collision" but we instead get the robotic "we have come to a stop on the grounds of person on track". It mimics their training samples and what colleagues got into the habit of saying so I guess they think it's good like this, but is not actually helpful
Idk what creates this useless information culture, but they clearly know that passengers do want this information
At the station itself, on the other hand, you might as well play "delay bingo". Is it an earlier training running late that is now slowing down other trains? Is it yet another Stellwerksstörung? Or maybe it's urgent track repairs? It might also be an Oberleitungsschaden!
To be honest, I don't care about excuses. Yes, problems happen, but this is systemic. Does it help me if I know the train tracks are broken yet again? It does not. The reasons (excuses) they bring up ring hollow. I don't feel that drivers or station staff would appear stupid if they don't tell. They are victims, too.
In the UK they do tend to say what the actual problem is, even if it's someone "under a train". But it has resulted in mockery for things like "leaves on the line" from people who apparently know how to run trains safely. You can't win really.
By always talking only about non specified "problems" and getting people not to expect any further information it is easier to hide when it's a suicide.
I cannot speak for other countries; but in Denmark, they are always crystal clear when the train has hit someone (»personpåkørsel« in Danish); and even when they suspect they might have hit someone; so when I say "technical problems", I mean technical problems. Besides, I am not sure I see the point of hiding when they've hit someone?
There's a lot of evidence for suicide being socially contagious, particularly through communications to the general public which will inevitably find their way to people who in that moment are particularly vulnerable. Newspapers publishing suicides causes an untick in subsequent suicides. Newspapers publicizing murder-suicides even causes an increase in murder-suicides. Publicized information about suicides by train increase the rate of suicides by trains.
It is therefore a beat practice to generally avoid mention suicide, because mentioning suicide means prompting people to think about suicide and in some cases that means prompting people to consider suicide. This is known as the Werther effect, you can look that up if you'd like to know more.
I'm in Norway, I was once at the railway station and someone collapsed on the platform and needed medical attention. Conductors of both trains currently at the platform attended the person, so train traffic was delayed.
The official reason for the delay, according to the Ruter app, the info screens and announcements over the PA system, was "signalfeil" ("signal error"). So at least in Norway, we clearly have a culture of describing all sorts of problems, including completely non-technical problems like someone having a medical emergency, as a problem with the train signals.
I am always a bit annoyed when the root of the problem is not explained. This is the case most of the time (DB of course). I would really like to have a bit more information. Even if there is nothing you can do, it helps to understand how big or small the problem is. Then you can make a decision based on it. Like getting out in the next station or something.
Part of the reason is that train drivers often dont even know themselves.
They might simply get the signal to hold the train or that it needs to be diverted.
I think they look stupider by not saying anything. They look stupid by all of these constant delays, cancellations, and the occasional utterly surreal self-inflicted problem like in the article. That's what makes them look stupid.
Just explain what's wrong. Arm passengers with the best info you can give them. And figure out a way to let people disembark close to where they need to be.
DB has become a complete joke. I've had to travel to and through Germany several times these past couple of years, and almost always there's a problem.
I once paid 80 euro for a taxi from Essen to Dusseldorf because they cancelled the train that would connect to the last ICE to Amsterdam. When I got to Dusseldorf on time, the ICE arrived at a different platform than announced. I only noticed that because some people were suddenly leaving the platform. I warned a few people who still hadn't noticed it. I bet a lot of people still managed to miss that train after all the trouble making it to Dusseldorf.
My sense is that this has happened over the last 20-30 years as overall competence has just dropped in many of these key positions. COVID was a good example of this - lots of humming and hawing about why decisions were being made, and garbled messaging about the reasons. Basically they get angry and defensive about blaming the "peanut gallery" or "armchair experts" while not being specific, because they themselves don't know why or how something is being done, and therefore being unable to defend their own positions from solid ground.
Unfortunately nowadays traveling with DB has become a game of Russian roulette. If you get lucky the train arrives at the destination ahead of time and if you're unlucky most probably a delay of 4+ hours and missing your connecting train.
The main reason for this is lack of competition for DB in Germany. I used to date a guy who works at infra department in DB and based on what he told me, I couldn't believe how inefficient and massively complicated DB is. They have internal departments which acts as separate entities to mimic competition and each department has to place bids among each other to get contracts (more bureaucracy) but then they have an IT department and no matter how cheap or good outside IT providers are they must get the service from internal IT department (so much for competition).
At this point DB needs a complete overhaul and let go of so much dead weight to make it working again and unfortunately German politicians are just throwing more money at every problem hoping they would magically solve themselves rather than fixing the actual structural problems.
Before the DB became a public limited company, their services worked remarkably well. I know from first hand experience because I was already a customer then.
The privatisation and the crazy idea that it could somehow not being run on a deficit is what ruined it. Of course the competition thing is artificial, and the internal structures are kaput, but I doubt that more competition would fix it.
Surprisingly, 90% of the train personnel is still pretty good, acting friendly and professionally.
The main issue is over-utilisation and under-investment of the rail network. Like in many other EU countries. There is no evidence that a state monopoly would perform any better given today’s state of infrastructure and increased traveler numbers.
> The main reason for this is lack of competition for DB in Germany
Cannot be - there is no competition in Switzerland, but things run pretty smoothly -> in the case of Germany I'd rather say: "lack of oversight, controls, 'konsequent zu sein'" -> in the case of Germany's DB I think that nobody at all levels gives a *hit about its problems.
> Unfortunately nowadays traveling with DB has become a game of Russian roulette.
Ironically, Russian trains (even over distances of thousands of kilometres) are usually almost perfectly on time.
Germany's DB seems to fill the same niche as other companies there, like Telekom: semi-private companies living off old state-built infrastructure that they're now incapable of (or unwilling to?) maintain.
Being on time over thousands of kilometers is a lot easier than being on time over dozens of kilometers. Especially if you share the same tracks with cargo trains, regional trains, and high speed trains and stop at every other village because that was the condition the nimbys required for allowing you to build the track in the first place.
Local trains in Moscow and Saint Petersburg ("elektrichka" with all local stops) may get delayed by a few minutes sometimes, true. But e.g. several trains being delayed by ten minutes because of an ice rain is newsworthy. At least that was the case on several directions I knew about.
I don't really buy that this is the core issue, even though it may very well be one issue. Rail was operated efficiently and on time in the past when competition did not exist even in a contrived manner, and rail is not really an industry in which real intra-industry competition is really possible. Rail competes with flight, and personal and mass surface transportation. It cannot really compete among rail operators in an efficient manner.
It is way more complicated than that, but you could commoditize the rail separate from the transport of goods and people, where they each compete on price for capacity, but it all gets extremely political very fast, i.e., public transport people vs goods transport that primarily pays for the whole network.
In the UK the railways used to be kind of bad in the nationalised British Rail days. People moan about the current privatised rail but it mostly works.
> internal departments which acts as separate entities to mimic competition and each department has to place bids among each other to get contracts (more bureaucracy) but then they have an IT
Same here, with a big German semiconductor player you all know. The IT department has to battle the non-it departments and external contractors for internal software dev jobs. It's a made up game, costing 70% of our work time (just the beurocracy).
I believe general wisdom in the US is that trains are best when run by the government at zero cost. This is presumably the best way to get transit. So the idea that competition would improve things is odd.
I know the author mentioned this, but I just got nervous imagining this as a tourist who doesn't speak German at all. This shouldn't be like this. Why they don't help at all?
It's also funny considering how here in South America we look at Germany trains (and Switzerland trains) as always on time, and the best train system, etc. But I am sure if this happens here it would be on the cover of newspapers.
I think, the joke about Germany and Italy should team up is a reference to the new CEO of Deutsche Bahn, Evelyn Palla, who is from Italy. The "to make the trains run on time" gives a hint here, because this is her declared task.
Not about Germany, Italy, and Japan, forming some sort of axis, I guess.
As per my other comment, Swiss trains (especially SBB) are not as pleasant as they get credit for. I get a lot that "you know, in other countries it's much worse", and it reminds me of software hosting, where it was normal in the past to be offline occasionally. Then Google et al. came and showed that much more reliability is possible with good engineering. I think there would be a lot of room for improvement.
I disagree. Swiss trains are a delight. They even have trains going up mountains (although some of those cost extra). Public transit in Switzerland was extremely reliable when I was there, and also according to official statistics.
Unlike other commenters, I agree that there are some (arguably significant) things to complain about. The first one is price - tickets are quite expensive. I frequently travel Zurich HB -> Lugano. This is 200km and costs a whopping 120+ CHF round trip. Zurich -> Geneva, Zurich Bern are similarly expensive. However, it's a bit hard to fault them as Switzerland is an expensive country and perhaps the high prices keep the service good.
What I am less able to excuse them for is capacity issues, especially on weekend and Friday trains on popular routes in the Summer. That Zurich Lugano train is packed to the gills most weekends during the summer such that it's standing room only for most of the 2 hour ride. They need to add more trains or at least more cars.
Reliability is not something to complain about. The trains are punctual, that's for sure.
Eh? Just checked in SBB Mobile, Zurich<->Lugano is 68 CHF roundtrip (with Halb-Tax, of course, but if you live in Switzerland, it doesn't make sense to not have it unless you have a GA travelcard) with 2nd class.
Keep in mind that a train in Germany counts as one-time if it is less than 6 minutes late. In Switzerland, it's 3 minutes.
Also in Germany, a train that did not even arrive does not count as too late.
There is also a concept of the "Pofalla-Wende", which is when a train is so late that it just does a 180 and drives back, to mitigate that the delay doesn't carry over to the train's next route. Of course, that means that it skips the stations at the end of the route.
Experienced that a few months ago. Next time I‘ll be tempted to pull the emergency brake which will cost them at least half an hour to get the train going again. Or so I have been told.
That does not make Germany look any better but I find the "percentage on time" not very useful compared to the "years of delay" metric. And arguable a average/median delay per train would be better? Also some delay volatility data would be interesting.
If you look at France for example, 80% of trains are not punctual but the "total delays" is actually on the low range, France being on the large side with lots of lines, I would say that it shows that the delays (20% of the time) are actual shorts.
I gather that this is an average of all trains. In Italy, the high velocity train are quite punctual, but the slow regional trains drag the average down.
The less complex your train network, the easier it is to ensure trains are on time. France, Italy and Germany possibly have larger networks than Switzerland.
Then split your network into segments you can handle. Switzerland receives lots of international trains. Not only that; it has a lot of rail companies, serves even tiny villages, and has the highest use per capita in Europe. Size of the network is a lame excuse. German trains used to be fine. Now they're a disaster.
Switzerland has all public transport synchronized across the country. In any of the countries you mentioned they don’t even gave synchronized public transport at city level.
I recently moved to the Netherlands to study, and I experience that a lot. Despite almost all official information everywhere being written in both Dutch and English, in-train announcements are only done in Dutch. I have to constantly listen to the announcements and try to understand based off their vibe if they sound like something critical or not.
The Netherlands is in the EU. English is the most widely spoken language in the EU, even after the UK left, because it is by far the most common second language. Nearly half of the people in the EU can speak it.
In Northern Europe the percentage is even higher. In the Netherlands there are almost as many people who speak it as there are Dutch speakers.
Taking into account people from other EU countries who are there on business plus tourists there is a good chance that if only one language was to be used for train announcements more people on the train would understand if it was in English then if it was in Dutch.
The Dutch were ridiculously bad at imposing their language on other countries. Little trace of it remains in Indonesia, or New York. Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten have never taken to it. South Africa is kind of the exception except even then Afrikaans has played second fiddle to English for 150 years, and they have sought to differentiate their language from Dutch in more recent times.
Portugal has been better at that game when you consider its size.
It already is, mate. There are people who move to countries such as the Netherlands, Iceland and Sweden and insist on using English all the time. I've even heard of Dutch using English with each other. There are people who've attempted this in Spain, but it's harder there since there are so many Spanish speakers.
Every language has strengths and weaknesses. Perfect is the enemy of good. If your definition of 'good' is 'relatively easy and technically international', Esperanto is very suitable. (Not to mention way better than the status quo, in any case.)
Ideally announcements should be bilingual, but if there’s only one language, it’s better to inconvenience any number of foreigners than even a single native who doesn’t speak English.
The point of an official language is that the government makes it as convenient as possible living your life knowing only that language. It wouldn't be that unreasonable IMO to switch official language to English, but seeing as NL is a democracy, that ought to be a democratic decision. A referendum of some kind would probably be best. It's not a small decision to be taken lightly.
But it's still nice to offer information in other languages in certain situations. Infrastructure used heavily by tourists and recent immigrants who don't speak the language yet should be made as usable as possible to people who don't know Dutch. Making important announcements in both English and Dutch on trains is an example of that.
Yes, I'm obviously not mad with them using their own language, and I am studying it since I live there. But it's in the EU, and there is a lot of international tourists on the train, who shouldn't be expected to learn the national language of every country they visit just to navigate it.
Yeah, why bother using their own language at all? They all speak English and are just pretending. I want all the people in all the places I visit to be just like me.
Yep, only semi-consistent exception is that Amsterdam Central & Schiphol are usually also announced in english. Including delays related to these stations.
But, for example, Rotterdam or Utrecht are already a lot less likely to be announced in english.
In Switzerland, the major train lines announce in English (as well as German and French). Minor train lines often only announce in the local language.
Honestly, I don't see the problem. As a tourist, you have to be prepared with apps, or you can ask someone for help. Happens all the time, and most people are happy to help.
Someone living here needs to learn the local language.
> we look at Germany trains (and Switzerland trains) as always on time
When taking an international train from Germany to Switzerland, don't count on it that it will run through to the final destination.
SBB (Swiss National Railways) started to block German trains if their delay is more than 15 minutes (so, basically every DB train) and won't allow the train on their network.
This is only peripherically educational. Constantly delayed DB trains completely fouled up the scheduling on the extremely dense Swiss network. So they just won't allow it anymore.
On a sidenote: In 2024 SBB trains were 93.2% punctual. Connectivity punctuality (where you have to catch a connecting train) was 98.7%. A train is counted as punctual if the delay is less than 3 minutes (half the German figure).
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.
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.
I wonder how many times a low-effort "truthy" sounding comment like that is written without someone like you to correct them and to clarify. There's also comments here suggesting UK's privatisation fixed BR that I do not have the energy to correct anymore, so they just sit there being wrong for all to see
> They are forced to (at least try to) make a profit for their shareholders,
This is not true at all.
The shareholders set the targets and since the shareholder is the government they can set any target they want: profitability, more trains, cheaper tickets etc..
If the shareholder wants to inject 10% every year in stead of taking a profit they are absolutely free to do so.
The DB AG has been specifically founded to be "market-oriented" and profit-making, so yes, it is true.
I am sure the state could try to do _something_ about it, but I am also sure that a very strong car lobby here in Germany is working against that. BTW, the road network, which I would consider to conceptually be the same kind of infrastructure as the rail network, is to my understanding mostly built and maintained by state organizations, so it is possible to do it that way.
I guess it is also harder to market "let's subsidize this private company with tax payer money so they can continue to offer mediocre service" to voters, compared to "let's use tax payer money to build and maintain one-of-a-kind critical infrastructure from which everyone (with a car, which due to the less-than-great alternatives is a lot of people) can profit".
Again, having it organized as a private company adds indirection, diffuses power and responsibility, and adds a certain more or less implicit expectation of what private companies are supposed to do. That's my main issue with it. Private companies aren't supposed to run critical infrastructure as a monopoly for profit. It's the states job to provide and maintain critical infrastructure in the interest of all.
>The DB AG has been specifically founded to be "market-oriented" and profit-making, so yes, it is true.
Again, if the shareholders decide this is the reason: yes.
But shareholders can just as easily set other targets or incentives.
>I guess it is also harder to market "let's subsidize this private company with tax payer money so they can continue to offer mediocre service" to voters,
The government owns DB AG, it is not a private company. It is a public company.
> The government owns DB AG, it is not a private company. It is a public company.
It is a private company, as in it is a legal entity under private law. This is in contrast to a "öffentlich-rechtliches Unternehmen" (I don't know if this even has a proper translation or equivalent in other jurisdictions). There is more than two options here, it can be both privatized and public according to your definition.
That's ridiculous. DB is not even trying to become profitable, not is there any evidence that it's sole shareholder, aka the government, sets it as a target.
Well apparently they have been somewhat profitable from 2016 to 2019, and they have been paying a dividend to the state more often than not. I don't think their goal is actively loosing money?
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.
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.
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.
German trains do typically announce in English. If they don't, that's the exception. Just ask around. Most people here speak English and will be able to repeat what was said, especially if they're under 40 or so.
Germany is the country where I found the highest number of people not being able to speak English, even people working in accomodation!
French people probably know English but they refuse to speak it; Italians don't know English that well, but they try their best using rolling R's and gestures.
I thought they already rejected delayed trains. Trains that are on time are still allowed. But I'd love to see Switzerland take over some of those international connections.
> But I'd love to see Switzerland take over some of those international connections.
The Giruno EMUs of the SBB serving the Eurocity from Hamburg to Basel are having technical malfunctions causing delays & aborted trainrides for the last few weeks.
The Eurocity(Express) Zurich-Munich is the most delayed long-distance train route in Germany. Most of the German route is only single-tracked and overcrowded.
I did learn German at school but it didn't help much when trying to get to Munich airport last year. I could understand what was going on with the cancelled trains at the station I boarded at, but the train I did catch end up tipping us all out after a few stops.
I could make out a bit of what the driver said, but not enough to be sure of the detail, which is what really mattered. I expected to miss my flight, but just made it in the end.
I'm a heavy public transport user in Switzerland, and even though it's almost a meme how reliable the trains are, reality is different. Yes, they operate in a way that make the stats look good (x% on time), but they take tradeoff to get there. E.g. they won't await connections if another train is a few minutes late. So you might have to wait for 30 minutes for the next one, or even longer if you're unlucky. And there's the occasional big incident, where you get stuck for several hours. I missed flights that way, even though planning in 3 hours of buffer. There is zero compensation in such cases as long as they bring you to your destination on the same day. Plus, several trains are regularly way too crowded.
They changed the policy maybe 5-years ago about a train waiting for a late train to come in because they found that it added additional delays to the entire system. I prefer the new way.
In my experience, they do sometimes still wait (at least that was the case for a few trips with delays last summer).
(And tbf I'm ok waiting 30min, with Taktfahrplan how much you wait is usually max 1h and often much shorter, my experience in other countries is often hours of delays in case of trouble)
> I know the author mentioned this, but I just got nervous imagining this as a tourist who doesn't speak German at all. This shouldn't be like this. Why they don't help at all?
How much help does your home country give to German tourists who don't speak English?
Swiss trains are very civilized. On an ordinary intercity train can sit at a table with a white tablecloth and have a beer or wine and a proper dinner. It really makes the time fly by. The SBB also has merch store with their own line of watches.
If it's anything like the UK, the staff have incredibly secure jobs and recently secured some good changes to their working conditions/pay. It's probably not in their contract to announce in other languages, so they do exactly what their contract says
Idk how it is in Germany but my wife is currently trying to became a train driver in France and there are far more requirements that what you would imagine.
Even if the job is actually opened to basically everyone (and that’s pretty nice), you have to be in perfect physical and psychological shape with pretty strict tests, you have to be intellectually apt enough to follow the training which is pretty intense. You have to accept work conditions such as not knowing your work hours until the day before. You have to accept sleeping who knows where at least 2 times a week. You have to accept having only one weekend off per month.
So what happens is that when you have that much filters and you still want to hire train drivers, you can’t afford to expect your drivers to know another language on top of all of the rest.
Actually I’m a taking the train everyday to go to work and I have barely any complaint with the SNCF.
Most of the time they do what they can to deal with issues.
I don’t feel like there are too much issues it’s just they are extremely bad at communicating issues when they happen.
Sometimes the train is not there when it should but on the screen it just disappears as if it passed. Most of the time it’s just 2-5 minutes late but you can’t know. Maybe it’s just late. Maybe the traffic is stopped. Who knows.
I just dont understand how they don’t have people whose job is just writing messages for the information screens.
What is worse is that in my region, they have a pretty decent community managers for live information but they only post information in twitter because why not. So they already have the people doing this work but those people are saying different things than what the screen shows. Just let them write things on the screens :D
Pay-walled, but the title says it all: "Switzerland suspends Deutsche Bahn trains due to chronic delays". DB is so unreliable that it impacts the networks of neighboring countries.
Swiss trains are always on time. I've heard they've start to refuse delayed German trains entry to the country because their delays disrupt the system too much. The Swiss train system is excellent. The German train system is a joke.
Germany had a great train system but Germany also has a big automobile industry that spends a lot of money on lobbying.
In the end of the 90s with neoliberalism being very popular, it was decided to privatize the trains. The effect was only minimal investments in the infrastructure and a gradual rotting away of the train network. Now we a reaping what we have sown.
The enshitification of the German trains was done on purpose so they don't compete with cars.
I'd reverse the question ask why Germany (or any other country where English is not an official language, and does not majorly rely on tourism for income) would provide any public information in English? Commercial services can choose to do so a matter of self interest, but why would state financed services?
Problem is that failing to communicate will lead to huge productivity holes, so to "fix it", either the natives need to learn a non native language or the incoming immigrants need to learn the native language..
So, attracting the international workforce to come Germany vs being able to fully utilise them are completely different ballparks..
This is Germany we're talking about, right? Something like half the population already speaks English to some degree and that is specifically concentrated in the part of the country that is already highly educated and would be working with those immigrants.
Educated immigrants often consider countries interchangeable. They are in a country, because they found an opportunity and took it. But they are not committed to stay, because better opportunities could arise elsewhere. When you have already immigrated once, doing it again is only going to get easier.
Immigrants with fewer opportunities are more likely to try to learn the language and integrate. When a country is offering them something they can't find anywhere else, it makes more sense to go through all that effort. Even knowing that they will probably never fully fit in.
I have my own DB story. About 15 years ago I was supposed to take an overnight sleeper train from Copenhagen to Cologne. We had beds booked. It's about 22:00 and we're on the platform ready for bed.
The train arrived on time, we checked our tickets to see which coach we were on and walked down the train looking for it. We get to the end of the train, odd, we must have missed our carriage so we turn around for another pass. Then we start to notice other confused expressions.
We eventually figured out the problem: they had accidentally left the sleeper coaches in Hamburg, a full 180 miles away as the crow flies, or almost half our entire journey.
After waiting on the platform for about an hour, busses arrived to take us to Hamburg. We're now quite tired and our bed on a train is now a seat on a bus.
We finally get to Hamburg at about 3:00 the next day, walk to our beds and we're ready to collapse. Surely they're not going to come and inspect our tickets at this time?
They came and inspected our tickets at around 3:30. Two and a half hours later we were in Cologne. Yay.
Deutsche Bahn has gone from not perfect to straight up disastrous and antisocial in the past years. They use scamming approaches more misleading than airline's and in cases straight up lie. It's rightfully headed for insolvency despite billions of wasteful and wrongful state funding. I hope that company goes under as soon as possible. Any other solution to the railway system management is better than DB. DB is not going to make it
Deutsche Bahn ist anything but wasteful, it's underfunded to the tune of tens of billions per year. Cleaning out trees more up to ten meters away from railways was seen as to expensive, now 6m tall trees fall in them all the time during storms. Having two railways next to each other was seen as unnecessary, now we have no backups when one fails.
Swiss railway is seen as the ideal DB should strive for, but fact is that Switzerland invests more than double per capita into its rail infrastructure. German stinginess now compounded over decades, and that's not the fault of management.
Underfunded and wasteful are not opposites. When there is not enough money to do things properly there is often a lot of duct tapping going on which waste available resources without fixing anything. There is scarcely anything more expensive in government than saving money.
> They use scamming approaches more misleading than airline's and in cases straight up lie.
Would you mind sharing some examples? My only complaints with DB are cancellations and delays. Well, the ticketing might be a bit confusing the first time you realize "ticket" and "seat reservation" are two completely independent entities. Similarly, rules for which train you're allowed to take might be a bit confusing. But I wouldn't call it scamming.
After privatization, the Deutsche Bahn became private enterprise and is now 100% owned by the German state. As such, insolvency isn't going to happen. Though it would be funny.
If a company fails this hard, the solution isn't to feed it more government money to prop it up. It's to let it fail and rebuild from scratch.
Blacklist everyone who was involved above a certain rank. Put together an entirely new structure. The only real way to get rid of this kind of rot is to make the consequences of dysfunction hit.
The DB is and always was fully owned by the government, this is not the usual case of "dumbass executives mess things up".
Unfortunately, the DB first got hit by Thatcherite neoliberalism in the early 90s that led to "unprofitable" things like switches, railyards or lesser-used routes to be torn down and the real estate sold off (to prepare for a privatization that THANK GOD never happened), and then we got 16 years of Conservative traffic/infrastructure ministers whose job priority was to funnel money to Bavarian highways [1], not towards railways.
Unfortunately, while the left wing loves to prune its ranks in purity tests (partially because its voters demand accountability), the Conservatives have a solid "better dead than red" voter base.
According to this page, it actually did stop at Troisdorf (though, that doesn't have to be correct). I don't see why they should have been able to stop at Neuwied but not any of the stations in between. Most of them are possibly too small, as the RE5 is quite long for a regional train, about 200m. The usual "RE" on this track, the RE8, is only about 110m max. Bonn-Beuel should have worked, though.
DB is continually the worst train experience I have in Europe. I have never been on a train in Germany that's on time or that stops at the right station. Several times I've had to find someone young (and who speaks English) and say, "I'm just going to follow you to the next train."
I've been told that the UK is worse, but I don't have much experience with it outside of Eurostar.
Passenger rights are very good in the UK. It's easy to claim Delay Repay, where you get 25% refund after a 15 minute delay, 50% refund after 30 mins and 100% refund after 60 mins. Other train operators are obliged to help you get where you need to go if the company you intended to travel with has cancelled your trains, or you've missed a connection due to a previous train you were on being delayed.
I've had the last train out of central London for the night cancelled at about 1am and you can just message the train company on social media and they'll pay £100+ to get you a taxi all the way to somewhere like Cambridge.
Also, not sure how it is in other countries, but in the UK, everything is entirely open data. You can go to a site like https://map.signalbox.io/ to see a live map of every train in the UK, and sites like Realtime Trains let you get all the details about every train (eg. https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/search/simple/gb-nr:KGX)
And some operators love to ignore their obligations
Our protections are good on paper but in reality quite poor. London is of course better than the rest of the country though.
I don't consider having to message a faceless social media team on "X" to get a taxi refunded good customer service at all. And they are definitely pushing for you to pay first and then get a refund, which is not in the spirit of the contract. My mother doesn't have "X" and wouldn't know where to start
UK has airline-style pricing that goes up extortionately as seats run out, making it prohibitively expensive to use. It's also frequently late and/or trains randomly cancelled, although you can plan around it, you end up 1hr+ late on most long journeys.
On the plus side: local journeys are great. Delay Repay means you get up to 100% of your ticket back if you're delayed. If you cannot make the last train due to delays, they're obligated to get your home by bus or even by taxi. Train stock is (in my area at least) new and very comfortable. Views are good!
My experience of the trains themselves has been fine in the UK.
Ticket prices vary a lot and are unpredictable. I have not a last minute ticket from London to the midlands for just over £20, but they can be a lot more (several times as much?) for the same journey even booking ahead.
I definitely prefer the train to driving if I am going long distance by myself, but if its multiple people the car becomes a lot cheaper.
Local services in cities are pretty good. I never owned a car in London, nor in Manchester until I had a child.
Deutsche Bahn is completely state owned, UK rail is privatized. They're both pretty bad. China's new high speed rail is state owned, while the Japanese network is largely private. They're both far better than UK and Germany. I wonder what are the main determinants of the quality of large infra networks? State ownership only seems to have a very loose correlation, where even the sign of the relationship is unclear.
DB is state owned, yes ... but it's run like a private company. It's basically the classic "privatize profits, socialize losses" - done as a yearly routine.
Not even remotely exaggerating, it's incredibly corrupt.
DB‘s quality decline started when this move to privatization happened. They didn’t put money into maintenance, closed lot of tracks and ignored all warnings by experts who predicted this exact scenario more than a decade ago. Most of the time now DB issues seem to be connected to a lack of available tracks. A super fast ICE has to wait for some slow train to clear the path. There’s an issue on one track and thus the entire traffic is backed up till that’s resolved.
I do think they’re working on improving these conditions. But I wish they did more to communicate that. Where is the big marketing campaign explaining how they got there, apologizing, and explaining how they will do better?
When the owner of DB is owned by the German federal government, they all rule the whole company, who gets the profit? The German federal government? (It's a sign of stupidity to claim DB is privat. It is not. It is not.)
That's why I said it's incredibly corrupt. It's an Aktiengesellschaft which is fully owned by the state, so profits would remain in the ownership of the company and their leadership to do with as they please, e.g. pay themselves whatever bonuses they want . (Or pay out to their shareholders? Lol, nope).
losses get pushed to be picked up by the state/taxes.
" It's an Aktiengesellschaft which is fully owned by the state, so profits would remain in the ownership of the company and their leadership to do with as they please, e.g. pay themselves whatever bonuses they want . "
That's plain wrong. The owner decides which happens to the profits and how much the leadership got paied.
Besides that, it is just rambling. Again calling the DB privatised is a sign of stupidity.
The determinant is the amount of money invested in infrastructure.
No matter whether the train operators and the network operator are private or a state monopoly, all decisions about major upgrades and new lines are made and funded by the government. The network operator just deals with the maintenance.
Nationalisation(or sometimes privatisation!) is seemingly seen by many as panacea, but it won't help you if your network runs at 150% capacity every day.
Not completely. Transport for Wales is state owned, or at least Welsh government, and control most of the local trains in Wales and out to some bits of England. Some of the UK infrastructure is state owned or funded. The state provides the licences as well, so they are not off the hook in that sense.
I take those long distance trains and it amazes me the choice and how low the cost is. You can choose an empty high speed service in peak time with a 20 minute frequency for a high cost (comparable to flying), you can book ahead for a lower price - especially in non peak services, or you can choose a flexible lower speed (comparable with service in the BR days, 3.5 hours) for far cheaper than it ever was.
Season ticket prices are under 20p/mile into London
Nationalisation will likely break this and increase costs for all but the richest. For the last decade the public have been clamouring for “simplification” because they couldn’t understand the restriction codes. Now it’s being rolled out they are of course seeing price rises and complaining “not like that!”
People who claim the U.K. is worse have no idea what DB is like and just think that “nationalisation” makes trains half the price and twice as reliable.
When comparing to the UK you have to also factor in how absurdly expensive it is. Eg a monthly ticket to the nearest city ~25km away is 292 EUR (nowhere near London. A city with not very high wages either). And the train is just 2.5 carriages and full every day.
A typical season ticket into London is under 20p a mile. Outside of London it’s far more expensive (35p a mile is common), because the railway has not had the investment London has over decades. Platform lengthening (of possible) is not cheap, requires buying new land in crowded towns and cities. Modern train stock isn’t cheap either
Most people will commute ~19 days a month, given vacations and sickness.
From my example, that's ~794 miles (corrected) a month, £255, £0.32/mile. Not as expensive as some other routes but still can be as as high as 12% of your take-home wage given the low salaries in that city.
Moving onto London... /under/ 20p a mile? Which route is that??
Just some random examples I picked:
Alton to Waterloo: £529, 1786 miles, £0.29/mile.
Guildford to Waterloo: £453/mo - 1140 miles a month, £0.39/mile.
Gravesend to London Bridge: £436/mo, 836 miles a month, £0.52/mile.
Brentwood to Liverpool St: £336/mo, 706 miles a month, £0.47/mile.
St Albans to Thameslink: £440/mo, 756 miles a month, £0.58/mile.
Brighton is £559/mo for the Thameslink only ticket (the cheaper one) and 50.5 miles to London Bridge. Even being generous saying 22 days a month, that's 25p/mile.
Just give up.
I've proved your "A typical season ticket into London is under 20p a mile" claim wrong multiple times.
Southampton to Waterloo is just about the exception at ~19p/mile if you assume 22 days per month which I think is exceptional.
Annual tickets are 40 weeks meaning 5.75 trips per weekly ticket (230 a year). Newbury works out 21p a mile, Ipswich 23p a mile, Cambridge 22p/mile, so yes prices have crept up just above 20p/mile in the last year or two.
UK trains are terrible. I don't have direct experience to know if they are worse than DB trains, except for DB's dire performance being a running joke amongst my German colleagues at work.
I bet that UK trains "win" by being far more expensive than German trains, along with absurdly complex pricing. If you choose the wrong ticket you could also "win" a criminal conviction!
Don't worry though! We're currently building the most expensive bit of high speed rail in Europe, that won't even go into the centre of our capital city [edit: apparently it will now, see reply], or further north than the Midlands. Passengers who have the audacity to want to travel further north will have to transit over to the old tracks, creating even further capacity problems.
All of this is entirely avoidable, if the government just took a few common sense measures, but sadly it doesn't seem to be anyone's priority.
> that won't even go into the centre of our capital city
Is Euston not the centre? Where all the other trains from the north-west come into, and literally on the same road as Kings Cross St Pancras? Plus Old Oak Common is going to be an interchange with the Elizabeth Line.
People also miss the fact that a big reason why HS2 is being built is to take load off of the West Coast Main Line, which is running at full capacity at the moment. There's no room to run additional services. Even though some unfortunate compromises have been made, this will still massively benefit parts of the North because they'll be able to get more frequent services once the line is no longer clogged up by trains from London.
Oh I have we uncancelled the Euston connection now. Good news finally. Hopefully we'll build beyond Birmingham too, because otherwise passengers travelling north of Birmingham will add extra stress on the overloaded WCML.
UK slam door trains where the door appeared locked but then came unlatched when another train passed and sucked people out to the their deaths before the advent of the safety lock.
> Several times I've had to find someone young (and who speaks English) and say, "I'm just going to follow you to the next train."
I'm on the other side of this. I end up chaperoning lost tourists on my DB disaster trips with a regularity that I should be getting a paycheck from DB.
> DB is continually the worst train experience I have in Europe
Oh c’mon have you tried trains in Slovenia? The ICE from Budapest with a constant 230+ min delay, the regional one from Ljubljana to Celje where half the track is seemingly under perpetual construction (so transfer to a bus!), passenger trains delayed all the time waiting for freight trains, trains randomly going 20kph on some segments, and lately even vandals sabotaging the tracks. And don’t worry, they announce all of that exclusively in Slovene with no extra answers.
I’ve been on DB and it wasn’t that bad. It was expensive but at least the train didn’t max out at 80kph.
For my job, I travel all over Germany very often. I take the car, train, bus, or sometimes even the plane. The train is the most comfortable means of transportation in Germany. Of course, there are delays, and sometimes mistakes happen that result in very long delays. But where doesn't that happen? I find traveling by car to be the worst. How many times this year have I been stuck in traffic jams for several hours without being able to go forward or backward? No one pays me compensation for being late. With the train, I even get some of my money back if we are late. I find this blog post ridiculous. The rail system in Germany is extremely complex and tightly scheduled. We have regional, long-distance, and freight traffic on the same tracks. Of course, the train can't just stop anywhere when there's a problem. Grow up. For those who are interested: I traveled from Berlin to Konstanz for the Christmas holidays, and both trips were on time. I paid €70 per trip and didn't have to worry about traffic, icy roads, or snow. I worked on my laptop for 6 hours on both trips. It couldn't have been more relaxed.
The train is indeed the most comfortable means of transportation in Germany, but it's so unreliable nowadays that it's practically unusable if you need to get somewhere on a schedule.
Want to get to the airport 2 hours before your flight? Sorry, you have to plan in at least an extra hour, because there's a 40% chance your train will be severely delayed or canceled.
This unreliability drives people who need to get places on time to other modes of transportation. But if you don't mind being randomly delayed by an hour, the train is great. It's sad, and it didn't use to be this way.
> the train can't just stop anywhere when there's a problem. Grow up
> didn't have to worry about traffic, icy roads, or snow
Aren't these statements contradictory? I think "grow up" means problems are unavoidable and the adult thing to do is expect them and accept them, and then you say you didn't have to worry, as if problems never happen.
To me it sounds like you just got lucky on your Christmas trips. Two trips on time hardly prove a rule that there's never trouble, and in any case you directly state there's trouble sometimes and that's something to accept.
Now I don't know the stats on problem frequency, which of course matters. But that's different from "don't have to worry". Opposite really. "Here's how much you should worry".
I don’t think it’s ridiculous. A complex system that delivers customer further from destination than they were originally from, is flawed by design. And we all know what the problem is exactly: it is the design for capabilities that the company could not afford based on its budget/planning/KPIs. DB did not invest enough in infrastructure to support the big dream, and now they also have huge aging and retiring workforce problem. So let’s not pretend it’s normal and business as usual: complexity is not an excuse for mismanagement.
Politicians do not dictate operational decisions. If they allocate X for infrastructure, the company should scale up or scale down to match that budget, rather than overpromise.
”The company” is not one company. The infrastructure manager (DB InfraGo in Germany) is managing tracks on behalf of the state. Operators (a regional operator in the case of this article) run as many trains as they want/are allowed, which in practice is more than the system can handle reliably. There are laws regulating how track access is awarded, so even when a DB group operator runs on tracks managed by DB InfraGo there is no single ”company” that makes a certain promise. The remedy is political either way, either change how track access is awarded to limit the number of trains allowed or increase funding for added capacity and maintenance.
I'm glad at least someone has a sense of proportion here. German trains have problems for sure, but the train system in Germany is nonetheless fantastic.
DB is a joke and a disgrace to Germany. I have actively avoided traveling by train for many years. The company is customer-unfriendly from start to finish. I find the confusing ticket prices particularly bad: Sparpreise, Super-Sparpreise, Frühbucher-Tarife, Flexpreis, Sparpreis Gruppe, BahnCard, Gutscheine, ...
If you don't want to pay extra, you have to book six months in advance and be familiar with the fare system. It's super frustrating. It's just a train ride. I don't want to have to plan and organize it like buying a new car at the best price or trading stocks. And in the end, you can't even count on arriving on schedule. If you're unlucky, you'll be stuck at the train station in some godforsaken village.
I prefer to travel by car. The travel costs can be easily calculated based on the price of gas and fuel consumption. The total maintenance costs for a car are transparent. You are much more flexible and autonomous when planning your trip. The probability of arriving more or less on schedule is almost 1. And if you do get stuck in traffic, at least you have a little private, quiet, warm, and dry space around you.
If it were reliable, inexpensive, and uncomplicated, I would still find it more sensible to travel by train. But that is far from being the case. Instead, DB manages to combine the disadvantages of administrative bureaucracy and market economy.
Yeah, this is the great irony of it all. Germany really wants to discourage taking a car for "environmental reasons" and so on and does everything to encourage public transport.
But one thing is clear: I won't be bothered, robbed or even stabbed in my own car, and I also won't arrive in a different village lest I drive there myself. I won't arrive three hours late either, or have to stay overnight in some shitty Hotel because they couldn't find a replacement train.
The German public transport, like many other things in Germany, is an absolute fever dream for a "developed country".
Cost of a car is extremely hard to predict, not just because of unexpected repairs but also because the price of gas is literally political.
The train experience in Germany is as bad as it is because of lobbying by the car industry and corruption both in the government and train operators. Not enough investment over decades paired with the absurd idea that train fares need to cover operating costs. Nobody would ask this of road networks, it’s just infrastructure that a society pays for. In addition to that the Deutsche Bahn suffers from common inefficiencies of large corporations that are not mitigated in effective ways by its leadership.
> Cost of a car is extremely hard to predict, not just because of unexpected repairs
Cars aren't complicated. Make the right choice (buy cheap, buy japanese or french, avoid wet V-belts, prefer timing chains). Change oil and oil filter often. Keep an eye on the brake pads, shock absorbers, brake discs, tires, brake fluid, rust on the bodywork. Taking care of all this is surprisingly inexpensive. Of course, you can also have a car mechanic do all of this. Then you pay for their labor. But I really don't see any nasty surprises that might be lurking there. Of course, it depends on how well informed you are. If you've never looked under your car, then it's obviously a surprise when the floor panel is rusted through.
I understand that this is unreasonable for most people. But there is scope for ensuring that costs can be planned very well. However, I must admit at this point that you might as well deal with the complicated DB tariffs if you want to.
> but also because the price of gas is literally political.
Super 95 currently costs between €1.60 and €1.80. I still find that pretty easy to budget for.
> The train experience in Germany is as bad as it is because of ...
I agree with all your points. I'm just totally disappointed that we as a society can't manage to make public long-distance transport appealing. I would love to live in a world where I would feel like a complete idiot if I drove from Leipzig to Stuttgart and back instead of just taking the train.
I feel like we lost humanity somewhere in modern world. I grew up in 3rd world country and if this were to happen, train would literally stop somewhere, anywhere. (With the assumption it’s safe from crewing into another train).
But the idea that you go 55 minutes just because of policy; and skip 15 stations is crazy to me. Again with the assumptions that it can safely stop somewhere for 5m and I’m pretty sure the answer is yes.
I have fond memories of train stopping close to my house for various random reasons and I’d just get out so I don’t have to walk back from the station. The modern world where everything is “safety issue” and “someone else’s problem” is where we lost our ways, and it’s never coming back.
I worked for a massive German company you heard of, this sounds more like the typical German philosophy of strictly following the process -- as absurd as it might be -- and refusing to take initiative for anything that is not explicitly defined as one's responsibility.
As a French, the culture shock was brutal and I never really got around that work attitude. I went through a similar issue back when I used to take a regional train in France, and the crew swiftly adapted by bending rules to accommodate a difficult situation caused by bad weather. I'm not sure this could happen today, but it was a thing 10 years ago, we used to trust the operators back then.
So much in German work culture - and also culture in general - is about covering your own arse. If you follow the procedure, even if the outcome is disaster, you are not at fault; you were just implementing the rules, and you cannot be held accountable. It's the fault of whoever came up with the rules, except that is usually not a single person, but some amorphous entity that ran through some decision making process years in the past. So, no one is really at fault or can be held accountable.
It's always some magical higher power preventing you from doing the sensible thing. One favourite excuse is insurance liability. We can't do the sensible thing, because the insurance wouldn't pay if something bad were to happen, even though the odds of something bad happening are virtually nil.
You can also observe this in German politics. "Oh, we absolutely cannot do <common sense thing> because the rules won't allow it." Well, you could change the rules, but then you would have to take some actual responsibility, and we can't have that.
That sounds a lot like industrial safety culture: blame the process, not the worker, so we can iterate on the safety built into the process if there is a failure, because doing so lessens the chance of future failures. It’s a great way to build airplanes.
Theoretically ... in practice, Boeing's most rigorous days in the 80s and 90s were directed by empowered individuals in the manufacturing org, and when it went full "strict process only" in the 2000s and 2010s the quality fell.
I don't think that's due to following the process but rather systemic cultural issues. The process doesn't exist in a vacuum. There's a good faith meta process that needs to be followed to incrementally fix issues as they arise.
Bad faith actors and cultural dysfunction can break pretty much anything no matter how well thought out it might be.
It's also leaving out that system only works (worked) for building airplanes because it happens (happened) to be an industry with a hugely passionate workforce. Switch it to contracted out wage slaves and 'the system' doesn't work. Because the system never 'worked', many passionate people worked via sheer force of will/desire/care/investment into the final product. It was about the people all along.
The idea in the aerospace industry is that you should not blame the pilot, since pilot error became a all-catch rule no matter if there was design or system errors. The classical example is the button for the landing gear, where pilots continued to accidentally press it and crashing the plane. The engineers added guardrails to the button and the pilot error rate went down.
The lever for the landing gear and the lever for the flaps were easily confused. After landing the pilots intended to retract flaps but accidentally retracted the landing gear instead.
At first they assumed their recruitment process accidentally favoured stupid people so they made sure to only recruit smart pilots. But it kept happening. Then they put a little flap on the end of the flap lever and a small wheel on the end of the gear lever and the problem went away.
That's my dad who worked at NaSA doing aeronautics stuff said.
Pilots fuck up all the time so blaming them doesn't excuse anything.
And I find myself butting heads with people over that all the time. Coworker (smug satisfied voice) well if the end user fucks up it's not our fault. Me (trying not to sound really annoyed) yeah it's still our problem.
Although it has far from mainstreamed yet, I like how the software industry has the notion of a “UX bug”: if the user failed at anything, the software is at fault, because it wasn’t easy enough to use.
Sort of, but the difference here is that it's really "blame the person who created the process, not the person following it". The people with the authority to alter faulty processes don't want to change it, even if it's clearly bad, because then they become "the person who created the process".
Industrial safety must (if it is to be effective) recognise that people are an important part of the process! They're so often forgotten, with disastrous results.
People need to be given timely information, communication channels, and authority to straighten things out when they go awry. That's good for safety!
It's also a crap way to run a culture when you scale it.
You need to make the people best positioned to notice something is stupid responsible enough to make them say no fuck you because otherwise every oversight and edge case will be substantially more likely to cause harm because they have less skin in the game.
See also: Cops getting "paid vacations" for bad stuff.
Except a lot of the safety in any given process comes from the people: if technicians, pilots, and air traffic controllers were not empowered to assess the situation and make decisions then there would a heck of a lot more accidents.
My favorite part of German work culture is watching an excel sheet together and going over the numbers.
My actual favorite part of German work culture is that meetings always have an agenda, that part is a delight when doing business with German customers.
Your meetings have an agenda? We just debate something and are stuck on some minor unimportant point that doesn't matter and the meeting goes into overtime and then we schedule 2-3 follow-up meetings where everything we said is now completely irrelevant because our assumptions were incorrect from the start. And then you finally get to work and you can't implement it like it was specified since everyone forgot that you can't really do X so you have to it some other way making everything that was discussed completely moot.
>If you follow the procedure, even if the outcome is disaster, you are not at fault; you were just implementing the rules, and you cannot be held accountable. It's the fault of whoever came up with the rules, except that is usually not a single person, but some amorphous entity that ran through some decision making process years in the past. So, no one is really at fault or can be held accountable.
Worse. You can't even take responsibility even if you want to, that's usually against the rules too.
... I had to take out a special insurance when working from home as a freelancer, and share evidence I had done so with my client as -- if someone slipped outside my house because I'd not swept up the snow somehow the company who was paying me would be liable for the insurance claim...
... Yep.
It's for similar reasons why everyone is up at the crack of dawn frantically shovelling snow outside their homes.
Rather spoils the fun of towing the kids to school on a sled when every 5 meters there's a perfectly swept bit you have to drag it across.
Reminds me of the "we can only send helmets" to Ukraine thing ... that apparently wasn't a real hard and fast rule but when originally presented you would have thought it was some magical rule set in stone.
It's interesting considering that based on the German military doctrine at the time low ranking officers on the ground had a huge amount of independence while the French ones were stuck doing nothing and waiting for orders to be signed and approved..
Of course maybe that didn't apply to committing atrocities to the same degree.
> you were just implementing the rules, and you cannot be held accountable
That kind of explains why they tried to pull it of at Nuremberg. And why some nazis that weren't sentenced internationally got good jobs in post-war Germany. For Germans they weren't really at fault if they were just following procedures.
That's not the main reason though. The reason the denazification was mostly a sham is because a lot of federal positions required good contacts and experience in that field and you couldn't find anyone qualified who wasn't in the party. Based not just on first hand accounts on the family side but also lots of research. A lot of higher ups also were well connected so they got an already short conviction halved to released early in order to get a position in the government.
yes but there are so many
cases where they took the worst of the worst and gave them high profile jobs with way way way to much power for high ranking nsdap members.
Rheinhard gehlen and everyone around him is a something that could have been prevented.
And so many high class nazis where in such good positions because they where experts on anticommunism. For the americans and brits it was "safer" to give positions to exnsdap officiers then people from the SPD(socialists)
Gehlen kicked even the only high ranking spd member in secret service out
for god sake they even hired klaus barbie. that guy had entertainment partys where the guests could
torture jews homosexualls etc... and he killed most of french opposition.
Got hired from the bnd and cia as expert on anticommunism
Germany didnt change much..
fuck we even voted a full member of the nsdap as chancelor. Kurt kiesinger. Yes we had two Nazi chancellors!!
honestly the only reason the denazification was shit was because most people at power at that time where kind of nazis.
edit:// btw the DDR had somehow solved the problem and didnt had as much nazis in high position.
"I was just following orders," is a bit of a meme, but it's also true, and even more so in the context of Prussian-style military discipline. Disobeying an order was not an option. You carry it out no matter what, but the responsibility lies with the commander. It gets more murky for the civilians who theoretically could have walked away, but a lot of them had a similar mindset that they were just doing their jobs. And you have to keep in mind that all of the Nazi's racial ideology had been codified into law at the time. So you were once again just implementing the rules, even if those rules were actually harmful.
But what this episode also highlights is the opposite of this in the form of the American approach that is much more flexible and willing to bend the rules if necessary. Rightfully, the Allies could and probably should have brought everyone to justice, but they realised that a lot of the Nazi scientists were extremely valuable assets that they needed to get a leg up on the Soviets. So rather than execute them or put them in prison and throw away the key, they recruited them.
That's kind of interesting, though considering that the German army (and presumably Prussian before that?) was know for giving a relatively huge amount of leeway and authority to more junior officers.
Supposedly while the French and British officers were frozen waiting for new orders to be telegraphed when something didn't go according to plan, Germans took the initiative based on what's happening on the ground. US and other countries adopted this doctrine after the war because of how unexpected successful the German army was (despite being outgunned by the French and the soviets who had better tanks and more trucks just couldn't figure out how to use them efficiently)
There's always an option. You could die. And if you didn't choose that option before committing atrocity as ordered you definitely deserve death afterwards.
They got good jobs because the Allies did not really care about punishing the Nazis.
At the end of WW2 a strong West Germany to oppose the USSR was more important than punishing some middle manager and the quickest way to get the West German state together was to use a lot of the existing bureaucracy.
As far as DB goes, I'm pretty sure it's mostly an issue of systemic technical and consequently social collapse.
The system runs beyond its limits and consequently the culture collapses because the people inside learn they have no agency.
The German rail network is quite good on paper, with dense and high frequency connections even to relatively remote locations.
But keeping that functional (particularly with constantly rising demand) requires far more investment than it receives.
All the examples of great rail systems (France, Switzerland, Japan) are both simpler in network structure and invest more relative to their passenger load.
The privatization of the train system in Germany was a particularly insane disaster that is only now, 30 years later, being undone/repaired.
If you look at an org chart of the DB these days, the most fascinating part is that DB consists of almost 600 separate corporate entities that are all supposed to invoice each other.
Speaking with insiders, it appears that when the privatization happened, the new corporate structure took what was essentially every mid-size branch of the org chart and created a separate corporate entity, with cross-invoicing for what would normally normal intra-company cooperation. I think the (misguided) goal was to obtain some form of accountability inside a large organisation that had been state-funded and not good at internal accounting.
This fragmentation lead to insane inflexibility, as each of the 600 entities has a separate PnL and is loathe to do anything that doesn’t look good on their books.
Add to this a history of incompetent leadership (Mehdorn, who also ran AirBerlin into the ground, and who was also responsible for the disastrous BER airport build-out), repeated rounds of cost-cutting that prioritized “efficiency” over “resiliency of the network” etc. etc.
DB is currently undergoing a massive corporate restructuring to simplify the 600+ entity structure, but there has been a massive loss of expertise, underinvestment in infrastructure, poor IT (if you see a job ad for a Windows NT4 admin, it’s likely DB), etc. etc. — it’ll take a decade or more to dig the org out of the hole it is in.
It was a privatization in name only. The German state held 100% of its shares since the beginning. As such, it might have no longer been subject to the state specific demands of hiring etc. - but instead found itself in an uneasy tension as the only supplier of services to an entity that was something between a customer and a shareholder.
Which brings up an interesting question: How do you structure something with a large piece of infrastructure like a rail network in a way that could benefit from the market forces of competition and innovation?
> Which brings up an interesting question: How do you structure something with a large piece of infrastructure like a rail network in a way that could benefit from the market forces of competition and innovation?
A rail network is near to a natural monopoly. You can build overlapping rail networks, but it's complex and interconnecting instead of overlapping would usually offer better transportation outcomes and there's a lot less gauge diversity so interconnection is more likely than overlap.
All that to say, you can't really get market forces on the rails. Rails compete with other modes of transit, but roads and oceans and rivers and air aren't driven by market forces either.
Transit by rail does compete in the market for transit across modes. You can have multiple transportation companies running on the same rails, and have some market forces, but capacity constraints make it difficult to have significant competition.
> capacity constraints make it difficult to have significant competition
Thirty years ago, you would be correct. In the modern day, you could tie switch signalling to real-time auctions and let private rail's command centers decide how much to bid and thus whether or not they win the slot for putting their cars onto the shared rails. The public rail owner likely needs to set rules allowing passenger rail to pay a premium to secure slots in advance (say, a week) so that a timetable can be guaranteed to passengers during peak rush hour, but off-peak slots can and should be auctioned to naturally handle the difference between off-peak passenger rail and not-time-sensitive, more-cost-averse freight rail.
You can’t. Every attempt at privatizing rail is a failure with worse performance, higher prices, and an inevitable level of special treatment by the state due to the monopolistic utility-like nature of rail infrastructure. Not everything needs to or should be privatized.
Not, that "insight" again. Yes it was privatized and yes it is still completely owned by the state. "Privatization" is a term of art (in German) that refers to the corporate structure not the ownership. There are also public corporations in Germany, that are fully owned by random people: e.V. = registered association.
I believe modern economists are studying how ownership should be assigned. The thinking is that contracts and rules handle the majority of situations but emergencies and edge cases require an owner who has authority and whose interests align with the thing they control. And you want a mechanism to reassign ownership when the previous owner is incompetent.
In the case of a national train system, you may want to create a national entity to develop, coordinate, and make the physical trains and support technologies. You would create regional or metro entities to control the train network for their local area including the train stations. They coordinate with each other via negotiated contracts. Any edge cases or emergency falls under the purview of the owning entity. For example, the national entity controls the switch from diesel locomotives to the newest engine. The local authority is responsible for repairing the lines after a natural disaster.
If an entity is egregiously incompetent or failing, the national regulatory authority, with support of the majority of all the different train entities, takes control and reforms it.
Raw investment numbers don't necessarily matter, but the productivity of said number. Even if things are more expensive in Switzerland, if they make efficient use of said investment, then it can work out ok (or even better).
I have no idea if this is actually the case, but you have to take that into account or Switzerland would not be as successful as it is. Higher incomes have historically been a symptom of productivity (and while median incomes and productivity have decoupled, especially in the angosphere, it is still usually correlated).
>Higher incomes have historically been a symptom of productivity
If I go to Zürich I get a burger for 30Fr that I can get in Southern Germany for 15€ and in Berlin for 8€. That is with roughly the same quality.
I'd say past productivity leads to network effects and investments in one area that boost local salaries and decouples them quite strongly from current productivity.
My previous company had a per-dollar extremely unproductive location in silicon valley. The people there weren't at fault. You don't magically become more productive because you live next to SF.
I have no idea how planes are the dominant form of transport for relatively short routes (like within the bounds of a large country or to an adjacent one) and how even in Europe the train networks can be a bit of a mess.
Like surely it’s easier to run a railway network when compared to the insane complexity to safely operate an airport and all the work that goes into plane maintenance and pilot training and so on.
You need a lot of infrastructure for trains (and a lot of it isn't even used all that much -- it's not like all rails have a train passing by every 5 minutes). You also can't get much use out of your rolling stock because the speeds are fairly slow. You also don't have the same flexibility as planes have regarding routes.
The upshot is that trains are a lot costlier than most believe think and most railway routes require state subsidies (with goods transport usually being an exception), whereas air traffic works so well it can be taxed heavily.
Air traffic is not taxed heavily compared to other modes of transport - on the contrary, it is very heavily subsidized (at least in Europe): Regional airports often strongly depend on state subsidies, airlines are exempt from petroleum taxes, flight tickets are VAT-exempt.
In Germany (and also e.g. Switzerland), long-distance trains are expected to run either at cost (or make a profit). Short-distance trains (regional transport) are usually subsidized.
Sounds neat but what kind of range limits would that impose on each trip? Switching from one means of transportation to another, even if both are buses, increases the total travel time significantly. Not to mention all the hassle involved for passengers.
trains can be superfast. For example a tgv from strassbourg to marseille is 5-6h. Same with car is for me 8h. Bus is even slower so I would wildy guess 12h. Plan is btw 1 1/2 hour.
Planes are faster, and there is actual competition keeping prices down. There is no competition on railroads, no accountability, no nothing. More importantly, railroads have to be managed centrally to work. And this makes them overwhelmingly complex, resulting in an ever-growing bureaucracy.
Air travel is decentralized, and while individual airports (cue: BER) can get screwed up, it doesn't cascade through the whole system.
We just need to add a bit of carbon pricing to reflect the true price of flights.
No amount of money will overcome the fundamental issue: monopoly.
Airlines are subject to market competition since any competitor around the globe can spot a poorly run route and buy their planes into those slots. If they can execute more efficiently than you, they can afford to lower prices (or increase the level of service) more than you, and thus put you out of business.
Trains do not work this way. No amount of investment can overcome the cushy institutional-rot, laziness, and demotivation that inevitably results from being a monopoly, as most train routes are not subject to competitive forces due to the real world constraints of the infrastructure needed.
France, Italy, Austria (and probably others) don't have monopoly on long distance train. For instance, you can take a DB/Renfe/Trenitalia train on french high speed line, or in Austria take a Westbahn train instead of ÖBB.
That said personally I much prefer the mostly fixed pricing (and no reservation required) of swiss network than the dynamic one of other countries.
It doesn't really work all that well. The "everything above the rail" model suffers from the fundamental problem that "everything above the rail" is just a minor component in the overall cost of rail.
The German rails network went downhill when they decided to socialize the losses and privatize the profit. Failure is blamed on the grunt workers, which are absolutely not interested in taking responsibility as a result of this. The fact that there are rotting railways everywhere and the DB waits until it gets so bad for cities to step in and take over part of the cost is a wonderful example of this. The new ICE's speed is actually lower than previous generations.
I have seen this systemic problem in other domains I worked in. The problems are very similar, and at the end of the day I can somewhat relate to the workers attitude of "why should I lean out of the window if I get punished anyway". But in some cases the workers are unfireable and oftentimes it is exactly that attitude that let the management get away with the terrible working conditions (most of the times more psychological than physical abuse) so it feeds into each other.
> The new ICE's speed is actually lower than previous generations.
While not the fastest ICE, the new ICE-L (assuming you refer to it) with a top speed of 230km/h, is not actually slower than what it is supposed to replace on most routes: InterCity trains, topping out at 200km/h.
ICE-L, btw, was planned to be a IC train, but just like before with IC-T/ICE-T (same top speed of 230km/h), and IC X (ICE 4), DB management has a tendency to decide next-to-last minute, that new vehicles must earn money and thus get rebranded ICE, which is both more prestigious and (at least in a fictional world without "Sparpreis") pricey.
TL;DR: This would be outrageous if ICE-L was to replace ICE 3 (neo; 320km/h +) services - but it is not.
Yeah, I didn't feel like looking up the exact details, so thank you for adding that. I didn't know that it was rebranded like that, I was just baffled at the outcome. Our mechanical engineering professor was responsible for the ICE breaking system a long time ago and those guys were all extremely good.
The other aspect is that there is a whole host of periphery issues, one of which is track maintenance, making it so for a lot of segments the ICE will not reach its top speed.
Could be. It used to be that to get phone service in Germany could take up to a month after putting in the order, that’s when it was state controlled. After the reforms installations were quicker.
So to me, there doesn’t seem to be a panacea except to hold the services accountable in some way.
That's a different situation / scenario and addressed a different problem.
The government is the most efficient and effective at big capital spending and with what I would call static operations. Competitive private entities are the best at delivering value on the front-end.
Monopolist/cartel private entites combine the rapacious nature of rent seeking with the lazy inefficiency of bureaucracy to great a giant ball of failure. Effective privatization requires either creating a framework for a robust competitive landscape OR tight, effective regulatory control. There's no universal correct answer.
If competition is in place and companies can win or lose, they will move mountains to yield marginal gain. If you let them get fat & lazy, you will need to move a mountain to do anthing -- even make more money!
> If competition is in place and companies can win or lose, they will move mountains to yield marginal gain.
... in the short term, happily screwing over society at large and possibly even themselves in the medium to long term. Perverse incentives are everywhere.
Add to that the transport buisness beeing marginal to the company who is mainly a immo speculation company trying to sell the strips of inner city land they hold.
The general reason is, the rule exists for a reason, and the "low worker" does not understand the bigger picture, so you should follow it blindly before doing something harmful you can't foresee. It's not always working well, but to be fair, also not always bad. Knowing how much you can stretch the rules can be an art which takes a long time to acquire.
Some cultures are more sticklers for creating and following rules and bureaucracy than others, though.
A good example: Here in North America I'll jaywalk without a thought if there's no traffic. In Germany, you'll get grandmothers calling you a child-killer for setting a bad example if you did the same.
Another example: Both France and Germany spend roughly the same amount (in raw Euros) on their militaries. France (which ALSO spends and develops a lot of their own kit) has a functional and effective military, including the only non-American nuclear aircraft carriers, and a bunch of nuclear attack and ballistic submarines and it's own nuclear deterrent. Germany is barely able to maintain their much smaller infrastructure because of its ineffective bureaucracy (there was a scandal a few years ago where over 80% of their euro fighters were combat ineffective due to lack of maintenance).
Of course, the very idea of jaywalking was created to remove the obligation to not kill people from drivers and shift it to the very people being killed, but this doesn’t seem to bother the meddling grandmothers.
> Of course, the very idea of jaywalking was created to remove the obligation to not kill people from drivers and shift it to the very people being killed, but this doesn’t seem to bother the meddling grandmothers.
I'm kind of curious how you expect this to work.
A driver is driving down the road at the posted speed limit. Instead of crossing at an intersection, a pedestrian steps into the road from between two parked vehicles directly in front of the moving car. By that point the car cannot be stopped before it hits the pedestrian because of the laws of physics, so who would you have at fault and how was that person expected to prevent it?
These are generally the same boot licking demographics who'll sit and wait out a 2min light cycle at 1:45am rather than treating it like a 4-way stop. Putting their money where their mouth is puts them head and shoulders above the types that tend to dominate the discussion on such issues.
I was in Germany once at a red light for a pedestrian crossing. After the last pedestrian had fully crossed the street and the pedestrian light turned red I drove off. I did not wait for my own light to turn green which is typical in my country.
The person behind me flashed their lights. Cultural difference I guess. Why wait when there is nothing to wait for.
I live in Australia, which is culturally the polar opposite of Germany[1], and you'd get a similar response here. If the police saw it, you'd be fined at least $500, and risk losing your licence.
1: Australia is very egalitarian, rather than hierarchical. Pragmatic, rather than bureaucratic. Australians are direct and emotive communicators. Spontaneous planners, etc. etc.
In Southern Europe, not many people wait for a red light if there isn't anything to wait for. Even the police blasts through red lights if nobody is using the pedestrian crossing.
Risk/cost ratio? A pedestrian acting irresponsibly can of course do a lot of damage, but the likelihood of killing someone is much lower than if a vehicle is breaking the rules.
Isn't that the argument for the alternative? The risk of being distracted by other traffic and missing a pedestrian who was obscured by another vehicle is much lower when there are no other vehicles or traffic, and then the rules are indecorous for not taking into account the change in risk.
"Bootlicking"? I guess you'd love if non-bootlicking neighbors decided to do a rave party outside your window at 3am. Every day. Or maybe a nice drag race on your street at 1am.
I mean, only people who think for themselves can do that!
There is a huge difference between someone being annoyed by some thing based on how it affects you and that thing just so happening to be against the rules vs being annoyed by a thing that's of no consequence to you for no reason other than because it's against the rules.
Regardless, I don't share those values. I have stared into the abyss of what people who praise conformity and the common good will do to a municipality if given free reign to regulate it's minutia and I do not want. My neighbors on one side blast music in a language I don't speak until a couple hours after my bedtime most nights and the neighbors on the other have barking dogs. I don't even notice them anymore, same with the nearby highway noise.
What consequences? Who doesn't like music?!? Oh, and I'll just throw that candy wrapper on the ground. After all, it's of no consequence.
You THINK that your rule-breaking has no consequences. This is called in the safety science "normalization of deviance", and it usually leads to more and more rules being ignored. And not necessarily by _you_ but by other people.
This is colloquially known as "being a bad example".
Litter is a great example. You people and your rules for everything weren't what changed it's prevalence. Social changes and general attitudes were.
Like I said, I've stared into the abyss of what you people will do to a society if left unchecked. You are worse than the alternative. That's why I live where I do.
Fine then. They drive the speed limit in the left lane or whatever. Point is that the people who advocate for the rules in obscenely trivial situations when deviating them them is in fine taste tend to be drawn from the pool of "robotic rule follower with no extra thought given" type people. Which has the side effect of making them consistent with what they preach.
> "In Germany, you'll get grandmothers calling you a child-killer for setting a bad example if you did the same."
Yeah, some Bavarian villagers can be hylariously weird. I, personally, have jaywalked all my life growing up in East and West Germany, and I only got "the lecture" twice: once in deeply pious Bavaria, and once in... Spain. Both involved the rolemodel-shaming routine as kids were to be seen, but only one came with a small fine attached.
> "Here in North America I'll jaywalk without a thought if there's no traffic."
Most likely not a POC and not from NY or Washington D.C., I see (I'm reporting for a friend). Ah, anecdotes. The spice of life!
Nobody cares if you jaywalk as long as no children are around. If there are children around, most people will avoid crossing a red light even if they otherwise would cross. But that's not a rule-following thing, it's a "don't set a bad example to children" thing. It's easier to teach children the rules about how to behave in traffic if you have fewer adults obviously violating them.
That would make sense, except that one of the universal rules of childhood is, "Adults get to do things you don't get to do, usually for damn good reasons, so get used to it." Every child knows this in their bones, even when they don't like it.
Kids are stupid and follow what adults do. If I judge that I have the time to cross the street at red light without getting hit by the incoming car doesnt mean that the kid standing next to me is even seeing the car and crossing right after me.....
Showing kids good example is good. What you mean is showing them bounderies.
Getting shit drunk in front of kids and telling them how much fun it is but they cant do it is behaving like a child
> A good example: Here in North America I'll jaywalk without a thought if there's no traffic. In Germany, you'll get grandmothers calling you a child-killer for setting a bad example if you did the same.
This varies wildly in Germany. In Hamburg, at 7 - 9 in the morning near schools or kindergartens with kids around, many people are following good traffic behavior. At 9 on a university campus, or at 9 at night no one really cares.
Yeah, I think people who have not experienced the system have no idea how absurd the German process mindset is. If it's not part of the process, it's impossible - damned what the reality on the ground is
Frenchman here and so true. I was taking the bus and it was stuck in traffic and I was like "hey can you let me out I life right in that street and shit aint moving" .... no fucking way. had to wait 10 minutes and then walk back to my place... driver was completly
ghostinh me after he said the magic german words " I am not allowed to do this".
In france they Busdrivers let me out between stops if I ask them before.
Germany is crazy rule
obsessed. they also have the crazy mentality that if you put it into rule problem is solved xD
Although Germans are famously methodical, my experience with German bureaucracy was that it's quite flexible. They will break you, and when you finally give up and seem like you're about to cry, they will roll their eyes, and oblige you, stressing how exceptional and magnanimous they are for letting you get what you want. In reality, they were rooting for you the whole time, but did not want their flexibility to be taken for granted.
I document German bureaucracy for a living. I cannot stress enough how "vibes-based" the entire thing is. Half the job is convincing bureaucrats that you're either overprepared or litigious to be worth the trouble.
The best strategy I've found with such bureaucrats is to bike shed them with an obvious but easy problem that you fix with much adieu so they can feel like they've found you out and feel like they've done something. Meanwhile they will ignore all the subtler things that might be much harder for you to deal with.
What really ought to bother people more than it does is that within just about any white western country/culture you can run the same comparison with "decently well off" being the german side and "everyone else" being the english side.
Reminds me of being en route with Lufthansa to Germany, needing an emergency landing in Turin, being shepherded onto a new working plane by Italians, then continuing to Germany where the whole plane load arrived without tickets from Turin...
The gate people tried to tell us it was impossible to be there without tickets, as if we were somehow collectively hiding them and a bit of persuasion would convince us to find the non-existent tickets! Not one person found they had a ticket, despite this allegedly being impossible.
i love that meme which shows three identical paper clips in a row but one is upside down relative to the others which is a minute difference. the caption reads “chaos German style”
> "[...] this sounds more like the typical German philosophy of strictly following the process -- as absurd as it might be -- and refusing to take initiative for anything that is not explicitly defined as one's responsibility."
Neither absurdity nor "German philosophy", but just stock-standard safety and security culture in action. Or more specifically in this case: generelle and objektspezifische Dienstanweisungen (general and location-specific administrative instructions or regulations) [1]. You don't follow them, it's you who's on the hook. :)
And when was the last time anyone here visited a railway control centre in a metropolitan area? Yeah.
I worked in the Swedish office of a multinational for a couple of years and the one experience I had where Swedes were selling a complex multi-million euro project to Germans was one of the most bureaucratically filled initiatives I’ve ever experienced in my life. Not sure if the project ever really took off, but I’m thankful I was able to avoid it beyond the initial week of discussions.
I worked for a company where we brought in teams from a couple European countries after a merger.
The absolute "I won't do anything more than I explicitly have to." was brutal. It was hard to even talk to them as they seemed terrified / constantly defensive of being asked to do something outside their typical process. They never were asked as long as I was there but man they were on a knifes edge about it at all times.
I'd even be on the phone with folks I met and got along with and I'd ask them about what they saw on a ticket they used to own, and I'd get angry made up rules about "I don't have to tell you anything because that ticket doesn't belong to me anymore!" Like bro ... we had a good time having beers together, I'm not your boss I'm a peer asking, it's still both our work hours ...
They were smart folks, got along with them otherwise, but it was just a horrible experience working with those folks when it came to work. Company eventually just shut down those offices, complied with whatever local laws were required to do so and washed their hands of those locations. I didn't blame them.
If you don't know german culture, this story might be hard for you to imagine. Fact is, germany has a massive stick up its ass. If there is a written rule, they will follow it, no matter what.
<the typical German philosophy of strictly following the process -- as absurd as it might be -- and refusing to take initiative for anything that is not explicitly defined as one's responsibility>
you summarized my 5+ year experience living in Germany with one sentence in a way that I have never found the words for - thank you, really, thank you
I feel that in Germany, the original intent of the many rules, processes, and procedures has been lost. Employees are trained to operate such that every situation is governed by a rule/process/procedure, and their job is to look up the situation in a massive leather-bound book of branching rules, see which rule applies in the given situation, and then… apply the rule. But, they will do this only if they assess that helping you falls under their job’s responsibilities. Sometimes your situation is neat and clean, and was what the rule-writers thought about when they wrote the rules. Sometimes, not.
TLDR: if you have an edge case in the German bureaucratic system (forms at the doctor’s office, Deutsche Bahn travel troubles, closing a bank account), you are f***
It is certainly my biggest dislike factor with my stay in Germany, and I'm still struggling to come to terms with it: do I dislike it enough to compel me to move away? is this something I can accept? How much can I influence and improve things that I directly interact with?
It seeps in everywhere too, with almost all aspects.
Day-to-day with restaurants, cafe, shops. Almost all interaction feels like it's actively checked if it's in their process or job description. Shop staffs are typically disengaged and can't really help you with anything outside the normal process.
Healthcare, both receptionist and doctors. You can see the rushed service because they are only compensated for limited amount of time by the state insurance. This took me a while to figure out; the process really defines what treatment you get, with what equipments, as well as the duration, and they have to do their best with the constraints put by the process.
An example: with Wurzelkanalbehandlung, the process says (at least back then) only 1 hour of Laborkosten can be compensated by the state insurance. This means if the dentist took more than 1 hour to work on you, that would be done at their personal loss, and thus the incentive to rush the procedure.
Going private helps (they tend to be more relaxed after the mention of of Privatzahler, and gives you access to newer equipments not yet acknowledged by the state insurance processes), but you still have to research, find, and pick the right practice.
Bureaucracy, administrative. You often have to deal with clerks that just go "I just work here", the rules says this and there's nothing I can do, throws hand in the air. Goodbye, next person please!
In day-to-day work, I can also see it. New hires tend to be more into the work, and questions things, but the system does push everyone to just follow the process and not do anything more. I've seen my colleagues slowly shift into this mode, delivering what is outlined, nothing more, not questioning the intent behind the work (or at least, doing it much less than before, because the system does not incentivise that).
I would summarize Americans (and perhaps most English speaking countries) as perceiving this mindset to be callous, ineffective, and a dereliction of autonomy.
But I'm interested in how Germans perceive Americans in reverse? If shop staff went out of their way to help them find a product, shoot the breeze, or recommend a lunch spot, would Germans tend to see this as being overzealous? Would it cause embarrassment, or be a pleasant surprise? Just curious.
I tend to view shop staff having a random talk with someone while I’m waiting to purchase or ask something as a dereliction of duty. If you want to catch up with a friend you can do it on your own time.
Every country is different and you need to learn slightly different ways of dealing with them in each. On a bad day it can be pretty exhausting.
It turns out, people everywhere want the same things, in the end. They just go about them differently.
In Germany, it often helps frame it as both of you trying to work with the rules together; as a framework to build within and on, rather than a cage to hold you in.
Doesn't always work. Nothing works all the time, (especially if the other person is having a bad day themselves and just wants it to be over). But if it helps even once eh?
The difference in healthcare between private and public insurance is, as far as i know, because if a doctor sends you for some test or something that your insurance feels was unnecessary then the doctor has to pay for it with the public flavour. At least, that’s what I heard but could be wrong.
I feel the same. I was in Kuwait city a few days ago and decided to learn their public transport system which is buses only but was pretty extensive and abundant with good google maps integration.
When you get on the bus there's a big sign stating the rules of riding the bus which include strictly stopping at designated bus stops ONLY and threatening fines. For the rest of the day I watched every bus driver stop anywhere they like if a person hailed the bus, allowing people to get in while waiting in red traffic lights, and if you talked to the driver he'd drop you off anywhere you wanted as long it's possible. Those drivers make nothing from this so they are doing it because this is life and also because there's no real enforcement against it. Also you can get in through the exit doors and leave through the entry doors, whatever you like.
I decided I feel ok about this and don't want it to change
Venkatesh Rao offers the following definition of the "Fourth World"
Fourth world: Parts of the developed world that have collapsed past third-world conditions because industrial safety nets have simultaneously withered from neglect/underfunding, and are being overwhelmed by demand, but where pre-modern societal structures don’t exist as backstops anymore.
People in the USSR at least had the good fortune of already living in a world where they were highly adept at recycling and barter and maintenance, and in the case of the chechens also community self defense.
I think most of America would be fucked as most people don't know to how to do anything but their job plus buy things with money from their job. The top 25% of handy people might be able to change their own oil and that is it (not that they can't learn more, but it takes time).
>I think most of America would be fucked as most people don't know to how to do anything
Most of America would be substantially less fucked than the slice of mostly officer workers who mostly have enough money that "spend money rather than upskill or barter" is their default mode of operation you see via HN.
I think this is relevant because the colloquialism of it meaning "developed" versus "undeveloped" doesn't work when you try to build on top of it
it's impossible to build on what Third World means or add lore like Fourth World when the definition is on a shaky and now non-existent foundation, while much of the unaffiliated world is highly developed now.
Someone already assigned "Fourth World" to stateless nations, so it's probably fifth world by now.
The developed world does have decaying infrastructure but moving it between the private and state sector has caused problems. As has lockdown and other international policies. Our local government's main interest seems to be in shutting streets off and designing bad cycle infrastructure that is little use to cyclists (I am one by the way). It is letting our streets fall to pieces and spending lots of money erecting physical blocks.
What does that even mean? We're talking about an organization that serves billions of riders per year. Their passenger numbers increased 20-30% since 2020 so even if their delays are bad clearly it's not bad enough that most people seek alternatives.
If I'm using your transit service and you take me on a several hour detour without my consent passing a dozen or more possible stops because "you're not cleared for that", you aren't serving your mandate and I'm never using your service again.
I might even pull the emergency brake before it gets that far and cause you more problems, even.
I’d say it’s mostly a North-European thing, not the whole world. I am a latin american living in Sweden and the overwhelming lack of empathy and humanity you’ll experience in the healthcare system is borderline unbelievable (until you learn to expect and deal with it). They trust the system so much that whenever it doesn’t work, it’s basically ”well bummer”. You become the 1% for which the system has failed, and you’re supposed to just take one for the team (since everyone else is having a good time anyway). The thing is simply that you have to learn to see the good side of the system and understand that you can’t have the cake and eat it too, unfortunately.
As another 3rd world citizen living in Northern Europe, I usually describe it as "processes and rules over common sense". They understand your situation, they agree with you, they can solve your problem, but they will not do it because it goes against some obscure rule, or it would not follow a specific mandatory procedure step by step, and who knows what are consequences.
And quite frankly, they don't give a fuck. They have been conditioned not to give a fuck from an early age; the system works 99% of the time, so nobody really has to care about each other. There is literally no benefit in giving a fuck about another person, in fact it is quite possible that you'll end up being punished by the system for breaking the rules. It is a Leviathan whale state swimming through the sea with millions of little fish sucking on it, and they sure as hell don't care about the few who fall off during the trip.
I think it's a "busy tracks" problem in general, which yeah, is a problem in Europe in general. You can't just stop a train in the middle of some track, there are a bunch of other trains coming too, who can't just pass unless you get to a place where that is possible, which isn't everywhere.
None the less, the rest of what you say is true of Sweden, but I don't think it's the reason a train refuses to stop on some train tracks.
My point is that, in a country where people act like well, people (and not robots), someone would be bothered by this and might try to solve the problem in some creative and unexpected way. Someone might think "damn, we're ruining these peoples' christmas, let's do something" and then fix it somehow. Here it's more like "well bummer, deal with it" in both cases. I doubt that a bunch of adult, highly-skilled people could not have a conversation over the phone and arrange for a train to stop 5 minutes on a track so people could get off. Are you saying that there are so many trains in the same track at the same time that stopping for 5 minutes would cause an accident? I think that a lack of willingness to give a fuck is much more likely.
> Are you saying that there are so many trains in the same track at the same time that stopping for 5 minutes would cause an accident?
No, but these places generally prefer to take care of the collective, even if it means slightly worse conditions for some individuals. This is impregnated into our brains from early on, and somewhat humorously "codified" in the Law of Jante, among others. From the outside, for the last two decades, it seems to be slightly changing more and more into another direction, but that's how it was when I was born and raised there at least.
Once you understand the common perspective of "sacrificing the individual for the group", it becomes a lot easier to understand this sort of reasoning.
Personally, I don't agree with it, together with a bunch of other weird social rules, hence I don't live there anymore. But the other side of the fence, where every rule is constantly broken by everyone, "just in this case" but 100x times a week, isn't so much better after all. Just different. Some people seem to be wired for some things, others not so much.
> the overwhelming lack of empathy and humanity you’ll experience in the healthcare system is borderline unbelievable (until you learn to expect and deal with it).
Curious to hear what strategy you've learned over time.
The most important thing is to learn to expect and plan ahead, so that you don't get caught by surprise as much as it is reasonably possible. I do not expect anyone to act with humanity, so I start playing the system as early as possible. If I think something might be a problem in two weeks, I start calling them today, knowing that it'll take them two weeks minimum to take me seriously. If I go the the ER, I take movies and games with me (and lots of paracetamol) because I know it'll take several hours for anyone to even say hello to me, let alone do something concrete. I also, maybe more importantly, do not expect anything from the human side. Basically I see them as robots, so I deal with them as robots: explain everything calmly, repeat myself 100 times, and even more importantly, do not get angry. You get angry, you lose. It doesn't matter if you have an internal bleeding and you're dying, the moment you start screaming, nobody will take you seriously anymore. You have to be slow, strong, and systematic: repeat yourself, call again in 1h, then in 4h, then next morning, then next morning, until at some point something happens.
I feel like we lost humanity somewhere in modern world
I feel the same. It is easier to hide behind rules, regulations, bureaucracy etc. Not saying we should stop following rules, but using a bit of common sense and having a bit of compassion would go a long way.
I also remember reading about a train that Japanese railways kept running, just for one kid, she took the train to school. They kept it running until she finished school, just for her (I know, someone is going to point out the inefficiency, cost etc about this story, but that is a separate conversation). I suppose stories like these are going to become rarer and rarer as time goes by, as everything has to be "efficient" and everyone has to follow some "rules".
I think you are mentioning a viral but incorrect story: a station was scheduled to close at a given date, a student mentioned in an interview that it will close after her graduation, but then some news sites claimed that the date of the closing was related to the graduation. The station was also used by a few residents.
The story is a bit suspect in that surely it would be more efficient to just hire her a taxi once a day. Even an expensive Japanese one.
I suppose it would be slightly inconvenient to her to change habits, as well as a bad precedent. Still, hard to accept there was no additional factor involved in the decision.
> I grew up in 3rd world country and if this were to happen, train would literally stop somewhere, anywhere.
I'm from Bangladesh, and the attitude you're describing is one reason why the country is poor and a mess! Deviating from the schedule for the sake of a single person is completely insane and maddeningly inefficient. It's classic third-world mentality. In a good country, the system would never tolerate such deviations. In a really good country, someone wouldn't even ask for such accommodation for themselves, because it would be shameful to inconvenience others even slightly for one's own sake.
Did the individuals and industries that truly drove fabulous innovation and development in the first world REALLY do it from a mindset of "it would be shameful to inconvenience others even slightly for one's own sake"? There are an awful lot of stories of rulebreaking out there... "The Wild Wild West" turned into some of the richest parts of the world, that name doesn't suggest that a society needs to follow the rules to the point of extreme shame to avoid staying poor.
It's not orthogonal. If you look at societies that industrialized early, their social development diverged hundreds of years before industrialization actually happened. When my dad was born in 1951, 90% of the population of Bangladesh lived in villages in extended kinship networks and multi-generational households. In such an environment, the informal rules of families dominate society. Bangladeshis have a very relaxed attitude towards time and rules. It's not a big deal if you're late in my dad's village, because everyone knows you and that you'll arrive an hour or two after the official time and will plan accordingly. If you inconvenience someone, it's not a big deal, because you're all family and you'll reciprocate the accommodation another time. (That's a key point! Kinship bonds form a kind of collateral that ensures that accommodations will be reciprocated in the future.) Plus, the country is blessed with three growing seasons, so nobody is in a hurry anyway! And if you're persistently causing problems, it will percolate to higher ups within the families and they'll set you straight through informal processes.
Contrast somewhere like England, where, for whatever reason, extended family networks began breaking down as far back as the middle ages. People in England were living in small nuclear family units back in the 14th century. When your neighbors aren't related to you, that forces people to rely on formal rules and procedures. You can't count on future reciprocity backed by the collateral of kinship ties. And if someone is causing problems, you need formal systems, based on rules and procedures, to deal with them.
These formalized systems are, in turn, far more scalable! You can plan and organize civilization building when everyone is socialized to follow formal timetables in a way that you cannot when people are socialized to follow the informal timing consensus. And the lack of individual accommodation is a feature when you scale from small networks of a dozen or so related individual to millions of people moving through the London Tube every day.
A small amount of rule breaking is tolerable, even beneficial, within a society where everyone otherwise rigidly adheres to rules.[1] But there is no developed society that isn't rule-based at the baseline level. In some places, like England, this rule-focused culture developed organically. In other places, like Japan, there was a deliberate effort to destroy extended family networks and clan structures and replace those frameworks with systems of formal rules and procedures.
[1] America is a good example of a society that is less rules-oriented than say Japan, and arguably derives some benefits from that. But even in America, we pay a price for that. Americans just aren't as good at large scale social organization as the Japanese or Taiwanese, and we compensate by structuring our society in a more decentralized way where less such organization is required in the first place. Ronny Chieng has a funny bit about how New Yorkers try to force open subway doors that have already closed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifX0oafDe3Q. This behavior, multiplied by thousands of occurrences per day, slows down the whole system.
When it comes to formalized social systems vs. informal ones, I think deciding which is better comes down to what you're trying to optimize for. Some people prefer a more rigid, punctual and formal society, where you know precisely what to expect and what not to expect, and you can rightly get upset when the expectations aren't met. Others (myself included) prefer those societies where everyone knows everyone else and everybody's related if you go back 10 generations. In my experience, which to be fair was as somewhat of an insider to the group, these kinds of societies are less stressful. They feel better to live in.
> Others (myself included) prefer those societies where everyone knows everyone else and everybody's related if you go back 10 generations. In my experience, which to be fair was as somewhat of an insider to the group, these kinds of societies are less stressful. They feel better to live in.
I agree. My mom comes from a family with thirteen siblings in Bangladesh, and moving to the U.S. was a very lonely experience. I felt the loss, but mostly got over it because I was young. My mom never did. My dad remembers a very happy childhood in his village, even though back then 20% of kids died before age 5.
But if you’re optimizing for economic development, informal societies are a hindrance. Informal societies have strong kinship networks,[1] and the intensity of kinship networks is correlated with many negative metrics: less functioning political institutions, less innovation, less specialization of labor, and lower economic growth: https://historicalpsychology.fas.harvard.edu/assets/files/20... ("We establish a tight empirical relationship between kinship intensity and economic development ... A one-SD-increase in the KII is associated with: ... a ~35% decrease in per capita luminosity and GDP worldwide ... [and] a ~10% decrease ..., within-country."); https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic... ("We report a robust association between in-marriage practices and corruption both across countries and within countries.").
[1] I'm not aware of any informal societies that don't have strong kinship networks.
Well, for a single person, yes. But for most people on the train?!?
Sadly, this attitude of designing mediocre and over-complicated systems and then sticking to them no matter the cost is very German nowadays. And we hate it. But we can't help ourselves. And this does not affect trains alone; it also affects our tax system, every government process, and often businesses.
We are unable to design better systems; we are unable to design simpler systems, and improvising is a skill we have eradicated from our minds.
> I grew up in 3rd world country and if this were to happen, train would literally stop somewhere, anywhere.
In many places without rigid rule enforcement, that kind of flexibility can actually feel more humane in practice, even if the overall system is worse. What frustrates me in the US (and sometimes in Europe) isn't rules themselves, but how aggressively and impersonally they're enforced in very ordinary situations.
For example, a friend of mine in New York casually crossed a line at a small PlayStation event and was stopped by a bodyguard as if he were bypassing airport immigration. I had a similar experience at a small event, maybe 300 people, where I tried to cross a line to get coffee and was abruptly blocked by security (they were just preparing the snacks).
Compared to more informal cultures, this kind of hyper enforcement can feel oddly hostile, especially when it's disconnected from any real safety concern.
"In a developing country nothing works but everything is possible. In a developed country everything works but nothing is possible"
In Lord of the Rings, fellowship of the ring when Gandalf arrives in Shire and Sam runs to meet him he says, "you're late!" to which Gandalf replies, "Deutsche Bahn is never late but arrives precisely when it means to".
The quality of culture and people you're dealing with has a huge multiplicative factor as well.
"I'm going to manufacture precision optics at competitive prices, right here, and I'm gonna tool up a factory to do it" is bold but believable in Houston or Dallas. It's a fucking joke in Trenton or Newark.
Likewise there's a whole bunch of ex-soviet 'stans and random east asian countries where such a statement is far more believable than middle easter, african and latin american ones that are of comparable GDP.
Same here. An Amtrak train would just stop at the next convenient road crossing, if there were really something preventing them from stopping at the scheduled station. Most Amtrak stations don't even have staff, or any way to prevent people from coming and going, so this would most likely involve construction on the station platform itself. That’s fairly rare but the last time I took the Zephyr headed east there was exactly that situation. The construction crews had the whole platform blocked off so we boarded at the road crossing a block away.
They can't realistically do this in Germany because the tracks are so much more busy than the US. There would more than likely be a train coming the other direction within the next few minutes, and they cannot guarantee all the people have time to vacate the track area.
Right, but Germany has stations every few miles. Here in America the next station might be hours and hundreds of miles away. Better to stop ¼ mile away instead; people will hardly know the difference. The point is that if for any reason they cannot reach the station then they’ll always stop at the nearest safe place instead. The crew always have an alternate stop.
For really long construction work they’ll actually build an entirely separate train station, like they did in Denver Colorado a few years back. They knew that the construction of the new station downtown would take a few years, so they built a really cheap platform a few miles away on a siding and moved all the arrivals and departures there for the duration.
Yeah, I was on Amtrak in North Dakota somewhere and we got stopped for a couple hours waiting for a plow train. So like half the train got off in the middle of this field to play in the snow while we waited.
The Amtrak people I've met over the years pretty clearly want to do a good job in a system that is stacked against them.
I don't understand ome detail of this story: Amtrak platforms are about 110cm high. That's more than waist high for most people. So how do you let people get on and off at a grade intersection instead of at a platform?
Looks like we both had incomplete information. I didn't know that some trains have their doors really close to the ground and it's actually very inconsistent. I'm getting a clearer picture now.
It is at least consistent within any one Amtrak route. The ones that go through the north east have to go through tunnels that can only accommodate single–level cars, while all the other routes have the double–level cars where the doors are really close to the ground.
I've ridden on Amtrak trains. The door for the passenger compartments is in the middle of the observation cars, the oval on the lower level is the window on the door. You can see 3 of them on the 3 cars. The crew would put out a step at stops which was helpful considering the age of most of the passengers.
Up top are seats and maybe a lounge, below are bedrooms, bathrooms, and storage. There's a spiral staircase to change levels.
The locomotive has steps right outside the wheels with handrails.
It's pretty obvious where the doors are (middle), which have windows. My point, replying to my parent, was that they said Amtrak platforms are at 110cm height. The lowest part of those doors are not at 110cm height, but much lower, almost as if the platform was much much lower than my parent claimed ;)
And yes, trains do exist, which either have doors at two different heights (these don't seem to) or that either automatically fold away so you can get out at ground level via the stairs that are revealed/created by the mechanism or that simply stay up for platform height entry/exit. Used both types. Now, whether or not Amtrak has those in specific parts of the US I can't say.
Anywhere doesn't help you much. You want to stop at a station with sufficiently good connections to continue your travels.
This situation seems pretty unusual, even for the DB. A regional express train should have many more stops than that. It sounds a bit like they switched the train to a direct connection to the final stop because they switched to the other side of the rhine (so you can't make any of the other planned stops anyway).
The major mistake here was not making the stop in Troisdorf. At the point where they missed that they should have planned the earliest usable stop for the passengers that needed to leave there.
I would also assume that there is no safe way for the conductor to halt at any earlier stop. A safe halt would need to be planned at a higher level.
My experience with these "fixes" is that they are worse than the other worst solution (in this case, step out in Köln Süd and get some other train).
There is really A LOT going on through the tracks in NRW and Düsseldorf/Köln/Bonn. It's sad people just read an article like this and just blame it on the poor guy as if he was a monkey.
The guy actually wanted to do something nice (get people closer to Bonn, so they could change a train with an easier alternative). It didn't work out, but this shows how bad the sync with these systems is, and safety is and must be prioritized.
People don't understand how many freight trains travel on those tracks.
Not if you live near the tracks! Obviously that’s a bit of a safety issue, though, not to mention taking a few minutes time from (potentially) hundreds of people to gain a few tens of minutes for yourself.
OK, so you disgorge however many people, at what age, with or without babies in ipushchairs or people in wheelchairs, onto the tracks, and they avoid the passing 100mph trains, they then walk along in the dark and rain for a few miles looking for a gap in the fence?
No, you let them off at the nearest station or level crossing. Here in America that would generally be within a block of where the train was supposed to stop anyway. There are a few stations with “underground” tracks that would have to let you off a little further away, but every station has some safe place to do so. It’ll be a place the crew knows about ahead of time as well.
You can do it in any train system designed to be resilient to failures. The Germans have apparently designed a system that incentivizes (or even forces) the conductor (or the dispatchers) to do ridiculous things that waste hours of their customer’s time to fix instead of simple and obvious things that take minutes to fix like just stopping at the next available station.
Around here if the Conductor gets a call from dispatch telling him that a station is unavailable, the dispatcher will already have cleared the train to stop at some logical alternate location. That might mean another train station in the same city or a specific level crossing. It might mean delaying or stopping conflicting traffic. They’ve thought ahead and planned a way to fix the problem _without_ carting passengers an hour out of their way.
> I feel like we lost humanity somewhere in modern world. I grew up in 3rd world country and if this were to happen, train would literally stop somewhere, anywhere. (With the assumption it’s safe from crewing into another train).
While Iran is not a third-world country per se, you'd be surprised how many times the bus driver would stop at random locations closer to passengers' destinations as well as bus stations.
There's more flexibility in day-to-day life of Iranians; people are expected to follow the rules but there's also this ancient concept of "morovvat" in the culture which encourages self-sacrifice for the betterment of others. Ask any tourist who's traveled to Iran and they tell you about the hospitality of Iranian people; e.g., you ask someone how to get to a place and they literally pause whatever they were doing and walk you to that place so you don't get lost!
It's strange how the image of Iran has been stained by the theocratic government (which Iranians protest against many times...).
It's a big, systemically failing organization running way beyond its capacity. Failures rippling through and compounding in a tightly coupled rail network.
If they weren't able to announce the train would stop at one station, why do you think they'll be able to do that at another?
I'm pretty sure train conductors aren't allowed to just stop somewhere unscheduled for good reasons, there's always a train behind and in front of them with no buffer.
train conductors are not controlling the train. that is done from a central (regional) control center that manages all trains of the region. only there someone decides where trains go or stop
Usually the train driver is in radio contact with central control and can request changes to the points, signals etc so they can make unscheduled stops. For example if there's a medical emergency on board and a passenger needs to be transferred to an ambulance.
Of course doing this can have ripple effects on other services, and if a common factor has severely delayed dozens of different trains, the central control room might not have enough staff to deal with dozens of unscheduled stop requests.
Also everyone complains about punctuality. A train stopping "nilly willy" somewhere it's not scheduled can very much cause exactly that in such a tightly scheduled system. So if you can, you avoid it.
Since we don't know "the other side of the story", we can't really tell. All people here see is the "I got kidnapped". If the story was written from the control room person's perspective, they might write a fascinating story about how they single-handedly avoided 17 trains being late by sending one train on a detour.
Would be awesome if there was someone on HN that knows if DB actually has the capacity to run a scheduling algorithm for their network within a few minutes, repeatedly, for many different trains at a moments notice. What kind of infra do they have for that, what do they use? With a large, interconnected, network that's tightly scheduled already that can't be easy.
OP was also unlucky in that he was on a regional train. They prioritize long distance trains usually as a regional train can more easily wait on a lower speed limit track somewhere than a fast long distance train on a potentially shared single track bottleneck.
Used to work for a bus company: lady had asked driver to drop her off 10 meters from the next bus stop. Then fell into a hole, broke her leg. Then sued us.
At one university in Denmark that opened in 1972 there used to not be a train stop. Instead of going to the nearby city central station and walk for half an hour, you’d pull the emergency break in the middle of a field, traverse the field and reach the university. Pulling the emergency break was of course not allowed, but it was very common.
Today, pulling the emergency break to get off in a field would quickly end you on surveillance videos and with a large fine for obstructing operations, possibly with a detour to the police station for a stern conversation.
I think for all of our problems, the US does get this right - we know when to be formal and when to be informal, and its something that is well culturally ingrained - that is the spirit and intent of the rules should be considered as strongly as the actual words.
France has a reputation of being permanently on strike, but is perhaps the only European country that is simultaneously northern European and Mediterranean at the same time.
No idea if there still is, but there definitely used to be. These things change over time, as culture does. Half a decade ago, pretty much everywhere in Europe followed rules less strictly. The balance was almost surely better.
We live in a society where complaining is considered "verbal abuse" or "harassment", but where we have to put up and shut up about everything going on.
The message out of 2020 and 2021, is that the big people know what they're doing and we don't.
We live in a society where being the victim of verbal abuse or harassment or various isms and all sorts of other petty things confers legitimacy and power upon one's opinion. There's a subtle difference.
No, I don't mean that at all. I've had to complain about things before and they accuse you of shouting (when you're not). They almost want people to swear, and rile them up, because that gives them the excuse to do nothing.
that is sadly exactly how most people operate now. Somebody gives legitimate critique to an issue? simply tone police them and you can claim all they say is [ism] or hate speech and therefore not even worth engaging with.
You're reading way too much into my use of the word "opinion". It's just whatever side of whatever the issue is be it customer service ad Burger King or some arcane discussion about compilers.
Yes, I'm aware of identity politics, but that is not what I'm talking about. I'm a member of a couple of minorities myself, and it confers little privilege on me with or without the abuse.
You're missing the point. Some people are quick to claim that the other person is being unreasonable in a way that's socially agreed upon to be bad as a justification for whatever their thing is, whether that's being a lazy worker at a min-wage job or anything else. And of course sometimes these people don't even wait for unreasonable behavior. They will characterize "hey can you please do your job" that way because it suits them.
This is a figment of living in a culture where being right but distasteful in a variety of poorly defined but broadly similar ways effectively makes you wrong. Toward the other end of the spectrum is stuff like "I don't care if he's a card carrying nazi he builds good rockets" and other stuff like that.
This has been done in USA using slow moving freight inner-city. Just can't do it on passenger service. It is illegal, but there is no one around to enforce it, the vast majority of the time.
I can neither confirm nor deny, I may have done it to get to/from the grocery store from near my house when I didn't have money for a car.
>I feel like we lost humanity somewhere in modern world.
When every useful idiot is screeching about statistical optimization you lose any optimization for anything that isn't measured or isn't optimized for.
Like it's not hard to imagine the breathless comments on HN about how trains should never(TM) stop without a platform if they'd have stopped the train on both sides and some old lady tripped and fell and broke her nose on the rail.
It reminds me of letting a child that's too young to not be stupid pick it's own dinner and it picks of candy then to the surprise of nobody with a brain it's cranky later despite being calorically satisfied by the numbers.
>The modern world where everything is “safety issue” and “someone else’s problem” is where we lost our ways, and it’s never coming back.
It'll come back if there's something bad enough that happens to kick society back to a point where "lol we ain't got the spare resources for that shut up and go away" becomes an acceptable way to deal with the peddlers of these things. But anything that gets us that far won't be pretty.
> trains should never(TM) stop without a platform if they'd have stopped the train on both sides and some old lady tripped and fell and broke her nose on the rail.
Yes. That is a good reason to not stop without a platform. But I tell you one even better. Look at the layout of the Troisdorf station. There are tracks with platforms, and there are through tracks. The trough tracks are surrounded by live tracks on both sides. If the train stops there, unlocks the doors, and somehow coaxes the people to climb down those people are immediately on a live track. To get off of it they have to cross the track and climb up a raised platform. And who knows when is a train coming on that track. The risk here is not breaking the nose of one old lady (which by the way, can easily kill an old person) but forcing hundreds of passengers into a meat grinder. But go on with your snark.
Dumping people on the tracks is not the solution here. Going beyond the station and stopping there (which is always safe in the "other trains are not going to run into yours" sense, that is what signals are for) then letting the signallers set the points for you to reverse back into the station is the solution.
>Yes. That is a good reason to not stop without a platform. But I tell you one even better. Look at the layout of the Troisdorf station. There are tracks with platforms, and there are through tracks. The trough tracks are surrounded by live tracks on both sides. If the train stops there, unlocks the doors, and somehow coaxes the people to climb down those people are immediately on a live track. To get off of it they have to cross the track and climb up a raised platform. And who knows when is a train coming on that track. The risk here is not breaking the nose of one old lady (which by the way, can easily kill an old person) but forcing hundreds of passengers into a meat grinder. But go on with your snark.
This is unfortunately exactly an example of the type of take I was complaining about.
Just let the people who are actually there and can actually see the situation use some judgement.
Arbitrarily halting traffic on an arbitrary section of track isn't something the parties involved don't know how to do. It's something that happens somewhere in the rail network every day for some reason or another. It's a supported function. I trust them to be able to invoke it.
> Just let the people who are actually there and can actually see the situation use some judgement.
Okay. But we are beyond that. The people who were there handled the situation and we both seem to agree that they didn't handle it well. We just seem to disagree how they should have handled it differently.
Your proposal is that they should have dumped people on the tracks. My proposal is that they should have done more to get the train next to a platform.
> This is unfortunately exactly an example of the type of take I was complaining about
Tell me where do you disagree. Have you looked at the track layout of the station? Have you looked at images of the platforms?
I'm confused about what are you asking. Are you asking if I have looked at the layout of the station and the images of the platforms? If so yes. That's how I'm describing it in my first post.
You can look at satellite images of the station via google maps, or you can check the track and signalling arrangements on https://www.openrailwaymap.org/
You can't be honestly claiming that the people exercised poor judgement when their freedom of action is constrained by the fact that they are hemmed in by all manner of rules in a highly rule following culture and that that poor judgement is justification for further reduced autonomy?
They ("ze germans" broadly speaking) should've handed this 300yr ago by not heading down a path (in their defense it probably wasn't obvious) to a culture that create obvious failures by following rules to the point of absurdity.
The train is just an example, and unfortunately there's no control train. If not the train then the absurd and trivially avoidable failure will be something else.
It sounds like you are an expert on DB rules and how they affect the decision making of the various entities in this story. So I will leave that part to you. I personally don't form opinion on things I don't know about.
What I know, and what I'm repeating now in the third comment, is that it would not have been safe to let the passengers out on the platform-less track there. Not because of rules, but because of common sense.
Not with trains, but I have a GO Transit (regional) bus that passes within a block of my house, whereas the actual official stop is about a fifteen minute walk away. I have taken that bus home many times, and the drivers are always willing to pull over at the stoplight and let me hop off.
I wonder if it's not safety but money. In the UK, train operators pay station operators a fixed fee to stop. As a result trains can't just stop somewhere randomly (except I hope in an emergency) even if that would benefit many people. All this is, needless to say, very stupid.
They actually do. I was on a train a month ago from Sheffield to London and a passenger was on the wrong train and they scheduled an extra stop to get them on the right train. Kind of restored my faith in humanity a bit tbh.
They did this for me once on an Intercity or whatever they call them these days. I fell asleep and woke up to my Mum waving at me from the station platform in Lancaster or somewhere wondering why I had not gotten off the train as it pulled out of the station. The conductor was kind enough to stop the train at some random cattle grid barely-even-a-platform in the middle of nowhere and radioed the train coming the other direction to pick me up. Bless.
I don't think so as in this case Deutsche Bahnn owns both the station and the train. In the UK they've gone a bit crazy with the whole free market thing. Public transport should not be a market.
In Germany there's also the issue that the powerful car makers are always lobbying the government to budget cut public transport.
Germany does actually have station fees. And DB isn't the only operator. The RRX trains, one of which OP talked about, are operated by DB and National Express, ordered by the RRX group comprised of VRR, go.Rheinland, NWL, SPNV-Nord and NVV, running on tracks and stations by DB InfraGO.
Transport for Wales has nationalised its trains. A lot of the infrastructure is paid for by the state as well.
By the way, I can remember the state run British Rail and that was bad too. Neither nationalisation nor private operators have done well with British trains over the past fifty years.
The current UK government is re-nationalising the railways. Several operators are currently nationalised (and the train fares have dropped!), and the plan is for all of them to be, once the contracts run out.
London is one of the places that least needed to be devolved (because the UK is run like a city state). It is in England the last time I checked. Bits of Northern England have been offered it and refused it.
There has been some popular demand for Cornish devolution, but Whitehall is only prepared to entertain it within some greater south west region.
The arrangement (now gradually coming to an end) in the UK is very silly, ToCs (which run trains) were district from the ultimate station owner (which was various notionally for-profit companies but of course always ultimately the government) and the track owners. Most of that nonsense is being gradually absorbed into a single government owned passenger rail entity.
A "one under" (likely suicide) plus signal problems (which can be basically anything) meant I was delayed by over an hour home from Yorkshire on Saturday, but that also means it was effectively free.
There was a post on hn by someone who built a model to predict which trains are going to be late to get ticket refunds and travel for free (albeit slower).
Lost humanity is right, and it stems from lost community.
During the Great Financial Crisis astute observers pointed to the loss of local bankers for most transactions as a component of the multifaceted structural causes. When you have your mortgage through the bank down the street, you're much less likely to mail them the keys instead of paying your bill, especially if you have to see the banker in the grocery store etc.
What did we do about this? Of course we didn't learn anything - we actually further consolidated banking.
The same is true of train service, traffic etiquette, and political discourse. The tragedy of the commons is exacerbated by moving away from local community.
It’s been boiling for a long time. Steinbeck wrote this nearly a century ago:
"I built it with my hands. Straightened old nails to put the sheathing on. Rafters are wired to the stringers with baling wire. It's mine. I built it. You bump it down — I'll be in the window with a rifle. You even come to close and I'll pot you like a rabbit."
"It's not me. There's nothing I can do. I'll lose my job if I don't do it. And look — suppose you kill me? They'll just hang you, but long before your hung there will be another guy on the tractor, and he'll bump the house down. You're not killing the right guy."
"That's so," the tenant said. "Who gave you orders? I'll go after him. He's the one to kill."
"You're wrong. He got his orders from the bank. The bank told them: "Clear those people out or it's your job."
"Well, there's a president of the bank. There's a Board of Directors. I'll fill up the magazine of the rifle and go into the bank."
The driver said: "Fellow was telling me the bank gets orders from the East. The orders were: "Make the land show profit or we'll close you up."
"But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don't aim to starve to death before I kill the man that's starving me."
"I don't know. Maybe there's nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn't man at all. Maybe, like you said, the property's doing it. Anyway I told you my orders."
At the end of the day you have to actually shoot someone from time to time to keep everyone in line.
It's way cheaper to not wrong people or to not walk up so close to that line than it is to secure the full stack and pay everyone what you'd need to pay them to compensate them for the risk of being the unlucky guy who gets scalped on livestream or whatever form sloppy retribution takes.
During the 30yr prior to the GFC the kinds of Americans who don't work in downtown offices, don't get compensated partly in RSUs and who aren't represented well in internet discussions and mainstream media complained fairly unanimously about the same things. Regulation forced their main street economies to either consolidate or pack up for China. The industrial employers got scooped up by the conglomerates and turned into poorly paying meat grinders with no "good" jobs or left entirely. The grocery store and hardware store became a Walmart. But nobody listened to them when they complained.
You're touching on points that Ayn Rand touched on in Atlas Shrugged, which as it happens uses the dynamics of the running of a railway as a metaphor for organisational incompetence and which opens on a scene of railway workers refusing to take initiative and following policy blindly.
Where she started to go a little weird is she thought anyone who had an idea had the right to just go do that, and society can go hang (she grew up suffering the worst Sovietism could serve up, her concept of community was damaged as a result). Unfortunately, her ideas are now held close to the hearts of some of the most powerful people on Earth, who are also going a little weird.
I'm actually OK with experts deciding that a particular policy is the right way to keep people safe. What I'm not OK with is using the policy as a prop to avoid independent thought or agility. I'd rather that instead of a procedure or a policy, people were taught a way of thinking about the World.
"We're not allowed to stop at the next station because we're not registered to do so", is a statement made in deference to a policy regardless of whether it makes sense or not. "We need to spend a few minutes making sure we're registered at the next station before we go any further" complies with the policy, but is a person taking ownership of resolving the problem, and comes from a place of empathy for the passengers on board. We need more of the latter, but unfortunately the Randian version we're now getting is "We'll stop or carry on wherever the driver feels like because he is sat at the controls so there's nothing anybody can do about that".
Your quote is missing a crucial bit. The full quote is «we're not registered to do so, so we are on the wrong tracks».
You were supposed to take the last exit, to be on the local road instead of the highway. No, we cannot let you off on the highway. We are not allowed to stop here. There are no stops. We wait for another exit. Sorry.
> I'm actually OK with experts deciding that a particular policy is the right way to keep people safe.
That's actually the nub of the topic. Humans can accumulate some expertise in this or that topic, to some limited extend. But they can't integrate all the cases that actual people are going to face in an anticipated manner.
There are different kind of attitude with expertise. Some people will grow humility as they realize how little they know and how tiny their individual contribution actually is in the grand scheme of cosmos. Other will grow a metastased ego and leverage on the little few things they believe firmly to grab as much political power as they can to enforce whatever fantasy come to their mind as they get out of touch from feedback from the rest of humanity (except the yes-man court).
If an expert have meaningful things to share, of course it should be considered. But not as an absolute authority. Experts can also be fake people, or bribed, or missing clues about the specific context, just as well as be perfectly on point with well framed context and best intention to the general public at heart. But taking blindly anything that an expert labeled person for unquestionable certitudes is a receipt for the kind of trouble exposed in this thread.
Tracks 3, 4 and 7 at the station in question are not adjacent to a platform. It sort of makes sense to route a train over these if there is no stop planned there (intentional or not).
Of course it does. So it also makes sense that if you are operating that train, you make sure you don't end up on tracks 3, 4 or 7. You stop and verify that the signalling and routing is in place to let you stop at that station before it becomes too late and that option becomes impossible.
This is basic management, it's basic competence.
The train was misrouted because nobody cared about routing it properly: the driver, the conductor, the signallers, the routers, the management. Something weird happened and everyone shrugged and started to hum "Que sera, sera" to themselves, rather than committing to doing a job in the passengers' interests.
So true. Another third worlder and it's still the same. On the interesting side, if they didn't stop we would make sure a coach or two (empty of course) experiences some arson or fractures. From major to minor depending upon how pissed the locals were. No, I am not condoning it course. Trains should not be burnt. Buses are a different story though. (That included not stopping even after the "chain pulls" :P)
Or maybe the tracks the train was routed onto didn't have platforms at the station.
In 3rd world countries it might be acceptable for people to jump out of 5-foot high carriages onto live tracks with trains running at 100mph for convenience, but not in Germany
He has a loaded lawyer and is not afraid to use him. The world is filled with economic traps like this. All the economic advantages gained by the commoner, would unravel by one risk of harm coming for the driver and the company.
Humanity has been codified into rules, and the rule does not allow throwing out people somewhere random, because that would be differently inhuman (and someone would sue you if they have a bigger harm than lost time).
Ugh. don’t remind me. my fiancée and I live in different cities in Germany. the train ride is 5 hours. but it has been 15h in the past just because DB is DB. and the only thing we got for it was like a 10 eur discount voucher. 10 hours of my life partner’s time is worth a lot more than 10 eur. i have cussed them and their mothers countless times, DB is a garbage transportation company owned and ran by garbage people.
in switzerland it’s amazing. france is way more efficient too because the low and high speed rails are largely physically separated. in germany everything shares everything and they rely on proper scheduling to make it work. which is never proper
In my experience, this doesn't always happen, and I say this as someone who traveled very often on that same RE5. The situation is what it is (poor maintenance, etc), but the main issue is that the tracks are shared with freight trains impossible to stop given their weight, so to avoid collisions and have a nice (albeit late) Christmas, they made that call to play it safe, rather than have a freight train crash into a train full of people.
I wouldn't blame it on the person, I would rather blame it on the shitty system the train driver has to rely on - apparently so unreliable they had to do what they did. Keep in mind, that's a delay also for that person who very likely doesn't want to work on that day either - the same person that has to deal with that level of BS every day now.
Of course, just to be clear, there is always the German ready to save the world by following an idiotic nonsense procedure, but that's everywhere in the world.
> I have fond memories of train stopping close to my house for various random reasons and I’d just get out so I don’t have to walk back from the station. The modern world where everything is “safety issue” and “someone else’s problem” is where we lost our ways, and it’s never coming back.
You got lucky many times. All it takes is that one time someone makes the wrong call and you get smashed by a train. In Europe this is very rarely the case, because exactly of these "nonsense" rules.
The main issue is the shitty maintenance/sync with other trains etc. "Digitalization".
I have no idea, but don't you think that the driver would have rather stopped at that station, instead of traveling an additional 50km or whatever?
The situation is rather an indicator of how bad public transportation has become due to lack of investments, maintenance, expansion, etc. For years they didn't care a bit about this.
Why should a driver risk his life and/or job to save the day, when the issue is bigger than him/her?
I lived in Berlin for 10 years. In my experience, people complain too much about German public transport. But comming from a south american country with reasonably good public transport, I found German's one very good.
The only thing I can agree is the "speaking only in german as if it was the lingua franca of the world". Germany is part of the EU. The EU has 24 langueages. You should at least speak in English. And no, my mother language is not english but spanish.
I had a 10am international flight to the US out of Munich. I boarded the train at the central station at 7am.
At 8:15 they dropped us off several stops away from the airport, claiming this train could not continue because it was so delayed. So we hung out in the country...
I finally go to the airport at 9am, rushed to the gate, but they people manning the counter had left (it's usually the flight attendants that man the counters I guess). I called the airline to try to get someone up there, but after waiting 45min on hold the flight had boarded and it was too late.
also, whatever jackass put ellipsis "..." substitution on the Munich flight board because "H32" or whatever was too long to fit into to their div and they couldn't bear messing out their UI, needs a flogging. The UI on the flight board is completely useless, but OH does it it look pretty
So that is what the classic "Cheney on MTA" Lisp implementation paper was named after. It felt like a reference, but I never had an idea about what it was referring to. Thanks!
Unfortunately travelling in Germany by train has become a mess, hence why so many reach out for car or inland flights.
Delays are to be expected, trains cancelled without reasoning, train stations skipped in similar ways as described on the article, and if using connections, better plan for at least 30m interval, while taking into account a plan B for every connection that might be missed.
I've attempted to take two DB trains this year, while travelling both through Germany and with Berlin as a destination. In the end there were seven trains, and 8 hours extra lost travelling with DB. My compensation was pitiful.
Living in the Netherlands (not native Dutch) I will now rather fly than take a train if it means that I can avoid using DB.
For contrast, tomorrow morning I am heading from the Netherlands to Paris with a train (non DB), and don't really expect anything but a pleasant and smooth journey.
> I was trying to travel 35 kilometers. I was now 63 kilometers from my grandmother’s house. Further away than when I started.
Oh boy. There's something deeply human about the frustrations of state institutions and bureaucracy.
From the linked article:
> How are train cancellations and delays compensated when traveling with the Deutschland-Ticket?
> In the event of a delay of at least 60 minutes at the destination station due to a delay or train cancellation in local transport, you will receive €1.50 compensation per case.
> Amounts under €4 will not be paid out due to a legal de minimis threshold. However, you can accumulate multiple late payment claims.
Maybe worth mentioning that this „1.50€ compensation“ rule only matters if you use the „Deutschland-Ticket“ which is a fixed price ticket for a whole month, unlimited travel on the Regio lines (short distance trains, i.e. non IC)
If you bought a regular route ticket you get 25% and more than an hour delay, and 50% at more than two hours.
Not sure how it is with other multi-use tickets.
This, combined with the certain delays CAN make traveling by train quite affordable… /s
Happens regularly. And if you don't have a visa for the new destination, well, too bad.
E.g. on December 20 a WizzAir flight 4768 was diverted to Thessaloniki (Greece) instead of its destination Skopje (North Macedonia): https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/WZZ4768/history/2025... . Those with Schengen visas (or appropriate passports) got a bus to Skopje. The rest allegedly waited for three hours and then got returned to Cyprus (EU, but not Schengen), but to a different airport (Paphos instead of Larnaca). So if someone had a car left on Larnaca's parking, too bad.
Reminds me of my time in Scotland. I commuted by train, and they published stats that showed my route as 95% on time "excepting conditions outside our control". In the year I was there, the train arrived on-time exactly once. Apparently very little was under their control.
They did occasionally announce the reasons for delays. Two that I remember: "Leaves on the track" in Autumn, what a surprise. "The wrong kind of snow" um...it's Winter, it snowed, it was nothing special?
The leaves are actually a big deal because they get crushed into a slippery film that stops the wheels making good friction with the rails. Occasionally you will see specialised debris-removal vehicles moving along the tracks and spraying them
Because of the substandard, cost-cutting line-side vegetation mismanagement coupled with the NIMBYs and save-the-planet warriors getting up-in-arms. Plus high wages making proactive vegetation management not cost-effective due to the extent. Network Rail is well aware of the issue but due to budget cuts, can't do much.
Behind every excuse on the railway, if you peel back just a tiny bit of the layer, you'll see the real reasons. In the UK it's usually "we need to spend that money on the NHS and welfare" and "ROSCO profits are not put back into the railway"
On a recent train from London to Bath. it was delayed because the train in front of me had hit a swan and came off worse for the wear. Its passengers had to disembark, and ours had to stop to take them on.
On the train back, we were delayed by the train in front of us catching fire.
The most maddening part about this experience is the helplessness. Its inconvenient, sure. Ive been late because of traffic, etc. Being carried along well beyond my will without a breakglass: Fine, I'll just walk! option makes my skin crawl.
Events like this seem to only be explained by accountability sink[0]. Naming it gives me some brief sense of sanity.
I appreciate that there is a safety concern; where's the humanity in large systems, especially as we trend towards more automation?
As a Russian, this is such a bonkers idea to me. I only took a Deutsche Bahn train once so far. It got delayed 20 minutes. When I complained about it on social media, I was told something like "what do you mean, it arrived and took you where you wanted to go".
Russian trains only get delayed if there's something seriously wrong. Like an accident or an act of sabotage because of the war. A month or so ago, a Sapsan train from St Petersburg to Moscow broke down en route. People had to wait for hours to get out. It made big news. As far as I can tell, this is a weekly occurrence in Germany.
Oh man, DB has one of the worst experiences in my well traveled history.
If you don't buy a seat, you don't get a seat. I was taking the 4am train 8 hours from Brussels to Berlin, and I bought seats for both legs of the trip. To sleep, of course.
The first leg of the trip was delayed, so they gave me a free ticket on the next train, 40 minutes later, but with no seat.
So, exhausted as all hell and wanting nothing more than a little nap, I was forced to stand in one of the hallways between the carriages, unable to rest much even vertically because people had to push past me to get to the bathroom.
As I live around the area where this happened and I am well aware of how DB is on this route, this story sounds extremely sketchy - why would the train change lines to the other side of the Rhine and not stop at any of the 17 (!!!) stops along the way to Neuwied? Especially with people in it?
The problem was a broken relay, no trains were able to run for a few hours through Bonn. The official statement said that the trains have stopped and were replaced by buses.
I know how sketchy it sounds, and it was even documented in DB Navigator. But DB makes this information inaccessible a couple of days later in the app, so there is no way to „proof“ it except asking DB itself.
Yes it is! And yes it was a typo! Thank you for finding the link to it. I was trying to find it before but couldn’t find it in official sources, DB deleted it from the official app. It did not stop at Troisdorf though.
It is operated by National Express, but I guess the routing comes from some other company (likely InfraGo)
> Apparently we were not registered at Troisdorf station, so we are on the wrong tracks. We cannot stop.”
And of course there is some huge fine or even potentially jail time if you moo in protest and pull that nice red lever to avoid the Christmas present of this bureaucratic idiocy (after all, you have legs that are capable of crossing train tracks and eyes to do that safely)?
It's for emergency.. if that happened to me I'd argue in court that I thought the driver went insane (because a system can't work like that) so it qualified as emergency..
But back to my country (Poland), it's better here - some had problems with physically getting out on the right station, and when the conductor saw it she even encouraged us to pull this lever in those cases so we don't have to get out at the wrong station.
To some extend I'd like rail operators being forced to follow the same rules as airlines in terms of compensation for delays. As the only thing that seems to work in cases like this is financial motivation.
I've seen this in the same region, possibly on this exact line last year. I was going from Paris to Copenhagen, managed to have only 5 hours of delay. The return journey took 30 hours more and I could only get one hotel night reimbursed.
I changed my ticket to get a French train as soon as possible.
Other survival story:
I lived in Northern Germany in the late 2000s as a young exchange student. Almost all the DB lines in the region would go through a particular railway node where, almost every Friday, someone (probably an evil reincarnator) would commit suicide, blocking the whole region.
My reflex: so as soon as the train would stop, I'd get out, get a taxi, then convince 4 other people to go to Hamburg or even Hannover with me, sharing the cost.
You got Deutsche Bahned. IF anyone watches Jet Lag The Game on YouTube, they play hide and seek games around Europe, and whenever they're on a Deutsche Bahn something almost always goes awry.
I used DB quite a few times last month and all of the delays and problems were listed on the trip planner website (in German and in English) despite there being no notifications at the departure station and the train driver speaking in German only when communicating.
We had a trip planned in which we needed a specific train. The website said “there has been an incident on the tracks. There will be a delay of 20-50 minutes waiting for a platform. Not all connections will be made,” and that is exactly what happened. This worked for our time window so we took the train. But there were a lot of confused and upset passengers who had absolutely no idea what was going on.
I’m sure DB has many problems, but one of them appears to be communication that surely isn’t too difficult to fix.
I like the Norwegian model: The train company is obliged to put up alternative transport to your destination. If they don't provide an alternative within reasonable time, you can demand refunds for documented costs for alternative transport up to fairly reasonable limits.
I've been bundled into taxis by the train operator in Norway because it was expected, but also likely cheaper for them to ensure full taxis than have people arrange it themselves and end up with everyone able to demand the maximum refund.
The costs are low enough that it's not a problem if it happens occasionally, but does create some real pressure to actually fix issues if it happens often enough.
I never understood why the Germans cannot get their shit together on commercial train travel. Austria manages to coordinate a wonderful federal train system across nine federal states without issues via the ÖBB, the Swiss also seem to have it down.
Fundamentally, the Germans tried to cheap out on high speed trains by trying to engineer them to run on normal tracks so they didn't have to build new, expensive high-speed tracks like France and Japan did.
This is the fundamental mistake underpinning their train service since the long distance trains frequently have to wait for other trains to pass, cascading delays through the system.
That and an almost criminal level of underinvestment in the past 20 years or so.
I travel to Cologne about 5 times a year. 2h ride, usually 25 minutes late in each direction. Just go to the board bistro right away, order some food (if available), grab a beer or coffee and don't look at the time.
I tried taking the train to Prague this year for my birthday. I’m from Berlin so taking the train made sense on paper. I could have taken the car but I thought that it might be more relaxing to just sit for the 4h or so it takes.
In Dresden we were told that they had issues with the power lines on the Czechia side and had to leave the train. It was still an hour to the border but seemed to be the best place to dump all the people and let them go the merry way the rest of the journey.
The basic service was a printed paper directly out of the connection lookup system. No info if this connection is actually the best or makes sense since other travelers will be also on route.
We had to switch trains 2 more times and arrived in Prague at around Midnight. Let’s say I really don’t want to take the train anywhere at the moment.
Sidestory. Check the current state of the S-Bahn Service (run by DB) in Berlin. One wonder why they bother to announce issues with the system day in and out. They could just switch over and announce when stuff is running smoothly instead.
Something similar happened to me between Essen and Dortmund while trying to get to the airport. The train stoped around 50 minutes between stations without a chance of getting off the train. I lost my flight as a result.
I have also been left in remote villages when the last train of the day broke for some reason at 12:30 am. All travellers and myself had to look for Ubers, which the government also tries to suppress.
I agree with some comenters that German companies seem to prefer to stuck with Bureaucracy other than finding what could be confortable or even human solutions.
The ticket mentioned in the article seems to be a Deutschland ticket, unfortunately compensation is low. For time sensitive trip I often consider other option.
The weirdest thing in my city is that the bus driver often forgets 1 or 2 stops. There was a kid bursted into tear when she lost her direction on her way back home from school because the bus driver took a "wrong" path.
We have this sickness in the UK too. I think it may be terminal. It is some combination of regulation, not trusting anyone's initiative, mindless rule-following, "safetyism", never empowering front-line staff to make decisions, managerial tier expansion, and a few other things besides like infrastructure neglect, "financialisation", and general ignorance of the world of things, of the real, and over-reliance on the world of words, of laws, of construct on paper and not in steel and stone.
When you have a simple journey and no interruptions DB in long distance is pretty good, not excellent but solid. But with more complicated things traveling with DB is not well thought out and they don't see what could be possible. Changing a platform should show you in-station navigation door to door. DB navigator should not show you impossible journeys, it presents you with train switches where the second train already left once you arrive or displays the stop is canceled entirely.
DB Navigator and bahn.de have a monopoly over german train routing and ticketing, but are not subject to anti-trust regulation enough or run by the government directly (dataquality issues, etc).
DB is very much against grassroots movements trying to improve customer experience and quality, like community built ticket stores or wallet and calendar integration.
I also think the ministry of transportation and politicians are at fault for not getting DB to step up their game. Trying to privatize DB, rigid regulations for how DB has to run and not enough attention to rail as a whole for example. I would consider the "ampel" (21-24) to be one of the better ones. After some reforms, the government is still not in a position to control the monopolist enough.
I have my own travel story involving DB. I had a ticket for a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt am Main to Warsaw. When I tried to check-in online a day before the flight it told me I had to do it at the airport. I fly a bit, so I knew what that meant - they overbooked the flight. The next day I got my "no aircraft entry guaranteed" boarding card of shame at the airport and learned at the gate that they overbooked the plane by three persons! After explaining my EU passenger rights, I got them to confirm my €250 compensation and since I was in an adventurous mood headed for the Frankfurt Flughafen Fernbahnhof train station.
The manned DB Travelcenter was still open so I walked in and asked for an international ticket to Warsaw. The gentleman (who spoke fluent English) typed a bit on the computer and told me he cannot sell a ticket for the Berlin-Warsaw leg of the journey due to a "system error on the Polish side". I knew that probably meant the Berlin-Warsaw-Express is at full capacity again and they don't sell tickets with no seat indicated for that route. I asked for a ticket to Berlin instead (€207, 2nd class) and went for a hamburger - still had about an hour until the train.
The train was initially supposed to arrive delayed 5 minutes but that was soon to change. The delay kept ticking up to 20 minutes, 45 minutes, 1 hour (around this time the DB travelcenter closed for the night) then two hours then cancelled altogether. I wasn't sure if my ticket is valid for the next train (the DB website was a bit vague about that) so I called my friend in Hamburg who confirmed I was good to jump onto the next train which would arrive on schedule in another three hours. I tried getting a Capri-Sun from a vending machine but it got stuck and wouldn't fall out. So I sat at the empty station with noting but rats as company until 3AM when the next Berlin-bound train arrived on time. In Berlin I got out at Sudkreutz and jumped onto a FlixBus to Poznań (€22) and stayed the night over at my friend's place (I badly needed a shower at that point) before taking a train to Warsaw the next day (€16, 2nd class).
Now, I technically did eventually use my Frankfurt-Berlin ticket but I was quite annoyed at DB so I applied for a reimbursement due to a cancelled train, which was granted in full. I also applied for reimbursement of the plane ticket from Lufthansa which was also granted. With the additional €250 compensation for denied boarding I actually made money on that little adventure but I probably wouldn't do that again. Gotta check in earlier from now on.
I lived 15 years in The Netherlands and 3 years ago moved to Germany.
Back in NL I used to complain about trains being late...
Boy oh boy was I not ready for Germany and Deutsche Bahn. I heard stories, but it was so absurd at times that I treated them as comical acts.
Then I traveled long distance on DB...
- trains being late by 15-40 minutes is NORMAL. It's included. At this point I feel like it's even planned.
- the "thrown out in the middle of nowhere" happens! Ruthlessly. Operationally. With zero empathy or guidance. One minute you traveled inside the train approaching your destination another minute you are on a station in some village, knowing nothing about "why?" And "what is next?"
I still take trains - but I do not plan any appointments on arrival. As arrival is theoretical and not guaranteed. I just take a gamble and sink hours into the journey. Read books. Watch movies.
P.s. I am surprised that DB is not held more accountable for the absolutely shit service they provide.
And being delayed for 15-40 minutes, getting thrown out in the middle of nowhere, or having to continue by bus is an inconvenience for most people, but a nightmare for people with disabilities. Imagine being in a wheelchair, having a digestive condition (Crohn, IBS, etc.), or some sort of anxiety. I imagine that there are groups of people in Germany that simply do not travel anymore.
It is an area where proper governance is failing. I don't know about Germany, but in The Netherlands, Dutch law requires at least 90% of the trains to be on time (less than 5 minutes delay). If national train company do not reach those numbers, they are fined and I think in an extreme case they can lose their concession.
NS is state-owned so all fines are just money transfer between two branches of the government. Also, they know that "the trains fail with current amount of public funding, I wonder if less funding will improve the situation" is not good logic. Therefore there won't be any actual fines.
> and I think in an extreme case they can lose their concession
And then what? Most of the country will be left without trains? The company will be dissolved and replaced by the Chinese? Not gonna happen.
> Dutch law requires at least 90% of the trains to be on time (less than 5 minutes delay
Yes, however, any train delayed more than 30 minutes gets canceled entirely and doesn't get counted in the statistics. The train this article is talking about would not be registered late under Dutch terms (though it probably wouldn't have traveled comically far without stopping).
Not saying Dutch trains are as bad as German trains, but applying the same laws won't fix DB's problems.
> P.s. I am surprised that DB is not held more accountable for the absolutely shit service they provide.
That's the famous German efficiency, not to waste time on things that were not done or caused by being inefficient in the first place. There's no point in wasting time on improving some process, fax machines still work, don't they?
The accountability part is what makes me more angry. I get to lose so many (maybe hundreds?) of hours a year because of how bad DB works. Meanwhile the executives at DB get their nice boni each year and absurdly high wages for what they do... which is consistently worsening the train experience year after year. Probably none of them even use the train.
Totally reminds me of Manhattan subways deciding to skip 6 stops after making some static noise on the speakers that nobody understands, and leaving you on a station that you have to pay reentry fee to go back the five stops you overrun (or run the lottery of staying for longer in case the next stop has an easy transfer.) Hopefully some day these absurdities of modern life will be fixed.
That reminds me in turn of a joke we used to have, that the afterlife is being on a subway car with constant, unclear, but important announcements. Maybe this stop is heaven, maybe hell, maybe nirvana, maybe oblivion. There's no way to tell. Getting off at the wrong stop would be catastrophic. So, you remain, forever, riding in this afterlife subway car.
I don't know what to make of this. Of course everyone has a right to be pissed off for losing time because of someone else's mistake, but at the same time the language is... I mean if you feel kidnapped because your train connection didn't work out I am not sure how you'd feel if you were really kidnapped. Was my family kidnapped when they were sitting for two hours in the airplane before takeoff because of xyz? No, it was just an unfortunate turn of events that happen from time to time when you fly.
German railways could be better, but at the same time it's nowhere near the level of complaining the average person makes, as in this article. I think it says more about the author than the company. "It's twenty minutes late, I consider this early". Despite the problems that exist, I wouldn't say I ever had the feeling of being relieved the train is only 20 minutes late. Especially not with local trains.
> I mean if you feel kidnapped because your train connection didn't work out
It's not "your train connection didn't work out", it's "you were planning to go somewhere, and the train took you somewhere else entirely, much farther away than when you started, and gave you no way out of this, and not even an apology or explanation". This is absolutely comparable to a form of kidnapping.
If you got into an Uber and they took you to some completely different place, many km away from your destination, and didn't let you get out of the vehicle until they got there, would you not say that they kidnapped you? Would you not be tempted to call the police and press charges, even if they did tell you that they would let you go out once they reached their destination?
* It has tracks so it cannot go anywhere it wants to go
* It can only let passengers go at certain places, these are called stations
So no, I would not compare it to a random Uber driver that takes me somewhere random on a whim. I wouldn't call the police if an Uber took me on a different road if the original road was closed. Etc.
The train took them 5+ stations away from their destination. They could very well have stopped in any of those stations, they just claim that some bureaucracy prevented them from doing so. Also, trains can in fact stop anywhere they want and let people get off. It's not normally done, but it could be a very good option rather than forcing people to travel much farther away than their destination.
Still, in Germany only 58.8% of the trains were on time in 2025 [1]. Maybe it's not as bad as the author states, but it's certainly valid complaining about it. I lived in Germany for five years and for longer stretches it was certainly very common to have a 30-60 minutes delay. A lot of my colleagues would even do trips like Stuttgart <-> Leipzig by plane because they hated traveling with DB so much.
I live in Germany and take the train all the time. There were always kind of clusters of issues, but lately I haven't had many problems, especially not major, don't really remember what the last time was I got any compensation for over an hour delay. The last time was maybe two years ago.
I wonder sometimes how these things develop because if you're objectively pissed off that your train was delayed, I cannot imagine enjoying taking the plane, or even worse a car. Like I haven't had a plane take off on time in my life. I took only a few business trips with the car and was stuck in traffic every single time. So objectively despite experiencing issues with DB myself, it's a lot better than my experience with alternatives. Stuttgart - Leipzig has a direct connection, and in my experience the biggest reason for a delay is when you miss a connecting train. E.g. your train is 15 minutes late but you had only 10 minutes to change trains. So other than the train going out of service I honestly can't imagine what the issue would be. You sit for 4h, can work comfortably, it's quieter than anything else, you can have a coffee or a beer, a meal etc. etc. And then maybe you'll have a half hour delay, but you can get that with anything else also.
When I was a child in France people were quick to say that trains ran on time in Germany... Well, in my experience there is no developed country with a worse train company than DB. Even Amtrack is still slightly better. In France people complain about the SNCF (especially strikes) but at least outside of strikes the TGV are mostly on time.
> no developed country with a worse train company than DB
Italy is pretty similar, and I would say even worse, but after reading / hearing more about DB I think they're just competing for being the worst train company ever
Should have taken the KVB/SWB line 16 from Cologne HBF to Bonn Bad Godesberg Rheinalle/BF instead, and the bus line 855 from there to Meckenheim BF, or so :)
I read the story and I felt like the mentioned background characters in it, saying "Deutsche Bahn..." to myself at the end of every paragraph.
Once I was travelling back to home from Munich and the train stopped somewhere in Frankfurt in the middle of nowhere. Literally stopped on the tracks and it was completely dark outside except some far away lights from the houses around.
We waited for 3 hours, with 2-3 explanations which did not make any sense. After 3 hours the train started riding again and I arrived in Cologne, which is ~1h away from home still, and they said this is the last station. I needed to spend the night in Cologne in a hotel, because it was 3 o'clock in the morning and there was no other train to my hometown.
Fortunately I was able to get a refund plus the hotel cost for that night back.
3 hours!! Unbelievable. In the UK we would smash the doors/windows open these days after an hour or two. We got sick of the railway having no contingency plans for getting people off stuck trains in bad conditions
Munich-Mühldorf regional train. Once it forgot to stop at Markt Schwaben (it always stops there). Passangers had to wait 30 min for the train to go back at the next station. Not even an apology.
There are also pleasant experiences when traveling by train, but rarely in Germany.
The Swiss railways are excellent and friendly. In Milan, I was unable to catch the reserved train to Zurich, but the conductors on the Swiss train that was just departing even accepted my ticket for the Italian railway.
> At some point you stop being a passenger and start being cargo.
It’s much worse than that – FedEx would never treat cargo like that. If they took cargo further away from its destination than it started and then left it there for the customer to sort out, that would break so many SLAs …
DB is well known to be used as a "golden parachute" by german politicians. When they loose popularity in politics they escape by giving themselves a high payed position at state owned DB company. Problem is they have no knowledge in managing a railroad.
I rode DB many times, all over Germany and from Düsseldorf to Cologne weekly for months. Luckily, never had an issue. By far my worst experience has been Trenitalia. I lost a couple of connections during the same vacation because the train was late and in both opportunities no one could tell me what to do, let alone give me a refund. In one trip the teller while exhaling cigarette smoke on my face shrugged then suggested I took a bus from Campiglia to Piombino, which ended up been one of the scariest rides of my life (I have crossed the Andes in South America by speeding buses racing each other with 200 ft exposed cliff drops on the side, so I’m not strange to scary rides)
There're certain kinds of rewards to encourage traveling by rail in Europe. For example, a training course I attended refunded part of your travel expenses if you took a long-distance train. And there're people who believe in not flying for the sake of the planet.
But at this point, I'm convinced you should avoid any train in and around Germany. This includes Denmark as well. Just take a plane, but don't have a layover in Germany. The same could probably be said about France. My first train from Paris to Nancy stopped for about 2hrs in the middle of nowhere. As the machinist said: "The train is tired."
Other countries like Italy or Spain seem to actually have well-functioning rail though.
I regularly travel on DSB (2.5hr journeys, 4 times a month minimum), and only very rarely encounter issues. Staff have always been easy to deal with and on the rare occasion I've had to be refunded (the carriage with my reserved seat didn't show up) I've received it within days.
Nope, leave Italy off the well-functioning rail. I am a commuter, i use the train here since 2009 and it's terrible. We're going through the same experiences described in the post, but often even much worse. On December 1st, my train took 6 hours to travel 100km instead of 1 hour so we too felt like the post author.
My most recent Deutsche Bahn train was announced as being 3 hours late. I watched a few passengers leave the station to grab coffee nearby. The train arrived 10 minutes later, and left 5 minutes after that. The whole system seems broken.
I am never taking the train in Germany or through Germany again (or through Belgium, for that matter). The experience is consistently bad. NS, DB, and NMBS all perform poorly. Train travel itself has become unreliable and frustrating. Ever since I got my car, the difference in freedom is obvious.
I do support having basic public transport and solid bike infrastructure for young people, but once you’re 25 or older, there’s little justification for relying on such low-quality public transport.
I’ll be going to Prague next year, and I’m fully willing to drive for hours rather than sit on a train that keeps getting delayed, is unpleasant to be on, and costs far too much.
Not for ICE, the only train worth getting for me. Also I don't live in Germany, in the Netherlands. Trains are expensive. Even though I live in the Randstad, near big cities, I don't have any good public transport here. It's just not worth it for me.
To think that, once we complete CA HSR, we too could have experiences like this. In fact, one of the best reasons to get trains in the US is so that we too can end up farther from our destination than when we started.
Deutsche Bahn seems very similar to most of the railway in England. Customer service is non-existent; delays are highly normalised.
The UK government hates how expensive it is to operate, so they are reducing subsidies and massively prioritising the most profitable routes and raising prices.
Staff got nice condition/pay bumps during COVID and all have the attitude that they are doing us a favour. I don't mean that lightly or that I've had one bad experience with a member of staff on a bad day. They are work-shy, offensive, rude, lacking training and plain bad tempered.
I'm very pro car now these days, which is exactly what the Government wants.
Customer service on British trains is excellent. It only takes a few minutes to claim Delay Repay if you're delayed more than 15 minutes, and you can even set it up to do it automatically for you. If your last train back home for the night is cancelled at 1am, you can message the company on social media and they'll pay £100+ to sort you out with a taxi for a distance like London to Cambridge.
I consistently find railway workers to be some of the most helpful and approachable people I have to interact with, which is remarkable given the sort of people they have to put up with. I think the sort of person you'll be speaking to certainly depends on the part of the country you're in though - in Scotland and Wales, I've seen people who've been let off for having a ticket that expired several days prior, and staff are happy to have a friendly chat if the train isn't too busy.
I've taken trains regularly in England for 25 years. I disagree.
What's your experience?
And it's taken a massive turn for the worse since 2020
England is definitely worse than Scotland and Wales I grant you that. And fwiw, in Scotland, they have far less powers to prosecute compared to England, which is why they seem like they are more lenient
As I responded in another thread, not all operators are 15 minutes. Not that 25/50% often isn't really that much compensation...
And that taxi is far from gaurenteed.
I get the sense you had one or two good experiences and extrapolated?
I'm pro car, I would much prefer to relax on a train, but the economics just don't work in the UK. I can't think of anywhere I want to go where taking the train is cheaper than driving
After paying for fuel, insurance, property taxes and maintenance (exclude the possibility of a car note in this scenario), is it still cheaper than taking the train?
And this is precisely why I don't use public transit when traveling on vacation and rent cars instead. I also don't fly unless the drive is longer than 7 to 8 hours. Driving in Germany is also reasonably fun.
And I thought the Dutch Railways (NS, Nationale Spoorwegen) where weird..
We mostly have issues with trains not showing up, but then the next one arrives in 20 minutes so it usually isn't a big problem (unless you are cutting it close).
We had a lot of issues in the past with the first leaves falling on the track or a bit of snow. And they ordered trains without toilets. So also cattle trucks.
And have I mentioned that you pay a lot for this "service"?
second class, normal costs: €18,80 to get from Utrecht to Amsterdam and back, 50 kilometers.
The opening paragraph contains some factual errors (you can only get kicked off a train when you do something illegal) and the whole story lives by exaggeration and missing facts.
It is as moronic as saying people were kidnapped when a plane had to divert because of the weather. Also he would have been entitled to get a paid cab ride to his destination when that happens. But that is just one of the facts he did not mention.
This story should be ignored and tossed into the local legends garbage.
Kicked Off = we have to stop for some technical reasons that are further unspecified, and everyone has to leave the train because we are driving now in the opposite direction. a replacement bus is coming. Once every hour. With a capacity of 8 people. In some cow village 50km far away from the next city. With no cab service available. Thats was what i meant
Of course there’s exaggeration. Nobody really believes this person was kidnapped by the German train company.
People do get kicked off trains, usually it’s the entire train that is being emptied. Happened to me in NRW. Happened to me in Brandenburg. When there’s a problem with the train, then sometimes it has to be evacuated.
He would have not been entitled to a cab ride by the way, he was travelling with Deutschlandticket. Your entire comment is not only pedantic, it’s also completely wrong lol.
He could try to do it on his own accord - they have leverage to decline and he'd have to take it through several other over burdened agencies.
He could also try getting into contact with DB, and good luck with that.
My own DB story was from Hamburg hbf where 3 huge DB employers was standing guard in front of reisenzentrum (the customer service counter) and yelling at every own being incredibly rude.
DB is a joke, and it is imploding on itself. Staff seems so stressed and embarrassed by being a part of it.
The thing that stands out to me about this story and that confuses me the most about German life is the general passive acceptance of realities like this. I think it might be simply European.
Following inflexible procedures to the letters and not to the spirit reminded me Swissair Flight 111, any aircraft fire today would result in quicker decision to land nowadays. I think Swiss are even more strict than Germans (at least when I lived there and frequently traveled to Germany), it's a blessing and a curse.
As a North American it's fun to read a story about trains "being bad". The light rail in my city routinely just breaks in the winter. Everybody is afraid to use it and drives instead. A 20-60 minute delay would be unexceptional, and it wouldn't even take you close to where you're actually going.
Can someone explain why, with Germany's reputation of being so well organized, great engineering, great manufacturing, they can't get the trains to run on time? It should be like Switzerland and instead it's like Italy. Doesn't compute for me.
The author makes effectively the same comment that twenty minutes late is normal for Germany (below). I don’t have any statistics, but anecdotally I’ve had worse experiences with DB than in the UK. DB does not just run late, but has a bad habit of teleporting you to random German towns, from which you must quickly route find to your original destination (as is the exact story of the post).
> It is twenty minutes late. I consider this early.
The TL;DR is: regional trains are usually on time, long-distance trains usually are not. If you need to travel between cities, plan with an hour buffer time. Basically, "show some adaptability".
The one good thing about frequent long-distance delays is that you might be lucky and catch an earlier delayed train and actually arrive a bit earlier than planned ;)
(also JFC, does the author like to whine about nothing - I'm travelling frequently with DB for about 25 years now, and while shit happens from time time, most of it is merely a slight inconvenience).
Plan with a ~40% of travel time buffer if you ought be there, and travel the day before if you must be there.
I travel from Basel to Hannover and back every two weeks on DB. Trains south are almost always late, trains north usually late. Frequently the train is already late in Hannover having come from Hamburg. The worst was when I was kicked out in Frankfurt and had to stay in a hotel. The delays were so bad there were no more trains left that could connect me to the last train out of Basel.
Things have been getting better for the past couple of months I think though.
OP mentions "six minutes" as a DB metric. But the thing is that DB doesn't care about trains being late. It's absolutely normal to have an hour delay in Germany. You can be considered lucky if it's under an hour. What will usually happen is that you spend half a day in some village waiting for your connection and travel the rest of the way standing in the doorway with your bags.
I've been on UK trains that were an hour late, others that changed platform at least three times, headed to the wrong destination etc.
Many are cancelled without a decent reason being given. I rarely take British trains now they are so expensive and unreliable. Only long distance maybe because buses are unpleasant.
My biggest gripe with DB is not that it's late, but that it quite often cancels the trains. If you decided to go by regional trains with 1-2 hops instead of direct (bc you can go much cheaper with Deutschlandticket), there's a high chance that at least one of your trains get cancelled and things will not go according the plan.
Not my experience. I regularly travel by train and a 20 minute delay is unusual. Almost every train is on time in my experience.
Recently while driving an hour journey turned into a three hour journey, and not because my car broke down. I've never experienced any delay anywhere near that significant on British trains.
That happens very infrequently on my commuter service in the UK. I'd say not more than once every couple of months, normally due to someone committing suicide in front of a train.
I can't wait for Italo and Trenitalia to enter the German market, it can only get better. It's already at rock bottom for long distance. Short distance with foreign train companies is bearable (Westbahn, transdev, RXX...)
Meanwhile, Switzerland has started forcing DB trains to stop at the border. They are late so often that they were throwing our train system out of whack. Even the Italian trains are better.
I'm french, my first trip in this country was epic. First time going to Köln ( Cologne ), the train back to the airport never arrived, with no explanation. I was literally stranded in another country without money.
Yeah, similar experience when I was in Berlin on vacation in 2023. Had a rail transfer to Amsterdam set for 16:30. Canceled without explanation or warning, and the replacement was:
Berlin -> Duisberg, with a 13-minute layover
Duisberg -> Viersen, with a 6-minute layover
Viersen -> Venlo, with a 7-minute layover
Venlo -> Eindhoven, with a 38-minute layover
Eindhoven -> Amsterdam
As you can probably guess, this is not at all what happened. Shit started to disintegrate around Viersen, we did some shuffling and waiting for later trains, and wound up in Aachen around midnight. The hotel across from the train station was closed for the night, we weren't going to stay in the nearby hostel after seeing one too many horror movies, and so we walked over a mile to a nearby hotel. Staff was lovely. We got in to a room by 01:00, showered, plugged in all our devices, and passed out around 02:00. Up at 05:00 and back to the train station to catch a ride to Rotterdam (very full train), and then on to Amsterdam. We hit our hotel about 12 hours behind schedule, changed clothes and got on with it.
Germany and France had the worst trains. Italy was insanely efficient/on-time.
On the other end Germany has a great used-cars markets. So if you feel the train service is consuming too much of your time that you can allocate better, evaluate if buying a used car is an improvement.
There is one part of the world where nothing movies without rules. And then there's another where rules are joke and everyone optimises for personal efficiency.
And here I was annoyed that the train going half the route (as in schedule, not coz of any accident) is named the same so I got on too early one by accident and had to walk a stop away.
The issue there is the comp. 1.5 euro doesn't make sense. should be O(50). If the compensation (which for DB is a fine in a way) is not high, DB has no incentives to do better.
Good news for you! 1.5 is in O(50) since they’re both constants! (It’s 1.50 because the author has the 58€-a-month flat rate ticket for all local and regional services in the entire country. If you buy a regular ticket, you get back 25% of the ticket price for delays over an hour and 50% for delays over two hours)
I do hope that sufficient humiliation will suffice for DB leadership to enact harsh measures. German precision and punctuality are still there in its people. It's not lost yet.
The millstones of the gods grind late, but they grind well. It depends where you're from -- there is always potential for dramatic change in a people as obedient as the German.
historically german railway had a track record of treating people like cattle, but one would expect that not even institutional culture changes would take that long
It is a remarkable change in attitude. Back in the day DB was one of the best train services in Europe. It had British Rail of the same era on the ropes.
Deutsche Bahn is a joke among Germans by now. It is THAT bad. It's utterly unreliable. We pretend everything is fine, that we have some functioning infrastructure, but it just pretends.
They have some policy that they need to give you a reason for a delay and they'd happily announce something like "we're late because of another train in front of us" and the irony is, of course, the train in front of us is probably late, too, and you never get to know the real reason. No, strike that. The real reason is because the entire system is completely messed up. Train time tables are fantasy by now.
> In DB’s official statistics, a train counts as “on time” if it’s less than six minutes late.1 Cancelled trains are not counted at all.2 If a train doesn’t exist, it cannot be late.
As a Dutchman, I’ve come to love German trains. The joy of a first class ICE seat to with table service as the empty middle of Germany swooshes by at 250km/h is hard to describe. Those trains are very good. Super comfortable, super fast, and did anyone say “restaurant car”? Seriously, the little bottle holes in the tray in front of you seems perfectly designed to fit a .5L glass of Erdinger and I don’t believe it’s a coincidence. Freshly tapped Erdinger! On a train! I generally travel for the destination, but in Germany, I travel for the travel.
So as a fanboy, I am saddened by how bad DB has become. Once you’re on the train, and it actually goes, and it goes all the way to the destination, it’s still fantastic. All of the above generally still holds. But the many hours I’ve spent in the dark in cold windy places like Duisburg Hbf gleis fünf are uncountable, and it really does discount from the experience. I don’t remember the German trains being this late, this often, a ~decade ago. I really hope DB will get its shit together because there’s a lot worth saving.
> I don’t remember the German trains being this late, this often, a ~decade ago.
Except: they were - over 20 years ago, I did my „Grundwehrdienst“ in the German army, travel with DB from Nuremberg to Munich and back every weekend for 8 months.
The number of times the ICE was on time I can count on one hand. 15 minutes delayed regularly, sometimes more.
After a while we planned to use the last train to arrive in Munich, and having to go a bit further with S-Bahn, we most of the time missed the last one (on purpose).
We then went to the DB counter and got free coupons to head our final destination by Taxi.
Also already happening back then: broken aircon, often in comical ways - I.e. totally non working in one wagon, with everyone sweating at some 45 degrees Celsius or more, next wagon: freezing at 16 degrees…
Tbh this is just another average trip using DB. I was on a RB from Munich to Kochel and the driver decided to stop in the middle of a field for reasons best known to them, the other time I took an ICE from Stuttgart we were marooned at Augsburg.
I visited the Dachau concentration camp several years ago on one of the hottest days of the year. Me and my GF packed water, but on that day is just wasn't enough and we ran out towards the end of the day.
We got around the camp and just before leaving we went into the cafe and asked for a drink, but they said sorry the cafe was closed.
Okay, fair enough. In that case we'll just fill our bottles with some tap water then.
"No, you can't do that".
Huh? We really need a drink... We've been on coaches and walking around all day and we've ran out of water.
"Sorry, I can't help".
We have our empty bottles here, could you please just pour us some water?
"No, sorry I can't".
I get she probably wasn't suppose to serve customers after close, but we just wanted her to fill our water bottles with tap water. I may be misremembering now but I'm like 80% sure I asked if I could fill the bottle in the toilet, but she also refused to open to toilets because they were closed.
This whole situation would have been absolutely absurd in the UK.
Germans really seem to like doing everything as per the rules regardless of how inconvenient and ridiculous it is. Even things like crossing roads where generally most Brits will wait for a green light, but if in a hurry many will look for a gap in traffic and just cross. Germans seem to rarely ever do this and you get the sense you are being judged if you do it.
I had lots of weird little experiences like this in Germany but almost passing out from dehydration at a German concentration camp had a certain level of irony to it.
To all non-Germans who might get scared by this blogpost:
While there's valid issues to complain about, this blogpost is really hyperbole. And frankly, to someone who has lived in the area, it reads purposefully disingenuous.
Just enter the places he mentions on Google Maps. Everything in NRW is so close together that to travel between cities you can often choose between international trains, regional trains or even just public transport.
The connection he needed, is serviced several times per hour by several different train lines.
Why did he stay on that specific train when he heard his stop would be skipped? The only reason I can think of is to write this blogpost. Since he's local to the area he should have known better.
Also it's worth noting that driving that same route by car, at that time, just a couple of hours before everyone starts their Christmas dinner, might've taken even longer.
I'm not trying to deny common issues with the DB but the author tried to travel through the densest urban area in the whole of Europe during the busiest 2-hour window of the whole year. AND he made a bad judgement call. To leave the transportation hub, staying on a long distance train which was already being re-routed.
Funnily enough, the fact that every "Kuhdorf" needs to be connected by train is one of the difficulties the DB faces for which there is no easy solution. And if a long-distance train needs to decide between dropping some stops which can also be reached by short-distance trains or delaying the whole train, I think that dropping those short-distance stops is absolutely the correct choice.
> Why did he stay on that specific train when he heard his stop would be skipped? The only reason I can think of is to write this blogpost. Since he's local to the area he should have known better.
Need to fly to Germany and take DB tomorrow to/from airport and dreading it despite speaking German.
Right out the gate 1st class tickets being half the price of standard tickets on same train does not fill me with confidence that this is organized in coherent fashion
Come to slovenia, the buses here stop at every stop.
I know you bought a ticket for a train from the main station in ljubljana, and when you come there (and only then and there, not before, not online), you'll be notified that your train is leaving from a track a 10 minute walk away, because the station is being renovated.
And sure, you were a responsible traveller, came early, so a 10 minute walk is no problem... there are supposedly dots on the asphalt showing where to go, but they're already wiped off, so some granny or a college student will probably point you in the right direction.
So after you walk all that way to the right train tracks, and the train should already be there, you'll be notified that there is no train. Why? Someone jumped infront of the train somewhere. When? A few hours ago. But hey... there's a bus that will take you with your train ticket.
Where is the bus? Back at the main station, 10 minutes away. Surely you were very responsible and came not just 10 minutes early but 20 minutes early, because the bus leaves at the same time the train should leave.
The only thing worse were the international trains in the early 2000s through the balkans... you'd be in Zagreb, croatia, waiting for a nighttime international train towards ljubljana, slovenia, 5 minutes to departure, and dingdong, announcement, it says it'll be 10 minutes late. Wait 10 minutes, so 5 minutes until the delayed departure... dingdong, 20 minutes late. Ok.. 10 more minutes... the display shows 30 minutes. I mean... you could risk it and go for a coffee or something, but it's not worth walking all the way to a nicer bar and back if you only have 10 minutes until the train.
...and then, when the delay says 50 minutes, you get a phonecall from a friend, who's on that same train (travelling from thessaloniki), and she tells you that the train is ~6 hours late and that they just crossed the serbian->croatian border (5-6 hours away from zagreb).
Meh. I have lived here for 7 years, and get a bit tired of these sorts of complaints about DB coming from the US. Germans have exceedingly little, if any, patience for anything going wrong. DB is always painted as this evil, completely broken system when in fact it's been a joy compared to e.g. San Francisco.
I've only encountered flexibility and slight discomfort in a few cases where something has happened. I'm not entirely sure what Germans expect DB to do. A car had an interconnecting door problem and had to remove that car from the train. Everyone had to filter in to other cars to compensate for the lack of seating. Should they instead cancel those tickets? Or make them stand? It was a full train, and no answer is the correct one for everyone involved. I ended up giving my seat to an elderly gentleman and sat between cars on the ground. Mild discomfort but literally nobody was to blame for this. I suppose I could have gotten the next train but I didn't want to wait - that's also not DB's problem to fix.
Another time, my train was delayed for several hours. Of course I was quite annoyed but found out the reason was that someone had offed themselves in front of one of the trains before it, bringing the line to a standstill while it was dealt with.
Most of the whining I've heard about DB boils down to inconvenience in situations nobody could have predicted nor helped, and this almost insatiable attitude by some Germans that any inconvenience is an offense to Germany seems always to be directed at an otherwise highly reliable and robust trnasporation system whilst having zero other frame of reference. Seriously, come to the US or, from what I've heard, the UK. Then tell me Germany's is awful with a straight face.
This article reads exactly like that. You weren't kidnapped. You were rerouted. Don't dilute words like that, it just undermines your point.
> This article reads exactly like that. You weren't kidnapped. You were rerouted.
Obviously. There's a joking undertone in those words. If they were serious, they would've called the police.
DB has gained its reputation for good reason. In this case, taking someone away into another federal state without giving them the option to get out of the train to find alternative transport. Their reasoning for not stopping seems to be purely bureaucratic.
Maybe the UK is worse; the UK is famous for its extremely high prices. The US probably is worse with the way their trains are operated. That still doesn't excuse the absolutely awful service DB provides in a country as wealthy and developed as Germany.
The worst part is that DB wasn't always this terrible. It's now playing catch-up with itself, taking care of overdue maintainance causing seruous disruptions that should've been minor annoyances years ago.
I have been advised by rail enthusiasts to make sure my train is scheduled to arrive two to three hours before my transfer, because DB will be late. A foolish friend once tried to make their transfer with only an hour and a half of scheduled margin; they missed their connection and lost their (paid-for) seat reservations.
Then there's the government side of things: we, the Dutch, want to run more and better train connections to the rest of Europe. Germany just doesn't want it to happen, though. Even when the Dutch offered to pay to have a broken bridge upgraded, the Germans turned down the offer, leaving plans for their old, outdated single track bridge in place.
DB probably works fine a lot of the time, but you shouldn't accept DB's incompetence as normal. You deserve better.
Even when the Dutch offered to pay to have a broken bridge upgraded, the Germans turned down the offer, leaving plans for their old, outdated single track bridge in place.
Or how a bridge Friesenbrücke was hit by a ship in 2015 and the replacement is still under construction (supposed to be finished in 2026 now). As a result no train could drive between Groningen and Leer.
To make the whole thing more sad, the replacement bridge has to be open 40 minutes every hour because a shipbuilder has convinced the Wasserstraßen- und Schifffahrtsamt to do so, severely constraining train traffic. No one on the other side of the border understands why they haven't built a bridge that would allow ships to pass through without opening the bridge.
This kind of nonsense is very typical of German bureaucracy (I have lived there). Nobody has ambitions and nobody wants to stick their neck out.
> Most of the whining I've heard about DB boils down to inconvenience in situations nobody could have predicted nor helped [..]
I agree with you that there’s a lot of complaining and it does get tiresome. The German train system is one of the most complex in the world and works closer to an interconnected spider web than the typical straight line systems in other countries.
However much of this has been predicted in the past. I think that’s why a lot of people are annoyed. Here are some sources if you’re interested to read more:
rerouted? it was a completly different destination, much further than he was originally. there is nothing "noone can do" about stupid burecracies like "can't stop at this station because we are not registered". First they had time to register the stop when they changed the itinery, Second if they failed that somehow, and most probably because of "there was no manual how to do it", in a sittuation like these, stupid rules like that should go out of the window and the passengers be let off as soon as possible and not 60km away. Somehow they can be flexible with the people's time but not with their stupid checklists.
The key explanation for failing to stop at the station is that the train was on the wrong track.
> "Apparently we were not registered at Troisdorf station, so we are on the wrong tracks"
Many stations have a 4 track system: a left track and right track which are adjacent to platforms, and 2 tracks in the middle, which are designed for non-stopping trains.
If the train was on the middle track, stopping would introduce risk and disruption by slowing/stopping the other trains travelling on the high-speed non-stopping line, and also endanger passengers who would have to dismount at height from the train onto an active track, cross the active track, and climb up to the platform.
Once the train was routed onto the incorrect track, correcting it was likely to be impractical (infrequent track transfer points) and stopping on the high-speed track would would be excessively disruptive and dangerous.
It was extremely easy for that train to stop in Bonn-Beuel, which is anyway far superior to Troisdorf for a train that was originally scheduled to stop at Bonn Central Station. Failing to stop there shows perfectly how little DB cares about its passengers.
Lame excuse. There has to be a better alternative than to take them an hour in the wrong direction. Stop and shunt to the right track. Stop at one of those other 15 stations they skipped. But the best would be to simply avoid these kind of unnecessary errors in the first place.
This is so typical for German bureaucracy. I used to work at a German university, which included teaching. I once had a small group of students who collectively plagiarized their coursework. Some of the group admitted doing so. I went to the examination office asking them to enforce the punishment for plagiarism (which would increasingly severe with the number of offenses).
They simply told me: this behavior ought to be punished. Which is a euphemism for but I'm not going to do it. They didn't want the hassle of potentially dealing with one out of many students filing a complaint or worst-case go to Karlsruhe (Germans know what that means). Which is exemplary of German bureaucracy, nobody wants to make decisions and carry responsibility.
I love Germany, but this is really something they need to fix going forward, because it stifles society and the economy in many ways.
The OP, judging by their site, lives in Germany. A lot of comments here are coming from Europeans (including Brits BTW). So, pray tell, why did you feel the need to get all defensive and blame the Murricans?
> Most of the whining I've heard about DB boils down to inconvenience in situations nobody could have predicted nor helped
Somehow doesn't happen in most other countries I lived. These things are easy to deal with with a bit of redundancy, which as I've heard is lacking in Germany these days.
I've had much better experience with trains in Russia despite much harsher weather conditions, much larger distances and much older cars. This problem is absolutely fixable, just let the trains go around problematic sections with redundant routes.
That's true, but at this point I would prefer slow but steady over being disembarked at random *dorf or standstill in a middle of nowhere with zero signal and no clue when we'll get back on track.
Just after Hannover but before Dusseldorf and such the train stopped: fire next to the tracks. Honestly, not DB fault this time.
Luckily DB trains have a restaurant/cafe in them. I went to get some food but the man behind the counter told me it was closed.
I asked him how since he was the seller, he stood there, there was power and internet. What's the problem?
Well, he said. And I shit you not: my shift is up. I have worked 8 hours. I am done.
And he was serious. Never mind that he was stuck on the train, just like us. Never mind that the replacement obviously wasn't there yet since they were stuck waiting on the next platform.
Nope. He works 8 hours. 8 hours done. He done. A thousand thirsty and hungry (and annoyed) on his train. He has food, drinks and time. But he just didn't give a shit.
He just stood there, for 2 hours, waiting to get off.
To Dutch people German civil servants are like NPCs following a very narrow script. It's baffling.
Kidnapper is likely not Deutsche Bahn but a regional subsidairy.
This is an effect of privatization gone wrong, with the national service, the infrastructure, the regional services (each), the network (not in infra), cargo and then some (sub)companies split for privatisation and an IPO that never happened. The highly segmented network is not digitalized in to any standard, so regional trains have to operate in policy frameworks and network cells that favor long distance trains. Its utter chaos on a daily basis.
Plenty of people here will probably focus on the Deutsche Bahn debacle but the problem is larger.
You have to understand that Germany is currently led by a mix of trauma and economy as religion rather than reason to get a sense of what is happening.
To simplify, Germany is somehow convinced that any inflation and rules deviation is an unstoppable slippery slope towards a return to the 20s and paving the way to some kind of nazi apocalypse. They therefore follow a rigid economic system, ordoliberalism, which to put it nicely, doesn't have a strong academic following.
As a result, they have implemented a mercantilist economy using internal devaluation while shielded by the euro and stubbornly refuse to recycle their surplus in the union or even in the country. You get this absurd situation where they have enshrined a balanced budget in their constitution while their median household wealth is bellow Italy, their infrastructures is crumbling, a significant portion of their savings finance foreign debts - especially bad foreign debts judging by what they lost with the Lehman bankruptcy - their industry fails to invest and the country is basically non ironically saving itself to irrelevance.
Honestly, if it wasn't for the beggar thy neighbors policies and them mostly refusing transfers despite benefiting hugely from the currency at the expense of the poorer members, it would be amongst the funniest quirk of history.
U-Bahn is a closed circle so not much happens (except accidents). The issue is with shared rails and there is too much traffic. On the road there is also a lot of delay but it's more accepted because oneself is in charge. Using the train gives up control so you've got easier someone to blame.
Didn't realize I should file a kidnapping charge every time the train I'm on randomly decides to go express and skip my stop. The MTA is apparently the largest kidnapper and human trafficker in history!
DB is a typical German moloch. Insane wages, a culture of anti performance. And being eaten alive by consultants. I know someone working there. It's a tragedy how they change once good people
I wonder if people think they will be taken seriously with so much hyperbole and drama
> Only then I notice: the driver has been speaking German only.
Oh wow a German conductor in a German train speaking German oh how awkward...
No you were not "kidnapped" your train just stopped at a different station.
> “That’s a different federal state.”
Yes and if you go to many cities in Europe and the US you can walk from one country to another. Oh wow shocking I know /s
Of course this is Deutsche Bahn at its best (in getting hand and feet mixed up) and that compensation is ridiculous. It should at least get your ticket back to the place you intended to go.
Neuwied to Troisdorf is 1h by car or train (in a good day of course)
Watch the neoliberals feed off of rigid bureaucratic incompetence to pander for privatization and create for-profit bureaucratic incompetence. All with massive subsidies that citizens will pay through taxes or cutting of public services elsewhere.
I'm not gonna pretend I know about the specifics of DB, but tales of crappy public services are plenty around the world and a lot of the critique is aimed at enabling privatization.
My anecdotal evidence is that these public entities usually suffer from lack of funding or incompetence fueled by corruption, that usually takes a few forms:
- the contracting of work to a third party with kickback (incentives to continously do sloppy work)
- inaction due to lack of corrupting opportunities (leaders try but cant set up a good fraud scheme)
- nepotism that leads to incompetence
And lack of funding can and has been weaponized to cause a shitty service to then set the pretext for privatization. Usually there are private interests behind this public policy decision.
The more menial reason for lack of funding is sometimes massive spending or subsidies for capitalists elsewhere which skews the budget.
And of course also the intense bureacracy needed due to lack of democratic control. Yes, im saying people dont actually have a say and they could have a say. IE delegate democracy.
These are just universal problems of modern capitalist economies and their bourgeois politics.
Quite possibly DB suffers from these more intensely than others.
I guess that's what happens if you live in a failed state. It's like watching an accident happen in super slow motion. I live rather remotely and 90% of bus drivers don't even speak German so when they skip a station despite you pushing the button to signal wanting to exit, you basically can't even communicate, leading to having to walk up to 2km with all your grocery bags.
It's difficult having an honest discussion if participants claim to sense barely perceptible noises where there aren't any.
One attribute of a failed state is that it can no longer provide public services. German bridges are in dire need of repair, some just crumbled last year. Trains aren't on time if they ride at all. Bordering countries already complain about this affecting their schedules as well.
Another attribute is crime. We've seen a rise in knife attacks over the last few years. German cities try to curb this via weapon-free zones with no effect because making something illegal doesn't fix the root cause. Then there's this intellectually offensive and unnecessarily expensive security theatre at local christmas markets.
Next is state legitimacy. After last year's elections which followed a government collapse, the old (collapsed!) cabinet was brought back in to support a debt-driven military budget that the new cabinet wouldn't have approved. The Election Scrutiny Committee decided against a recount of the votes for a specific party that didn't make it into the Bundestag because of a missing votes to reach a requirement while there were many reports of votes having been mishandled - even in many previous elections. Not to forget the complete lack of interest in investigating critical infrastructure being destroyed that now affects the entire industrial core of the country.
Then there's corruption: Mask deals, Cum ex, Azerbaijan as just rather recent examples involving national and international scandals.
Economy: Barely any growth, inflation beyond the official numbers, rising energy prices (spot prices partially tripled in the ~5 years).
I could go on. I know it's a far cry from "gangs rule the streets" levels of "failed state" but compared to some slightly saner Western governments and compared to pre-2020 Germany, it's quite the failure with no signs for improvements.
I listed a public transport related experience explaining why Germany is a failed state. I'm not blaming individuals. To construe this into blaming immigration for broken public transport is reaching man.
This is the place where AI needs to take over, no more excuses!
For example in country 400k€ was spend on executives (200 hundred people) Christmas dinner for publicly owned company.
While the scheduling and company management is similar issues as DB. I think we ned a new word for this kind of clusterfuck!! They are "rulesfull", rules that hinder the system and make the user scream in pain and agony.
I don't tolerate this kind of thing. If you find yourself in a similar situation and want out - call emergency services, say chest pain, out of breath, and where you are.
You may find the train has now "registered" itself at the next station.
It will reveal driver to be using intentionally tricky language. "Cannot stop"
It's not that the train can't stop, trains can obviously stop wherever and whenever they want. It's not that the doors cannot open - train doors can be opened by the driver or by passengers, trains have emergency egress requirements.
The problem is that nobody actually wanted to get off that train. They wanted to complain about it. Comparing it to a kidnapping is offensive and absurd. That's now how people act when kidnapped.
> "If you find yourself in a similar situation and want out - call emergency services, say chest pain, out of breath"
Being stuck on a train that's arbitrarily changing stops is irritating and disruptive to passengers. Faking a medical emergency is also disruptive to passengers, and also to the emergency services, who may prioritise the hoax call over genuine emergencies, which risks other peoples' health.
> "The problem is that nobody actually wanted to get off that train."
It's pretty clear they did. No-one would prefer complaining about an hour-plus unplanned detour over simply following their plans and getting off the train.
> "Comparing it to a kidnapping is offensive and absurd."
It's clear they're using the word "kidnapping" as a hyperbolic rhetorical narrative device, and aren't literally comparing it to a kidnapping.
I'm sorry for the second reply but the "hyperbolic rhetorical narrative device" - is a literal comparison to kidnapping. That is what the text says. I struggle to see how it would be the opposite, they're not comparing it to a kidnapping?
So you want to waste the time of an ambulance and emergency doctor just to be able to get off a train, which could mean that emergency services are lacking elsewhere?
Not a good idea to abuse EMS ever. But certainly given a sample size of enough people, some will invariably have mental breakdowns or panic attacks from being held against their will necessitating EMS. Judging and chastising people having real panic attacks as fakers is fucking idiotic bullshit. Pushing people to the breaking point with brinkmanship games will cause all sorts of unnecessary drama and workarounds as a matter of survival, and not all of the reactions will be positive or properly proportionate.
I'm abusing one government department due to suffering abuse from another. If that causes a different kind of staffing shortage - that's something I don't have control over, but has the same root cause as the DB incompetence.
In my case because I do have not mild but moderate autism and panic disorder, it would genuinely feel like a heart attack if that happened to me. I wouldn't be lying about my symptoms.
The problem with that is - why do I get access to this "out" by being able to call EMS to get off the train? (Provided you agree with me that I would be a valid call). Why does everyone else have to suffer?
My worldview is they don't. DB wants to take you past 15 stations? Here's a mechanism to stop them.
I'm agreeing it's an abuse of the system, but it's valid because it scales. If there was a flood of EMS calls every time DB skipped 15 stations - DB blinks first.
Maybe a better example from me would have been an emergency stop button?
Why is my time less valuable than an ambulance or doctor? You have to make a lot of assumptions and normative judgements for that to be true, which I reject.
Morally DB (through the driver) is the one lying and saying things like "cannot stop". They don't want to stop - that's different. They've already broken the social contract, I'm free to do the same.
The consequence of wasting a doctor or ambulance drivers time is depriving someone else of medical care, potentially leading to worse medical outcomes, up to death.
I’m sure you’re going to pose a hypothetical that you would be in the way to save someone’s life, but we both know that’s not true and even in that situation, you could raise that with the train company rather than faking a new, different medical emergency
I won't give you a new hypothetical, just complete the comparison.
It's true an EMS call might reduce QALY (quality adjusted life years). It's also true that taking a train full of passengers somewhere they don't want to go also reduces QALY.
Iterate this enough and DB changes their policy. Now we have a new equilibrium. The full game theory of this isn't as simple as wasted doctor time = bad.
EMS on duty vs you on a train, doesn't take a lot of assumptions to guess whos wasted time risks more lives.
And it's not don't want to stop, it's not allowed to stop. Do you think it's the driver's decision when and where to stop. Unless in case of emergency there s strict rules they have to follow.
One simple rule for everybody is: Never ever waste the time of EMS.
What if one person dies because of this call, what if other peoplre follow your example and more people die?
How about that? The driver asks for you to sacrifice your life then he will stop the train an let 100 people off the train. According to your logic a good choice.
There is a huge difference between wasted time and being dead escpecially for the relarives of the dead. Maybe you should tell your logic to someone who last someone because EMS was late.
It's probably less valuable because they're surely working, and their job is to save lives and it's time sensitive; while there are chances that you're not working and that your job is less time-critical than theirs.
However I second your idea that "if the train doesn't stop it's because they decided they didn't want it to stop"- and therefore they should be considered responsible for kidnapping their customers unless it can be proven that it was absolutely impossible to stop the train without catastrophic consequences.
The ad absurdum of this situation would be DB escalating it into a full on hijacking scenario where they run the train in a loop, forever claiming the train cannot ever stop.
In that situation - you do what is necessary to stop the train, because nobody else will, which might involve killing the driver.
The reason you don't jump straight to shooting the driver is that doesn't achieve your goals. There is a long list of things to do before needing to kill anyone, so do those first.
Ok, I think I understand your viewpoint better. You will do the minimum necessary to make the outcome you want happen, regardless of what it might be. The goal you want and the actions needed to make it come about need not be proportional.
You're being downvoted because what you propose is an abuse of the emergency services system. And that's bad. I wonder who's conversely taking action on the badness of DB abusing every customer of most of their services.
Faking a medical emergency emergency is both illegal and immoral.
In Germany in particular, you could be charged for all the expenses. A friend of mine did not fake, was in real panic, but still was at the end of the ”nothing” and had to paid the ambulance costs. Not cheap!
If you think you are being kidnapped or whatever, instead of lying and abusing EMS, you can call the police, and explain clearly what’s going on with the truth. If serious enough they will be able to act better in that case.
I find the downvotes to your comment absurd. The downvoters seem to me what Kaczynski called "oversocialized". They accept being taken against your will because the system says that's how it's supposed to work. And then rationalize their conformity with apparent consequences (medical emergency services not providing care elsewhere, you being penalized for a fake call, and so on).
It shows a concerning lack of agency and a concerning amount of conformity.
I agree that the decision made by the train here sucks, but I think it's pretty clear that the use of "kidnapped" is hyperbole. You are not "kidnapped" if the bus driver refuses to let you get down in the middle of the freeway. The situation is a little similar if the driver is taking you to somewhere you don't want to go, because that is also what a kidnapper does, but that's where the similarities end.
I'm not asking the bus driver to stop in the middle of a highway. I'm asking the bus driver not to go past 15 actual bus stops before letting me off. With the drivers rationale being - "This bus is not registered at any of those stops".
I'm disappointed that this deviancy is normalized and rationalized, and that more people aren't freaking out while being held against their will. The status quo continues because it's tolerated.
I often think about people in the USA, they might have some misdemeanor warrant for some traffic infraction they didn't know about on the other side of the country.
They get stopped for speeding near their home in Florida, the police arrest them, take them to the county jail where they are stuck without bond waiting for extradition to the county where the warrant was issued. You might wait a few weeks in a cell, then you can spend another five weeks stuck in the back of a van, pissing into a cup while they drive you 3000 miles to Seattle, stopping at 25 other jails on the way. Only for Seattle to give you a court date and kick you out of the door with nothing except the clothes on your back. Except it's 40°F and you were arrested in a t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops. The cops in Florida have your phone and wallet. You have no phone numbers. You have no money. You're 3000 miles from home. Good luck, champ!
(this is a real thing that happens regularly in the USA)
The DB service described is terrible, but the author’s language is really hard to get around.
The constant comparison to cows, for example, suggesting it’s ok and normal to mistreat non humans, instead of making the far more obvious connection that if a human who is understanding exactly what is happening goes through so much suffering with a slight change of schedule, the fear and suffering cows and other animals who are constantly being transported in far worse conditions with no idea what is happening may be going through.
The comparison to kidnapping is also really bad. I’ve taken a plane that had been diverted to the wrong, unfriendly, country and then been unable to leave a tiny terminal, with no to limited access to food, water and restroom facilities for hours, and the idea that we were being kidnapped never crossed my mind, although actual kidnapping by the state we were in was a remote but real possibility.
DB is weird. They seem to make their own rules and then run the game and “dont tell the rules to anyone”. I was on my way to catch a flight from Munich to my home (Madrid). I didn’t knew that apparently at one point the train splits into two parts and the front part goes to the airport and the other part just goes to the nearby cattle farms and comes back in 3 hours.
Google Maps - No idea Citymapper - what? English announcement - nien.
Thanks to an old lady, who told me that i needed to switch coaches to go the airport. Madre mia!!
We took that train, realised when we got to the other end of the line that we hadn't gotten where we expected, then turned back to the place where it separates. Waited for the next advertised train to airport (it's signalled on the electronic board as two separate entries; yes, it says "board whatever carriages for airport, and the rest for ...", or at least I assume it did, as it was in German of course; but again, it literally shows up as two different trains). Train arrives, stays there for a while (it's a big train, so the part in front of us didn't move so we didn't realise it had already separated), then after like 5-6 minutes it leaves. Only as it starts moving I notice that a small electronic board on the side of the carriage said "airport". The notice board then changes and obviously "both" trains disappear.
We were so lucky that we'd decided to go to the airport much earlier than we needed.
And don't get me started on the ticketing machines not accepting Visa, Mastercard, or Amex at the central station in Munchen. Or the web ticketing interface which was at least as annoying as the train to use.
I've never had trouble buying train tickets with a credit card in Germany. If I had to guess, your issue was that you were trying to use a card that didn't support chip-and-PIN or contactless payments.
Two years back the S-bahn ticket machines at the aiport only supported chip+pin, not contactless. Had to open my banking app to figure out my pin code, as I wanted to use my corporate Amex
> didn't support chip-and-PIN or contactless payments.
As opposed to... swiping the card?
Are there really cards out there that exclusively support that?
Chip and signature, which often means just the chip without further authentication.
EMV has multiple options. Many countries (including the US) chose the signature option for credit cards for convenience and use PINs only with debit cards. Before contactless payment apps became common, that was a major source of friction when using American credit cards in Europe.
I'd argue we picked it for legacy reasons - Americans are not used to the chip/pin concept, and adopted EMV very late because of a variety of legacy reasons (massive installed base of mag stripe equipment, and systems to deal with the inherent slightly higher fraud).
No the US stuck with signature for profit and cultural reasons. Europe also had a huge install of mag stripe equipment, and has the same fraud systems, what else do you think Europe was using before EMV was developed?
But Chip-and-PIN makes using credit cards marginally less convenient, and forces people to authenticate themselves to perform transactions, unlike swipes and signatures, something that many Americans don't like. The US is happy with crazy high fraud rates, and crazy high interchange rates (fees for using credit cards). Those interchange rates also fund all the fancy points and rewards programs in the US, and primarily are paid for by the poorest in society (who can't access those programs, but are still paying the interchange rates). Plus high interchange rates mean more money for banks and the card networks themselves.
The EU on the other hand capped interchange rates, so either banks had to get fraud under control, or pay for fraud out of their own pockets. I'll give you two guess which route they chose.
legacy reasons = cultural reasons
Americans are not used to the pin concept.
The legacy reasons are part of why we waited so long to adopt EMV - my belief is that the US had much higher density of credit card adoption which significantly delayed EMV/Chip adoption - to give you an idea, even in the mid 90's a place that didnt take a credit card was an exception rather than common.
I dont disagree with you about interchange rates etc - we should cap them - but as a high earner I'm also going to maximize what I can from that system while I can ;-)
> Americans are not used to the pin concept.
Nobody was. That's what happens when something new is invented, nobody is familiar with it until they're educated. Nobody in Europe were not used to the pin concept when Chip & PIN was originally created (except of course for access to ATMs, which I assume also existed in the US).
> my belief is that the US had much higher density of credit card adoption which significantly delayed EMV/Chip adoption - to give you an idea, even in the mid 90's a place that didnt take a credit card was an exception rather than common.
I don't know why you think Europe was any different, credit card adoption and acceptance in Europe matched that of the US in the 90s. Europe did take longer to hit the same levels of adoption as the US, but remember credit cards have been around since the 1950s, and were computerised in the 1970s. By the time you get to the 1990s, credit cards were pretty much ubiquitous across the entire western world. The US wasn't some futuristic bastion of banking technologies, if any thing, it was starting to fall behind. Today, US banking systems look comically outdated compared to anything you find in Europe.
Your "belief" for the reasons US banking tech lags so far behind the rest of the world are pretty easy to disprove with some fairly superficial research.
My point is we (in north america) often seem retain outdated technology because of early adopter problems - be it the T1 vs E1 conversation, how credit cards are processed, all of it. We tend to adopt V1 of a technology and have too much of an installed base to easily adopt the considerably improved V2.
And my point is that V1 technology for credit cards happened in the 1950s, V2 in the 1970s and by the time chip and pin came around, credit cards were hardly new technology anywhere in the western world.
Claiming that the US had too large of an install base for chip and pin to work would be like claiming the US had too large of a propeller air craft install base to adopt jet engines (also developed in Europe), but somehow the US managed that transition just fine. Americas failure to adopt chip and pin has nothing to do with legacy, and everything to do with US culture has a different relationship which money and how it’s spent.
In Europe people generally expect to be challenged when spending money using credit cards, and that’s always been true. So chip and PIN was always an easy to sell to consumers. In the US, people simply don’t expect to be challenged, and even get up upset when challenged, when using a credit card. So selling chip and PIN to consumers is much harder, especially when the US so happy to accept exploitative banking practices, and crazy high fraud rates.
> As opposed to... swiping the card?
People still do that? Are you posting to us from 20 years ago?
Very few Norwegian issued cards, if any, have a magnetic strip. It's too easily cloned.
Both my DNB and Nordea cards, as well as my personal and corporate Norwegian AMEX cards all have magnetic strip, and they’ve all been issued somewhat recently.
Yeah, but have they ever been used? Will they ever?
Not in Norway. But they very well might be abroad.
I’ve never received a debit or credit card in Norway without a magstrip. One of the points of having one is to use it in places abroad where chip or contactless isn’t implemented. It’s become thinner but the stipe is still there.
If you work near high field magnets, mag strips don’t last long. Chips are fine though so that’s another bonus.
Prepaid gift cards (please note: those are not store issued) dont have chips and it is sometimes a problem to use them. But I doubt someone would buy a plane ticket with them.
A gift card isn't a credit card, though... ?
You are likely thinking of branded gift cards that are specific to one store (or one grouping of stores). An Apple or Target gift card, for example.
There are also gift cards that are credit cards. Or, really, debit cards. See “open-loop cards” at https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/more-than-you-want-to...
I am not sure if it counts as a debit or credit card, because from technology point of view the division is blurry.
They are perhaps prepaid debit cards. But you can change and set a pin on them just like on the old credit cards. Because that's what they are - old technology.
They dont have a chip, so you have to swipe them.
Some employers give those gift cards instead of cash and I think those cards use the older technology in order to be cheaper (the chip costs few cents to manufacture). After you clear your card balance you basically throw the card away (very ecological), but if they wanted they can also add more money to the same card again. They usually dont do it since people lose the cards, so they issue new ones. So you get a lot of plastic. Think of this as some pocket money every 3-6 months.
It says VISA on the card.
The companies could give cash, but due to some obscure law and psychological reasons they give cards. The card is still better than the paper sodexo gift cards they would give out years ago that were a pain to use since few shops accepted them. But still it is a pain, since you often end up with a small balance and you need to pay part with this gift card (to clean it up to zero) and part with cash.
Perhaps this is to facilitate the transition towards a cashless society and to provide the bundle of social benefits that companies advertise to stay competitive in the market and attract employees. Just like company shares or RSUs.
> A gift card isn't a credit card, though... ?
I supposed it's a matter of semantics, is a prepaid credit card that is gifted not a "gift card"?
If this story was more than a few years ago it's plausible that the card didn't have a chip. I still have a VISA debit card without a chip, and it was issued only two years ago.
Also chip-and-pin is mostly not enabled with American credit cards or card payment terminals
Yes, magnetic strips are easy to skim or erase.
A couple years ago, I was at a station waiting for a (delayed) ICE train. I couldn't buy a ticket at the machine or with the app, since the train had already departed (if it had been on schedule). The ticket machine also wouldn't take VISA / MasterCard, only the more common Girocard (most people still call it EC)
Later, in the train, when I asked the conductor to buy a ticket with my Girocard, he said "That's not a commonly used payment method" and asked for VISA, or cash (not having any to provide change, obviously).
For other readers' benefit: Girocard is not related to Girobank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girobank or using said Girobank's Girocard to pay bills or collect dole.
American Express I get. No one uses that in Europe. Visa and Mastercard debit cards are what everyone uses and they work in all German ticket machines. You weren't trying to use a credit card where you?
What language do you expect the Germans to use?
I don't think the person expected the Germans to use a different language, only was saying that they weren't entirely sure what it said.
For a train going to an airport, English.
This is the norm around the world, especially with complicated situations like a train splitting in two.
Is it though?
Why should anywhere cater to my failure to learn their language and systems? It’s nice if they do but I don’t expect it.
Are you seriously asking why Airport infrastructure should support English or is it rhetorical?
If you are not a backwater that doesn't get any travelers, you should cater to tourists who, as a rule, do not speak your language. Even those tourists who do speak a few phrases will absolutely be unable to understand something as complex as a the train spilling up into two before going to the Airport.
> Why should anywhere cater to my failure to learn their language and systems? It’s nice if they do but I don’t expect it.
I certainly don't see this attitude from Germans in Spain.
> you should cater to tourists who, as a rule, do not speak your language.
Why should tourists be supported? Tourists are trashing my country nearly as badly as our largest industry (dairy). Without infrastructure they shouldn’t be encouraged.
I have no interest in having more.
We also have no trains, but I’d like that to change.
If you want international travelers, English is the language to allow that.
As someone travelling for the first time in a while - Wise has changed travel for the better, and dramatically.
Managed 2 weeks in the UK without touching cash and the transactions between currency were inexpensive and quick.
Massive fan.
How were you using it? I have only ever used Wise for bank transfers. There are travel credit cards without any foreign transaction fees and that’s what I always use.
> How were you using it?
I’ve used it like a debit card/credit card. On phone and as a physical card for tap-and-go on transport. I’ve used it for booking accommodation bookings online too.
Fees are low/non existent and conversion rates good.
Lots of people use Amex in Europe. It's very popular as a business card.
I doubt that it is popular with the actual users, only with the company that they work for. When I had a company issued AMEX card the damn thing was practically useless. In fact even in the US there were plenty of places that wouldn't accept it.
AMEX cards are being used by both large and small businesses. It's accepted by hotels, restaurants, airlines, suppliers, utilities, etc... Small shops are of little importance.
I use an Amex as my primary and preferred personal card, and legitimately can't remember any place in the US where it wasn't accepted.
In Europe it is pretty hit or miss though, unfortunately.
germans don't use credit cards. finding an automated ticket machine thst handles credit cards would be extremely rare.
DB machines have been accepting all sorts of cards for a long time (Visa, AMEX, Discover). Local vending machines might vary though.
Starting in 2026, support of digital payments is mandatory in Germany for all types of businesses. DB has been card-friendly for a long time.
Yeah and already in 2025 it's quite common to be able to pay with a credit card in bars and restaurants too, which was almost unheard of a few years back. Of course these machines break all the time, and suddenly the business can only take cash. This seems to be a very specific problem that only happens in Germany.
> And don't get me started on the ticketing machines not accepting Visa, Mastercard, or Amex at the central station in Munchen
Wow. You travel to a different part of the world without doing basic research. Hope you did not try stuffing USD on machines.
I would never expect a Western European country to not accept Visa and Mastercard. I say this as an Eastern European. But I do remember that in Germany (and Austria) it's not that accepted to pay by card.
This just happened to me a couple days ago trying to get from Luxembourg to Heidelberg, got on what I thought was the right train at a transfer but was apparently the wrong half, announcement only in German, rushing to find a spot for luggage in packed train and getting scolded by various Germans and we missed it. 3 hours of travel to end up back in Luxembourg and we got a very expensive rental car to get to our next couple destinations, not proudest travel moment. Next train we took was easiest possible scenario, Nuremberg to Munich, one train no transfers, assigned carriage, app helpfully shows you where to stand, arrived with time to spare. Except the platform changed as train was arriving, announcement again only in German, asked an attendant if train on other platform was our train, “No that train is on platform 9” rush up and down platform 9, carriages and train number don’t match ask another attendant if the original train on the other platform is ours, says you have no time, jump on that train, it is right but we are on opposite side of train and walk through the entire train with luggage again with various Germans giving scolding looks. Peaceful way to travel.
Ir you download the Deutsche Bahn App, chances are about 50% that it will tell you if your platform changes. Better than nothing.
Splitting trains is a quite common thing in Germany (though more long distance) and communicated in the official app.
If third party apps don't show that information that's on their part. Usually it's also said after departure inside the train by the conductor, though maybe just on long distance trains.
They still get it wrong quite often. Worst case is when the train arrives in reverse cart order, and the carts are labeled wrong. Bonus points if your reserved seat is in a cart that's missing.
Reserved seat in a missing cart is boring - 95% of the time you'll find an empty seat. Much more fun is a reserved bicycle rack in a cart that's missing. The number of bicycle racks is limited, and they're quite often sold out.
Yes, although quite often they forget not everyone speaks German.
I once had a bit of Schadenfrunde while travelling in Netherlands, having the conductor telling us to switch trains in Dutch, and all my German fellow travellers wondering what it was all about.
I wonder what's the level of mutual ineligibility between DE<>NL (probably DE is easier to NL) but it's funny how Germans sometimes seem to play dumb and not understand a thing in NL
As a German speaker, spoken Dutch REALLY trips me up because of small pronunciation differences in almost every word. Written Dutch is way closer.
The Dutch seem to understand German better, but my Dutch friends credit that more to education and exposure.
I don't know about the Dutch but apparently the Flemish don't understand German without having learned it at school.
I speak both some German and some Dutch (as nth languages, I can understand them fine but speaking is hit and miss) and sometimes I don't notice which is which and answer in the wrong language, to me they're almost the same language with a different accent. I translate the German into some Frenglish mess for my Flemish friends to help them understand and it works great.
Your Dutch friends have it right: In German high schools you don't get Dutch, Polish or Czech as a rule but you do get French and English. But in Dutch schools you do get German.
they have access to german tv and watch it.
I'm German, I don't speak Dutch. But I was able to follow a Dutch tour guide in Den Haag just fine when she was explaining things in Dutch. She kindly repeated everything in English for my benefit (I was the only foreigner) even though I told her I understood her just fine in Dutch.
You have to "adjust your ears" a bit but I think if you know German and English then you can understand Dutch just fine if it's not slang.
It also depends on the particular dialect a German speaks. Dutch is effectively old German before all the various alterations and "reforms" to the German language that were instituted to create fragmentation between the germanic people of Europe, i.e., English, Dutch, Germans, Austrians, Swiss, Belgians throughout the ~16th-20th century by aristocrats driving wedges between peasants between kingdoms and dukedoms in order to define their own nations/ethnicities through language and culture so their royal families could rule over and would find it difficult to associate with each other. It is one of the things that also contributed to the fragmentation of Germany before unification, language barriers that even created unique cultures between sides of a valley that were in different dukedoms.
A similar thing has caused the tension between the germanic and Romance languages that followed the Roman border line N to S that separates Europe.
dutch is a bit harder to understand. like some german dialects that not every german understands either, like swiss german, luxemburgian or friesian (also spoken in the northern parts of the netherlands), or plattdeutsch.
i grew up in austria and in the north of germany so i got an early appreciation for understanding dialects. yet learning dutch took me a few months of staying in the netherlands. on the other hand when i visited luxemburg people were shocked that i could understand them when they spoke amongst each other
Frisian is not a dialect, and is not usually spoken outside of Frisia (the Dutch province). In German Ostfriesland they do speak a German dialect with Frisian roots.
i was simplifying. the difference between dialect and language is fluid. plattdeutsch (low german) is also considered a language, as is luxembourgish. frisian btw is also spoken in nordfriesland (in schleswig-holstein) and there are a few speakers of saterfriesish which is the last remaining dialect of east frisian.
Ironically, technically speaking, there are seemingly more similarities between British English, i.e., Anglican German and current High German due to various perversions and "reforms" of the German language over the last many decades, in order to drive the Germanic people away from each other.
If the EU were a serious and legitimate institution, there would be an effort to implement reforms that nudge English, Dutch, and present day German all towards better mutual intelligibility, NOT diversion from each other through perversion and "simplification", or what seems to be a pollution and destruction of the current German and Dutch language through what at least Germans have a term for, "Verdenglichung", i.e., the portmanteau of German (De..) and English, prefixed with "ver...", meaning the transformation or application of.
Do you seriously believe that the German spelling reforms were done to "drive the Germanic people away from each other"? If so that's quite the insane conspiracy theory you got yourself there. And lmao at "Anglican German".
I can barely follow German and I've been taught it in high school for a couple of years. I would not expect a German person to understand Dutch.
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I speak fluently 6 languages, and a few dialects of them, how many do you speak?
Does it matter to the OP's point how well-spoken you are? Biting down some non-constructive snark here.
Yes, English is a good lowest common language, and it is mostly that announcements are in English. But learning enough of the native language that you are at least puzzled enough to ask another passenger seems like a not very high and reasonable bar for travel-speak to pick up.
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Well it's generally a good idea to ask a fellow traveller when you hear an announcement you don't understand. Especially if it doesn't use words you've commonly heard before. And maybe tell them instead of having Schadenfreude?
Which is what happened next.
The point was that even in international trains inside Germany, announcements related to trains problems are only done in German.
I speak it fluently, including some variations, however most travellers do not.
I also remember there used to be ticket machines in NRW only in German, about 20 years ago.
How dare they speak their own language in their own country on a regional train
I think you still should be able to expect a bit of accommodation on trains that cross country borders or go to airports.
The EU makes travel between EU countries as easy as travel between US states. You can just get on a train from Germany to Spain without any prior planning.
The regional trains usually have announcements in the language of the neighboring country when they get close to the border
It's also unusual given how much English you'll hear in Germany nowadays (at least in major, tourist-attracting cities) in just about any other context.
Too much English. I noticed this indoctrination way back when they released Ice Age over there for kids. The title wasn't even translated into German.
"Das Boot"
English has been in a hegemonic position over German for the past sixty years, not vice versa.
The majority of popular German language films tend to have English language titles when aimed at the English market, and nearly always when aimed at children: "Goodbye Lenin", "Run Lola Run" etc. I was pretty amazed at "Ice Age", because it would be easy and concise to translate.
They can. But they should also not be assholes with everybody else. And no not just local trains, I got information in English exactly zero times when there were huge delays on international trains. And it happened 2 times from 3 when I tried to cross Germany by train. And Germans (and Austrians btw) are terrible with this, even compared to others. The German site at my multinational company at the time was the only site on Earth which had to introduce an internal regulation about mandatory English, because they just switched to German all the time even when there were people on the call from different countries. I’m living now in Wien, and they are terrible with this even in friendly environments.
YMMV. I worked in three different German startups in Berlin and I almost never heard anybody speaking German in the company, even though more than half of the people were from Germany. Maybe it's different in bigger companies, or outside Berlin?
I would rather say older companies, and Berlin is definitely a different beast. That’s the only place where I had similarly good experience in Germany/Austria, and heard consistently good hearsay regarding this. It’s still way worse averagely than Nordic countries, Netherlands, or even some Eastern European countries. And here, I specifically mean when they can speak English, they just choose not to.
Yeah. I know, I'm from Finland originally. People in Berlin are quite often just rude, but it's just something you have to deal with when living in this city.
I've been living in Berlin for 15 years now, and every time I visit Finland I'm shocked when for example the cashier in the supermarket smiles to me and is friendly. Are they mocking me, is this a joke? It takes a few days to adapt.
Naturally living in Berlin means you learn to hate and love your city at the same time. You hate so many things in here, and when you travel, you're happy to come back because the place you were in of course misses all the unique aspects of Berlin.
You are comparing different environments. Inside a startup or a multinational it will obviously be quite common.
But you can't expect low level bureaucrats from a transportation company to start speaking english when it is not required to perform the job.
I was answering to this part:
> The German site at my multinational company at the time was the only site on Earth which had to introduce an internal regulation about mandatory English, because they just switched to German all the time even when there were people on the call from different countries.
Oh yeah, it was for the parent
It was an international connection train, ICE, between Amsterdam and Cologne....
So Dutch and German? Actually, those ICE are staffed by Dutch NS personnel until Köln where they swap with their German DB colleagues. Usually that means Dutch and German messages from Amsterdam to Köln (sometimes English too), and German afterwards.
> Yes, although quite often they forget not everyone speaks German.
Do you complain when announcements in your home country are given in exclusively non-German languages?
This is a bad faith argument. English is (like it or not) the international language. If you want tourists to understand what's happening, do announcements in your local language and in English.
Making announcements in German in the US makes little sense.
How convenient for monoglot English speakers!
Or.. english-speaking people forget not everyone speaks english. If you go to another country you have to learn a bit about how things are done there, ask for help, etc.., most people consider this a normal part of traveling.
Great advice which I assume you follow to the letter.
idk man, I get it's nice if things are clear for you, but it's misplaced IMO to have this level of entitlement over people speaking their mother tongue in their own country
I hope you get to learn Portuguese well enough that my fellow country folks never force themselves to speak any other language, in case you happen to visit us, if not, oh well.
I am fluent in several European languages and dialects, human languages is second nature alongside learning programming languages.
As for entitlement, the expectations on international trains crossing borders aren't the same as local trains, which I left out from the comment, it was an ICE after crew change.
It seems to me long-distance transportation services should make the most important announcements in the second language most likely to be understood by international travelers. In Europe, that usually means English.
Are we really living in a world where you need to have the official app - any app! - to ride a train?
Side note: as of now, I have 14 various "travel" apps installed on my phone. Buses, trains, local buses, etc. In every EU country and city there's something else being used.
I suppose it isn’t required technically, you can still purchase tickets at the stations. But oh boy, the “official” app for the Shinkansen in Japan might be the worst piece of garbage I have ever used.
Proper push notifications for train line delays are quite nice, and unfortunately half of us own phones that decided to shoot PWAs in the back of the head (there's still no vibrations for iOS PWA notifications?), so here we are.
If you can read a modicum of German wasn't this sort of thing on the timetables in a standard way pretty much forever?
It is still stupid.
Had something similar from Nuremberg to Suhl and accidentally ending up in Bad Kissingen for a bit.
But I don't think DB is unique in this weirdness.
Back in the UK, I think something similar happens on routes going past Gatwick; I've only heard English announcements on that train despite the airport being one of the ones serving London.
Plus, one time I was on a work trip to Liverpool (via London), and somewhere around Nottingham or Crewe a fellow passenger asked me when we'd be getting to "Liverpool Street": https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Liverpool+Street+Station,+Lo...
There's also the way my first leg home from university was Aberystwyth to Birmingham New Street, but the train regularly terminated early (Shrewsbury? Or was it Wolverhampton?) to game the rules.
What language would you pick first, if you're going to add non English to London trains?
The problem with UK announcements is that they are piped to multiple places in the station, which is all hard surfaces and produces lots of reverberation and echo. This often makes them hard to understand even for natives. Also there are some stations with really terrible old speakers , such as horn speakers.
I'd ask the airports themselves for the nationalities of the tourists departing through them, and specify whichever secondary language was most relevant for trains likely to be used by tourists accessing those airports accordingly.
If I had to guess, French, German, or Spanish, in that order. But it may well be that e.g. Heathrow has a lot more Arabic, Stansted gets a lot more German, and Gatwick gets a lot more French, Luton gets the Spanish tourists, and City is mostly business trips or something.
You're correct about the acoustics, but foam panels are a thing that can be installed (or not) independently of this.
Arabic?
This is pretty common in other countries. I almost got screwed multiple times by SNCF (french trains) where they don't announce which half of the train goes where on the speakers. Even in the official app, it's buried deep: for some reason, it's under "Travel Details" and not "Train Details".
It was partially on me because there are assigned seats and carriages, but I was late and had to jump in the train. But still no vocal announcement of "cars x to y go to z, the others go to w".
Hah! We had the same situation taking a train from Marseille to Paris. Looked at the seats, entered the proper carriage, sit down, and at the next stop someone came and told us we took their seats. I was like 'this is 74B' (or whatever), 'the ticket is for that seat', until someone managed to tell us that we got in the wrong part of the train, and we need to move forward.
Now, the train itself was two trains connected together, and at the next stop we literally had to run like 100 meters or so to make it on time to enter the front part, because there was engine near the end/stop.
Not sure would the 2nd half of the train depart, but it was super stressful experience.
> Travel Details
Where the train is going being a ’detail’ is completely hilarious.
When was this? Took the train (S1) last week and every single screen at the stations and in the train explains this in detail and there are probably 20 announcements both in German and English telling everybody which coach goes to the airport and which to Freising.
It's not that complicated.
Those announcements in English have been in place for 20 years. Neither train to Munich airport (S1, S8) goes to cattle farms. Tourists can get confused if they're unaware in which part of the train they sit.
(Also, the S8 is usually quicker anyway...unless you somehow ended up at Laim, Moosach or Feldmoching.)
Completely agree. They even recruited a native BBC level English speaker as the voice actor for the announcements.
Splitting trains is not uncommon. Generally for Amtrak there will be two conductors one for each part of the train. On the platform both conductors will tell you which part of the train goes where. They often check tickets more frequently than usual just to make sure you are on the right part of the train.
Train splitting is quite acceptable when the customer service is alright.
I'm pretty sure there should be english announcements. Maybe they were broken. You also get this information via the displays on the wagons and on the screens inside. There is a bus/train from Freising to the airport every 10 min that takes 15min, so you are not trapped there for hours. Google maps also has all the public transport connections available for navigation. That it does not support certain things like train splits or instant train changes is not DBs problem.
The preferred way to get to the airport is via S8 (not S1). Idk how one could push/guide people more to take this one. S8 does not split and it definitely has announcements in english. They also prioritize keeping S8 running above anything else.
I'd also recommend buying tickets via app, not via ticket machines.
It’s likely some utilitarian reason, i.e. sacrifice the riders on the train for the good of all the other schedules.
This is the one benefit of living in an overly-litigious country that has news media which can pick up on a story like this. They’d rather have the masses suffer to avoid the legal fees and bad press, so instead of sacrificing a train, they’d make everyone’s lives worse overall.
I’m not arguing for utilitarianism, though. Ir allows dictators to thrive.
I think you're reading a bit too much into this
In general the S-Bahn in Munich is a massive s*t show I can report more info about this if needed. However, in the S1 going to the airport (the train you took) it is quite well described that the train splits and it's both on German and in English.
The Munich S-Bahn is usually a delight compared to the Paris suburbian RER.
To be fair (and I am not fan of DB and many other rail companies), DB is not the only rail system that splits trains, and it is rather clearly indicated, but you have to 1) expect something like trains that split at specific stops and 2) know what you are looking for on a ticket or billboard, partially because indicating that, especially far in advance is a bit of a UI/design challenge.
Also, I believe you were trying to write "nein". But why would you expect an English announcement in Germany on a German train? Google Maps? What does that have to do with that; it's an unofficial and only like an 80% solution.
Yeah, the S1 from Munich to the airport splits regularly, and you have to be in the rear half of the train. The first time (as a not-perfect-German-speaker) I'd have missed it but for the kindness of another traveller.
Now, at least, the announcements are also in English, which frankly is very positive - that DB are improving anything noticeable. (And to be clear, Bavaria/Germany are absolutely not given to accommodating non-German speakers, like, ever.)
DB is infinitely better than Trenitalia. I once took the train equivalent of what airlines call a code-share from Venice to Munich and Trenitalia just straight-up forgot half the train somewhere. It was a total gong show.
But then you already entered the wrong train. The destination of a train is usually clearly written on the train, unless it's a very old one where it's not visible on every coach
I agree that it's not that intuitive that a line can have multiple end stops (like Stuttgart - Munich ends in both Stuttgart and Munich, depending on the direction you are entering?
I guess you took the S1 S-Bahn. Yes, it always splits in Neufahrn. Part of the train goes to the airport, the other section to Freising (a cute University city, by the way)
That is indicated on the platform screens before getting on the train. It tells you which part of the train goes where so you know which wagon to take.
I found it also not very intuitive first time I took it. But hey, when travelling there’s always local peculiarities to take care of ;)
Strong disagree. For most parts travelling is a non-event these days.
A train that splits, on the way to the airport where there will be a lot of non-german speaking people, and for some reason only shows it on the platform is insane.
Having a train that splits on that route is already bad enough, but you HAVE to emphasize it on the train.
I know that I need to pay attention to this, because I've grown up with DB pulling all sorts of fucked up shit, but we should not accept that this is reasonable.
You get repeated hints like 20 times outside and inside the train. Announcements (also in english, recorded, by an english native speaker, repeatedly), the train displays explain it and when you get to the station where the train splits, every display in that train shows you whether you're in the right carriage and you get an extra announcement exclusive to the carriages that go somewhere else that you should change now if you want to go to the airport.
This really is the original poster's problem.
From the top of my head I know three cities which have peculiarities when it comes to public transportation to the Airport. In two cases, it's obvious they do this to push the private train to foreigners, at 5x the ticket rate.
This sort of used to be the case with Heathrow Express in London. There was a lot of signage that suggested to the unwary that Heathrow Express was the "right" way to get into London. Now, especially with the Elizabeth Line, while you can save a few minutes with Heathrow Express, that's really not a cost-effective alternative for a lot of people. (And Piccadilly may be a better option depending on your luggage and where you are staying.)
Can you share which cities these two are?
Stockholm (SL Bus/Train via Märsta 47kr vs. Arlanda Express 340 SEK)
Vienna (S-Bahn S7 4.40 EUR vs. City Airport Train 24.90 EUR)
While with the Stockholm one, the public transport option is cheap but a little bit more complicated (there are convenient medium priced options too), the Vienna one is really just branding and a non-obvious exit to the train station.
Ah, Stockholm. Been there as a student, went to Uppsala the day I was flying from Arlanda, and the only trains to the airport were the insanely expensive Arlanda Expresses. Had to take the normal train to Märsta, then walk the five kilometers to the airport. Fun times.
London for sure. All three of the Stanstead, Gatwick and Heathrow Express services are an absolute rip off compared with the alternatives that don’t take much longer.
Many people use them out of ignorance, expense accounts or they have the disposable income not to care.
There are announcements inside the train. Nowadays also in English.
Hamburg has a similar arrangement, however they make a very clear and unmistakable audio announcement in both English and German.
im.surprised this not to be the case in Munich??
That fucking Sbahn is the bane of the existence of many tourists. It happens so much that there‘s now a bus line from those cow fields to an airport. You will be late.
I had similar experience only in Poland. Where this part of the train goes was posted on the glass window on the doors. Somehow I missed it and went to a city I didn't intend to.
Same we missed the right stop on our way back to France. We just managed to get in a train going the other way but dB personal almost ticketed us a penalty...
Your ticket was without assigned seat? Because if there was assigned seat, surely the seat would be in the correct carriage?
There's only local trains to Munich airport. Those don't have seat numbers.
> surely the seat would be in the correct carriage?
You’d think so but you’d be surprised how un-joined-up things can be.
I am German and the three times I took an ICE from Cologne to Berlin and then back, EACH TIME I boarded at a wrong wagon. The entire system, their app, the signages at the tracks... it is all complete and utter dogshit.
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It's really not too much to expect a train going to the airport to make important announcements in English.
Where I live the bus drivers that drive the bus from the capital to the airport barely speak the local language, let alone English.
Where I live the airport bus plays a prerecorded message. It's pretty obnoxious.
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It's still an expectation I have, even as a native German speaker. I work for a well-known German company (our storefronts are sometimes called "the German embassy"), and our day-to-day business language at work is ... English. We hire from all over and want people to be able to get around effectively. This is infrastructure. Make it work.
Шановні пасажири, цей потяг який слідує від станції Івано-Франківськ Головний через Житомир до станції Київ-Дарниця буде розділено дві частини, вагони з першого по п'ятнадцятий прослідують до станції Київ-Головний, а вагони з шістнадцятого по двадцять перший поїдуть у пекло, муахаха. Дякую за вашу увагу.
To be fair, I'm sure the USSR insisted on Russian language announcements in the Ukraine. Look how that turned out... Language war in the east.
If I went to the Ukraine, I would either pick up some Ukrainian or take some who did.
English is much more diffuse around the globe and can't be attributed to a single empire. There is no risk in dubbing in English and many benefits, from encouraging tourists and workers.
Also people are forgetting that railway announcements both at the station and inside the carriage are usually a complete incomprehensible trash tier. I honestly can't decipher half of the words in the Ukrainian or Russian announcements. Imagine needing to do that in the foreign language.
In my opinion it is way past time that EU has officially adopted English as a standard language for all communications. Especially with the crazies preparing for invasion right at the border.
Nu sunt englez, așa cã n-o sã-ți rãspund în englezã.
Ceart gu leòr. Chan eil Romainis agam. :)
Honestly, it should be an obligation. DB should make it one for themselves. DB carries millions of people a year that do not speak the language. Important information like route changes should be available to them. English just happens to be the most likely language to be understood at least enough to ask staff/other passengers as to what is going on.
I'm a native English speaker. It is not their obligation to provide everything in English. It is arrogant for someone like me to presume it should be.
If preventing people that struggle with the local language from getting confused or missing stuff is the goal then they're likely better off doing it in Turkish or Arab.
Not being under any obligation doesn't mean it is not a sensible a courteous way to do. You like it or not, english has become a defacto common international language.
While I speak 5 languages and try to learn some basic words of the local languages of any country I visit out of courtesy (how to say hello, bye, thank you, ask where are the toilets, etc), I wouldn't expect any traveller to know enough to understand this kind of specificities in any country they visit.
>common international language
Not nearly as much as people on the internet seem to think. In large parts of Europe, speaking english will get you absolutely nowhere.
Near international airports and capitals usually yes you can usually get help in english accross europe, at least enough to get basic help and instructions.
I mean, whenever the Deutsche Bahn is involved, in large parts of Germany speaking German will also get you absolutely nowhere...
Of course they’re under no obligation to do so. In fact, they’re under no obligation to let in foreign tourists at all, or to not make their lives arbitrarily hard in various ways. But not being obligated to not be a dick doesn’t mean you should in fact be one.
They aren't though. That's the point. English speakers are determined to force their language on everyone else. I've seen it abroad on many occasions. It is often painful to watch. Sometimes they even make fun of the person for speaking poor English.
You're also assuming the tourists themselves are all fluent in English, which is another issue. In some parts of Germany, many of their tourists are likely to speak French or Polish as a primary language, not to mention Mandarin etc from further afield.
And French, as Germany is adjacent to France.
There are train connections to Scandinavia, so let's add Swedish, Danish and Finnish.
Also Dutch and Polish to accommodate the other adjacent countries.
This is the sort of immature "well, actually" response that you can't afford anymore once you actually take responsibility for things. I wish more people trained themselves to have a "what if I had to do it" habit before having an opinion.
Imagine you're in charge of the train network. You have to pay for the announcements on trains. You can't reasonanbly pay 10 announcements because that's silly and expensive. If you add any language other than German, which are you going to add?
It's not hard to be pragmatic.
Pragmatic is multiple languages in locations where it's highly relevant.
For example, the UK Gatwick Express train makes announcements in English, French, German and Spanish.
The Thameslink service (which also happens to travel on the same tracks and also happens to stop at Gatwick Airport) makes announcements in English only.
I wouldn't expect local or regional trains in Europe to make announcements other than in that country's native language – except perhaps where it's a service designed for airport connections or similar international travel.
>If you add any language other than German, which are you going to add?
Given the demographics? Turkish or arab
> If you add any language other than German, which are you going to add?
Bavarian ? /s
Look, as an EU country citizen, English is more or less the defacto language of the EU, regardless of what politicians declare. Everyone in the EU speaks english in some form as even traveling to a next door country like you state requires communication.
There are cases where in Belgium you will see signs in 4 languages (Dutch, French, Flemish and English)
Also if you ever travel in Japan, they have signs, especially on trains, all in, Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English all in one. (usually rotating signage). So the precedent is there to do it on mass transit but :shrug:.
Point is, when your customer base is logically needing more language options, it should be considered.
Don't you think same could be said about German and French? I still remember the time when passports from my (now EU) country used French instead of English, and when signs for tourists were in German.
An English announcement wouldn't hurt but we don't have them on our trains here either.
> Don't you think same could be said about German and French?
That they’re the de facto languages of the EU? No, this is just factually not true. The vast majority of EU citizens speak no German at all.
>Everyone in the EU speaks english
That's not even slightly true, where in god's name did you get this idea?
Cheap strawman. Travelling Swedes, Danes, Finns and Poles will be fine with English, Dutch with either/both English or German.
Mostly fair, I really appreciate the grasp that almost all Scandinavians have on English.
Don't forget French though! I wouldn't make the assumption that travelling French people would have enough grasp of English or German to understand the announcements.
My comment is mostly a poke at the two assumptions: that non-English speaking countries should universally support English-speaking travellers, and that English is the predominant (and only other) language which should be supported.
I’m baffled that any other language would be considered - the only language that comes close to English in number of speakers is Mandarin, and Mandarin has nearly half a billion fewer speakers than English.
We should be happy there is a language that has emerged for people to communicate globally without borders, and support it’s role as the worlds second language rather than work to re-fracture how people communicate
For local/regional trains, I wouldn't expect any language other than German.
I would say that for long distance trains only English and the local language should be enough.
For international trains, we should have all languages of all traversed countries and English. So for example a train from Paris to Frankfurt should have announcements in French, German and English (and it is actually the case for that train, I already rode it).
But for example, the Berlin - Warsaw train has only English announcements besides the local language depending on the country the train is in (so no Polish when it is in Germany, and no German when it is in Poland), I consider this to be wrong. It should have announcements in Polish, German and English for the whole route.
Agree with your last point. That's a weird choice. At least the stops either side of the border are guaranteed to have people who natively speak the other language.
I seem to recall lines in Belgium that do announcements is 4 languages: french, Flemish, German, and English.
I take trains like those for work, not to France but to Amsterdam, and I don’t speak German, French or Dutch.. if we want a train system that allows Europeans to use it there needs to be announcements and signs in the language 50% of EU citizens speak
Because even in countries less developed(by western standards), there are more English announcements, so visiting tourists can also use the public transport. This isn't lack of speaking the language as well, it is more about not wanting to speak another language because "In Deutschland muss man Deutsch sprechen." It is reaching French level of racism at this point. Funny for a country that wants to attract so many international expats.
This assume that a country should please english-speaking tourists but not everyone speaks that language. Here our perception is biased because we're in a english-speaking-forum. Tourism isn't a central concern for many people/countries and not supporting it is a valid choice.
> French level of racism
Racism really ??? As a Parisian I'll struggle to make tourists feel unpleasant but I assure you there's absolutely nothing to do with race. French from outside the capital get the same treatment, they just happen to understand our insults.
English is the international language. It is mandatory to learn it as the second language in most parts of the world, even places you never heard of. It is especially a no-brainer for a person who grew up in Germany(which is one of the most developed countries in the world, and definitely has the means to educate its own people). Again, this is a problem of choice. And since Germany is a country that relies on importing educated people to keep its economy afloat, choices like these are self-sabotaging.
This isn't an english-speaking-forum, its an international one. That is the reason English is being spoken.
I get why the French is still angry about this issue and refuses to speak English, since it isn't French that is considered the international language, but English.
I wouldn't expect a French to understand this though.
Germany isn't a country that relies on importing educated people to keep it's economy afloat.
It for the most part imports comparatively uneducated people and partially to suppress the wages of it's native population.
>I wouldn't expect a French to understand this though.
A weird reaction given the way you described them earlier.
France can be afforded such idiosyncrasies because the French are generally rational thinking people, not clockwork slaves to a bureaucratic machine like Germans are made to be by their culture.
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Lingua Franca predates colonialism. Latin predates Lingua Franca, although one can argue Latin was forced down due to the Roman Empire's extensive reach and size. Ancient Greek also served a similar role. One doesn't need to learn each others language as long as they all know one common language. One could argue for Esperanto, or a purely symbolic language like traffic icons, but you need to learn that one too. So it makes more sense to use a fit for purpose language for travel that has no ambiguities. You can even create a graph that can be queried. There's all sorts of ways to solve this with as little pain as possible as long as you care to. And wanting people to just learn the local language to traverse a transport network is chauvinism.
The term "lingua franca" comes out of the Holy Roman Empire and Norman expansion, and later French imperialism, which gave it high status.
But I have long wondered whether many European languages will end up in the same state as Welsh or Basque or Sorbian. Icelandic is already much of the way there. Will Dutch and even German go the same way?
It is chauvinistic and colonial-minded to expect everyone to speak your language in their country. Not to mention arrogant.
If you visited Japan as a tourist, I believe you learned enough to say hello, ask someone where your hotel is, and so on. I don’t for a second believe you learned enough to understand arbitrary train network change announcements. Unless you spend years studying the language before visiting any country as a tourist, which would be absurd.
No, I didn't learn vast amounts of Japanese, but I did learn phrases and the kanji for various destinations. It sped things up. I did not stand around and speak English to people slowly and expect them all to understand.
Because English has become the lingua franca for Europe. I suspect that now UK has left EU it will be much easier to accept this.
Personally I worry about the Maltese/Irish supremacy that will arise as a result.
More seriously, I suspect that
> Since the exit of the United Kingdom from the EU in 2020, the government of France has encouraged greater use of French as a working language
will hasten the move to English in official proceedings. Almost 44% of the population understand it already, and it’s unclear why the teens of the EU who already speak near-perfect English would want to learn French other than for recreation.
I still lean on UK English though, regarding way of writing and words I tend to use.
Wasn't that meant to be Esperanto? /s
Sure, but it never caught on. Not sure the point of your “/s” sign, since what you’re claiming is in fact true, and if it’s a joke it’s not a particularly funny one.
Because it's going to the airport and so might be full of travellers and tourists?
To be fair, it’s announced in the platform screens in a language abstract way, by indicating the destination and the platform segments (A,B vs C,D) to take to reach the destination.
The key is that on hundred of trains around the world this is done to indicate the convenience - these doors will be closer, etc.
Trains splitting in half are rare enough that THAT is what needs to be described.
The US equivalent is the empire builder which splits in Spokane (I believe) but it’s much more old fashioned and you have a tag above your seat showing your destination- if you somehow end up on the wrong car the conductor will wake you up and move you to the right one.
A similar one that can catch you (and has caught me) are express elevators or the two-story ones which mean you only can stop at even or odd floors depending on where you got on.
Unpopular opinion: you should learn the absolute basics of the language used in the country you are travelling to.
Seriously? That unpopular? Lmfao.
Not only unpopular, but pretty daft too. If you think the basics of a language should include "this train will separate into two at station X, please sit in the front Y carriages to get to Z" then enjoy doing a cross-Europe trip.
Not that I agree with the post you are replying to - I think having announcements in a few of the best-known languages is very reasonable to deal with tourists - but the fair expression/announcement would be something simpler like "Airport carts 1, 2 and 3. so-and-so-place carts 4 through 8". A tourist could make do with "aiport", "cart" and basic numbers in their vocabulary. If I recall, I was able to get to the correct train(s) in Italy with no more Italian than "treno", the name of the city, and "linea gialla" or something.
You can't just learn a few words and expect to follow a train announcement, particularly when it's not obvious from context (anything other than announcing the next station).
I have done cross-Europe trips before and I needed way less than that.
Well in this case this is what you would've needed. Either you ignored that when you replied, or you didn't care.
I planned my trips (read: spent a couple of minutes on them). I went through all countries from Budapest to London. I was only 16 years old at one time. I did fine. Adults, in the age of smartphones are having issues? It actually is wild to me.
Being 16 was a benefit - you didn’t know anything so you checked basically everything.
This kind of thing captures older adults who know everything and have never heard of a trainset split.
I made a similar mistake years ago in NY - I assumed that the impressive subway system could get me to the airport, but you transfer onto a bus that gives you a VERY detailed tour of some neighborhoods.
I did not check out everything, I had to be somewhere.
I would have mentioned running away at age 13 with no destination in mind but I never left the country.
Basics for a casual traveller are 'hello, 'please', 'thank you', 'two beers', 'can I have the bill', and 'I'll take the schnitzel please'.
Perfectly understanding rapidly-spoken German explaining something esoteric about the splitting of a train is magnitudes, years of study beyond casual traveller level.
Going from the Netherlands to Budapest I started my journey with Deutsche Bahn. My train also did the split in half and go different directions trick. Was I supposed to learn Dutch, German, and Hungarian in order to buy my train tickets?
I said "travelling TO", and most of the time you do not need to know anything apart from the name of the city... and then I presume you have a smartphone as well. Come on.
What did you do once you arrived in Budapest? Did you do your research or did you get scammed by the taxi mafia as well?
If you travel to Budapest from Berlin you buy the ticket from DB and the crew changes as follows: German, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian. None of the first three crews would speak Hungarian. Luckily all will be able to communicate in English.
(regular announcements oftentimes won't be in Hungarian until you are in Hungary, that depends on the train origin, but I would only expect local+English)
> What did you do once you arrived in Budapest?
You will be perfectly fine staying in Budapest with just English; you can learn hello, please, and thank you to be polite. This goes for most bigger European cities, outside of France I guess.
Even France you can survive with English, just try some French and ask “how do you say” a number of times.
French people are quite friendly if you don’t exhibit all the worst symptoms of stereotypical tourists.
I took French for 5 years and I don't think I learned enough to understand a tannoy announcement that the train was being split into two parts. Tannoy announcements aren't the easiest to understand even for native speakers.
It’s been a staple of comedy routines that train announcers can’t be understood even by native speakers.
Knowing the basics is knowing how to salute, thanks, ask basic directions. You can't ask everyone to know every single language they visit and be able to understand stuff mentionned in a foreign language in a possibly noisy environment and from an only half decent speaker system.
> Unpopular opinion: you should learn the absolute basics of the language used in the country you are travelling to.
As a German I disagree with this. Europe is a single market, we want to have people getting around crossing borders at all times to get stuff done. It pays to make things easier.
If you're going for a three-weeks leisure trip, sure, learn how to say hi and thank-you.
In India train announcements in stations are made in the regional language, English and Hindi.
I most most places to English. Honestly it should be default to have the local language and English.
Belgium gave me one of the more annoying train experiences when I was a younger man. I was in Leuven for a conference, and had decided to bring my then girlfriend (now wife) for a trip, after which we would take the Eurostar to London. On the ticket, it said Brussels-Midi, but after happily boarding the train, we only saw the following related options on the train map for stops:
1. Brussel-Noord
2. Brussel-Centraal
3. Brussel-Zuid
So here we were, not speaking the language, rushing for a train that we were at risk of being late for, and not having a clear idea of the actual stop to get off of.
And the people on the train? Totally unhelpful. "Eurostar"? Shrug. "Train to London?" Blank looks.
Anyway we winged it and made it, but still a damn stupid set up if you want to be welcoming to tourists (and their money).
Was it Centraal? That would have been my guess.
Nope, the biggest station is actually Midi/Zuid.
Hah nope! Even as a Belgian I find the naming of the Brussels train stations maddening. Brussels-Midi is the south station, so Brussel-Zuid. Midi allegedly means south in French, but I've never actually heard it being used over "sud", also south.
In conversation, midi also means noon (e.g. used as "meet me at noon"), which for my brain correlates more with central than south, given the context of a day.
Not a linguist, so what do I know, maybe someone else can chime in.
This is indeed the bizarre convo I was having with myself, having (allegedly) taken some French classes, I was racking my brain on which was the correct answer. We always used "sud", and Midi didn't seem to be south, eliminating Zuid (Since Zuid/Sud seemed similar), and yes Midi seems "mid-day", so maybe "Central" since it's the center of the day, but then there's "Centraal", so why would there be Centraal and "Brussels Middle"?!
So we winged it and got off at Zuid (since Noord felt wrong and Centraal definitely seemed wrong) and luckily it was the right one.
We did have a wonderful evening (perhaps too much so) the night before at a nice craft beer bar in Leuven which had 100 beers on tap, and it had just bought over by a nice young couple as well. So perhaps neither of us were in the right state that morning to navigate a confusing train map! Good memories.
Southern France is also called le Midi!
BTW, Ukrainian shares the same logic, but it also calls the north "midnight" (північ). Meanwhile, Armenian calls the east and west "sun exit" and "sun entrance" (արևելք, արևմուտք) respectively.
In Europe (and anywhere else north of the Tropic of Cancer), the sun is always approximately due south at noon. That’s the reason for the connection, and “midi” indeed means both south (in some contexts) and noon in French.
Makes a lot of sense, thanks for the insight!
Brussels in particular perhaps is sort of non-intuitive because, even (or perhaps especially) if you know a little bit of French, the station names don't obviously correlate to their relative locations. There is a logic but it's not obvious to someone not used to it--and, honestly, I'd have to go online to figure it out again.
I was in Belgium going to Antwerp and sometimes the French name -- Anvers -- was used. At least in e.g. Valais in CH cities that have dual names are shown with both, e.g. Sierre/Siders.
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The term "kidnapped" is kinda over the top, but I can understand the author. I've travelled with Polish trains a lot when studying, and there were a few situations like this. Especially frustrating, if the train stops because of "some issue" while you can literally see the platform 200m away. No, you can't get out and walk the track (which will be guaranteed to be empty, because well, the train is broken) and take a bus or something, no, you have to sit there for ~2h until a replacement engine gets there.
We had similar occurrences on Amtrak but there was a trick - the conductor could let people out of a stopped train to “smoke” on their own reconnaissance and risk.
And if you went to smoke with your bag and disappeared, well, they never saw it.
I was in this sort of circumstance on a SEPTA train (using the same rails and stations as Amtrak fwiw) and they let us walk to the next station with no pretext. It was just the common sense thing to do and the SEPTA personnel running that train felt empowered to exercise common sense.
The more bureaucratic an organization becomes, the more inhuman it becomes. An unwillingness to bend rules when the circumstance rationally calls for it is extremely dangerous. One might think that Germans in particular would be highly tuned to this problem, but no. They still put following orders first. Typical.
I would expect a litigious country like the US makes common sense very expensive if somebody happens to get hurt. Train tracks are quite dangerous.
You would think so (and so would I), but my experience with Amtrak is that the conductors and engineers exercise a lot of individual discretion.
(I think it "helps" that Amtrak covers a very large area, most of which only sees a train once or twice a day at the most. So the practical reality is that there are a lot of stops where you pretty much exit the train right off onto the rails.)
Amtrak also exists in a strange portion of law where it can be actually quite hard to sue them.
> The term "kidnapped" is kinda over the top
If you got in a taxi to take you 35km away and he drove you 60km away to a random other town instead, would you consider "kidnapped" to be over the top?
Does it only count as "kidnap" if you are not eventually released? Or is it just that it's not kidnap when a corporation does it?
From the Cambridge dictionary:
kidnap: to take a person away illegally by force, usually in order to demand money in exchange for releasing them.
The "usually" refers to the money, but the part that is "always" is the existence of an intent.
There was no intent here. This was a mistake, not on purpose. Nobody would say, unless to make a joke, "i was kidnapped by an elevator" Because the elevator works automatically, it has no intent to take the person by force and hold them hostage.
Can't believe i had to type this down.
There plainly was intent.
The train operator deliberately drove the train, with passengers on it, to places they knew the passengers didn't want to go, and did not allow them a chance to get out sooner.
If a taxi driver were to do the same thing we would say he kidnapped his passengers.
The fact that trains are operated by big corporations does not absolve them of responsibility. If anything they should be held to a higher standard, not a lower one.
(I can't believe I had to type this down.)
I was imagining something more Kafkaesque. There are some transit systems that have transfer only stations. If DB dropped you off at such a station, and then cancelled the only trains leaving that station (due to weather, holidays), I'm sure you could end up spending Christmas there, and you'd be entitled to €3.75 compensation.
Almost had this somewhere in Northern Germany in early december.
The train stopped at "Kuhdorf", as the author says, at 10:30pm. The driver told us he couldn't continue because "the track was wet" (in Northern Germany in december, how unlucky!) and to wait for "replacement circulation" (usually buses or trains).
The driver then left the train. In fact he had reached his hometown and exceeded his work quota because of the delays.
Like the fabled German roadworker and the (more frequently observed) Krampus, the DB replacement bus is a fairy tale creature.
The passengers got out and forced the driver back into the train and he drove us to the terminus then took a taxi back to said Kuhdorf.
On the nightbus home a class of French highschool girls elected me the best-looking man in the bus (they thought I didn't understand) so I went back home with a smile.
I don't think it's safe if the track is electrified
Electric trains don't get power via the tracks like that, they use power lines. Metros are a different matter, but that's not what the article is about.
Many UK long distance trains still take power from a third rail for some of all of their journey.
Overhead electrification is a long term goal for the non-Metro UK rail network but it is a long way off.
The other method is an electric train with a diesel generator car.
Interesting, TIL. Trains don't do that where I'm from for obvious safety reasons, but I understand infrastructure everywhere comes with different baggage.
Anywhere with third rail (which is predominantly London and the South-East of England) tends to be fenced off along the sides of the tracks or other things in place to strongly discourage you from walking onto the tracks.
Given that a considerable amount of the UK rail routes date from the late 1800s there are a lot of places where tracks cross roads and therefore mix with other forms of transport (including pedestrians). It's surprising just how little there is in between a pedestrian and a live rail in these situations, here's an example 5 miles or so away from central London: https://maps.app.goo.gl/nPcJM1YxBexaDDKY6
One of those live third rails start less than 5 yards away from where pedestrians regularly walk, with just some angled planks of wood to stop you walking towards them.
That is terrifying, thank you for sharing.
We just take it for granted here in the UK. The number of people who die accidentally on the tracks each year is very low, and much lower than those who choose to commit suicide that way.
There's a strong "stay away from train tracks" education whilst growing up.
Those who grew up in the 70s/80s had the benefit of some utterly horrific public information safety films such as https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-the-finishing-line... (well, that one was never used in the end, but it sets the tone...)
More horror here: https://artofthemovies.co.uk/blogs/original-movie-posters/sc...
Metros may have electrified third rail, but the ones next to DB train tracks are all with a top covered third rail. Usualy power deliviery is via catenaries.
Why exactly you cannot get out and walk ? Just curious whether that's impossible or just not allowed ?
Way back in 90's, when I arrived on an Indian Railway station about 10 minutes before the train's scheduled time, I was pleasantly surprised to find the train at the platform.
Only when I checked the passenger reservation list, I found this was train from yesterday, late by 23:50 hours.
(for the curious... No, I could not get my reserved birth and had to travel on unreserved ticket, but at least I reached destination on my planned time.)
DB last year: I took train last year from Frankfurt airport to Bonn only to see Bonn sail past the window and train to go to Cologne.
I asked locals what is going on, turns out that all trains were late, and this train departed from the platform already marked for Bonn! “You should watch what train number you board on DB, not trust sign on platform!” locals helpfully advised me.
> “You should watch what train number you board on DB, not trust sign on platform!”
Not to blame the victim but that’s always a good idea regardless of how punctual your local trains and busses are.
I was in a similar situation in Egypt once. At the specified time a train arrives, I board it. Only to see that my seat is occupied. We started to discuss the situation and the other passenger showed me his ticket - it was one of the previous delayed trains. We figured it just in time for me to jump out of the wrong train before it left the station :)
proof or it didnt happen. this is a meme joke. even osho made a joke exactly like this.
This has certainly happened to someone if not the OP.
I did wait in a single spot for almost 10h, my 5-6h journey became a 15h one, in Serbia in the late 2000s. IIRC, a large part of the railway was down that day, couple hundred km, electricity issue or something. Some people walked off the train, which was in between cities but near the road. I was a student, didn't have an alternative, so I didn't. They didn't organize a replacement bus.
This kind of thing was (maybe not to that extent) common, like once every year or two. They rarely reported on it in media if the cause wasn't notable.
The title should be changed. It should be: "Kidnapped by National Express".
Because the train mentioned in the article is not operated by Deutsche Bahn, but by National Express, see https://bahn.expert/details/RE28521/j/20251224-a0049123-9494...
National Express is actually a subsidiary of the British train operator Mobico Group: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Express_Germany
No. The problem with DB are not the trains or the personnel on the trains. The problem is that the tracks are in miserable condition and that they are operated in a terrible way. The fault in this case is 100% with DB. Nobody else is to blame.
Shifting the blame away from DB, who is responsible for creating the terrible track conditions and is responsible for the operations, to the train operator, who zero ability to influence what DB is doing is just totally unfair.
DB is at fault here, they lead the train onto the wrong tracks and they also caused the previous delays. Regional trains in Germany have many different kinds of operators. Taking any of them is always miserable in exactly the same way, which is in almost every case caused by DB, because they can not operate the train network.
What is worse is that these operators also get into conflict with the DB trains. E.g. they prioritize a DB train, which is already late, over a regional train, causing delays for regional trains.
Would you happen to know if they would be using their own branded/livery trains, or would they be using DB trains, or maybe just DB cars pulled by a British locomotive?
It just raises so many questions in my mind that of all entities, a British train operator would be operating a train that is bounded within the German rail system.
My first thought is that it's some kind of counter-union effort through fake "competition" by bringing in foreign, private operators into the network.
They are running their own trains and their own liveries. What happens a lot of the time in German regional services is that private operators run routes for DB, because they are required to offer them. There is some actual competition forming in German long-distance trains (Flixtrain), but the important bottleneck in Germain train travel is the rail network, which is owned and (at least supposedly) maintained by the recently formed DB InfraGo
Competition on the railways is mandated through EU law.
Most regional services are tendered to the (in theory) best operator. The details on how, both which governing body organises the tender and whether the trains are branded by the region or the operator, varies across Europe. In Germany, these contracts are operated by a mix of DB, foreign state-owned operators and private operators. DB sells tickets for all region-organised trains regardless of who is the current operator.
Most countries have decided to have no or limited tenders on long-distance trains. In Germany, government support is prohibited for long-distance.
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.
I appreciate you sharing the positive experience as a neighbor, but unfortunately, the Deutsche Bahn is as bad as presented here. (I spend several years commuting to college via DB). Once my train stopped in a small village with the announcement "the train ends here". Thankfully, kind people picked me up.
I used to complain about the French SNCF, then I discovered DB and stopped complaining. I've been a Bahncard 1. Klasse holder for a few years.
Last time I took the train in Germany I was 30h late and had to spend a sunday between Cologne and Karlsruhe (not that I was really surprised).
The punctuality is a joke, ICEs are unpractical, train management comically incompetent (remember when the ICEs cars would never come in the announced order and there was luggage room for maybe 15% of passengers?).
The cars are very dirty, especially in 1st class where eating a full meal at your seat is encouraged but the cars are cleaned once every two days.
However, the train attendants are usually very arranging for every aspect of the trip on board.
Cheap tickets are cool, but have been there for so long (the regional ones) Germans take them for granted.
As a French I feel that the SNCF is pretty good. We like to complain about it but I have had a few minor problems (3 hours pause from locomotive breakdown, or 2 hours stop to allow cleaning after a suicide) but nothing too bad. There are on times and rarely canceled.
The major issues are with pricing and lack of investment outside of TGV but it's not too bad.
I live in Berlin but grew up in the US. Yep, Germany has much more train coverage than where I'm from originally. And that's great. But to understand the complaints you really have to spend some years living with the uncertainty created by the DB.
It depends which route you take, but for a wide swath of the German population, your chance of an absolutely wretched experience seems to be around 1 in 4. That means that people are constantly weighing the desire for affordable, sustainable, comfortable transport that may go horribly wrong, against the (similarly unpredictable) endemic traffic jams and exhaustion of driving, and often choosing wrong. If you have no car, you're weighing more reliable but slow and uncomfortable and traffic-jam-prone buses, or simply avoiding the travel. Constantly making decisions on penalty of deeply unpleasant consequences without any way to actually reasonably judge your decision is a special form of miserable.
At least in the US, most of the time, there is no decision to make: you drive.
> Maybe I've just been lucky so far,
A lot of the issues are local, some are time constrained. There is a CCC talk on youtube "BahnMining - Pünktlichkeit ist eine Zier (David Kriesel)", that concludes that any train traveling through certain trainstations will most likely end up significantly delayed. Then you have certain train models failing during summer. Or my recent favourite planned construction work with no apparent plan for a reliable replacement service beyond "here is a train, it might leave at some point".
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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.
Agree. Cologne/NRW is the worst. Anything going to or through Neumünster also used to be an almost-guaranteed nightmare, but I've heard it's better now.
That said, last time I was there DB was on strike and I lost hours.
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.
> The train starts moving. The driver announces there are “issues around Bonn.” He does not specify what kind. No one asks. We have learned not to ask.
This is one of those issues I keep mulling about; it seems train operators (and airliners for that matter) tend to avoid being technically specific about operation problems, and just say "problems" and - if they are kind - where the problem is. And I cannot decide whether this is the wrong or right approach: how much information is too much? The argument is that travellers don't care why the train cannot move or why it is delayed, they just want to know when the next train is.
The problem - however - is that train operators come off looking like idiots, when they really aren't. As an example, the S-trains around Copenhagen have recently switched to a CBTC signal system, which has increased punctuality to 97% (below 3 minutes, cancelled trains counted). At cold temperatures, railway points (or switches, if you will) might become inoperable, as their mechanism freeze (of course, there are systems to prevent this, but can occur anyway). This happened this November on the S-train lines, but the announcement was "signal failure"; which meant the train operator (DSB) (and the railway owner (Banedanmark)) kind of looked a bit stupid, since the whole point of CBTC was to eliminate signal failures entirely (in fact, if you're being pedantic, since CBTC has _no_ signals, there technically cannot be any signal failures), and had promised as much.
But - then again - travellers really just wanted to know what the next train was, but I still think train operators are doing themselves a disservice by being oblique about the actual problem. Particularly when a problem lasts for several days, "technical problems" just makes people think their engineers are incompetent, when in reality they have no idea about the severity of the problem (because it is not communicated).
I may of course be biased here, since I have a high interest in how trains operate, but friends of mine - whose interest is far lessen compared to mine - are also frustrated by these opaque messages; and I think the reason is a strong sense of lack of control - since (assuming one made it to the station on time) up until this point, the passenger have done everything right, and yet the system failed, and now they are not privy as to why.
Airlines are vague about this (at least in Europe) because different types of problems mean different obligations to compensate passengers.
After the incident they will determine what's the least expensive lie they can plausibly give (perhaps the weather will change fast enough that you can blame the weather, perhaps you can't lie about an equipment failure when everyone in the airport sees you swap out the airplane). If they tell the passengers the truth at the time they risk being held to that later.
Thankfully the EU at least has regulations requiring compensation. On my last business trip to Europe I got 650 euros for an overnight delay. The last time I got delayed in the US I got a hearty "fuck off" from the gate agent.
Heh, on the other hand the one and only time I arrived hours earlier was in the US :) I was flying AMS to SFO via Portland, we cleared immigration unusually fast, and when I got to my gate (connecting flight was in like 4 hours) the lady there asked if I wanted to move to an earlier one, boarding in ~20 mins. I said sure, and I even got the checked-in luggage at SFO (she did say that there was a chance it'd get sent later).
Airlines are often happy to do this as the earlier flight is likely not full, and allowing you on it costs them nothing while it opens a seat on the later flight which they can then sell to a standby passenger.
On paper yes, but every time my flight was delayed in EU the airlines (KLM, Lufthansa, RyanAir) always had a cop out, weather, airport issues, etc. and I didn't get compensated. Even though other planes managed to fly in the same conditions.
If they refuse you can escalate or hire a company that will negotiate for some percentage of profit. In most cases I had this problem they gave me a refund, but sometimes I had to argue a bit.
I used to work at one such company. The process can take a long time but it is mostly hands-off for the traveller and success rates are high once the case has been taken.
Edit: and also, these claim-assistance companies work on a winning fee.
I’ve tried those as well, they only take easy cases you can do yourself as well
Same, I was luckily just above the 1500 km threshold and got 400€, 3 hotel nights reimbursed (3 stars but 4 stars might have been ok), restaurants bills paid (beer included), a free replacement ticket , made new friends and visited museums. Lovely!
My boss and colleagues weren't delighted though...
Yet the very fact that airlines routinely do put people up in hotels when flights get cancelled is an example of the exorbitant privilege of air travel (another being tax-free kerosene).
Nobody expects this to happen with train travel. Perhaps they should.
I travel mostly by high speed train over very long distances and I fail to see it making more economical sense than air travel, even with taxed kerosene.
The costs of a high speed line are on the scale of 30 millions euros per km, with maintenance of 300,000 €/km/year. A TGV with 740 seats costs around 25 millions euros and has maintenance too. Most of the operating costs are per trip, a TGV typically does 2 to 3 500km trips per day.
A mid-range plane like the A320neo costs around 100 millions euros for 190 passengers and typical operating costs of 5 millions for a 2 flights per day average. A lot of these costs are hourly costs (fuel and maintenance) and airport costs. Fuel is 10%.
In France, trains and especially high-speed trains are heavily subsidised with a lot of tickets paid under various incentivized and subsidized schemes. SNCF (trains and railways) receives between 10 and 20 billions euros per year from various government entities (depending on what you include), i.e. 20% to 35% of revenue. There are also indirect subsidies through corporate tax schemes like commuting exemptions. Finally, long haul buses have long been forbidden and considered a threat to the train monopoly, and after a short golden age of EU-led monopoly breaking, they have been again heavily regulated so they can hardly compete. Similarly, short-haul flights have been almost banned.
The train is more practical but when I hear it is on par with air travel economically and more environment friendly I fail to make sense of the numbers.
My allusion was to environmental sustainability, not to the human construct of economic efficiency.
However counter-intuitive it may be, air travel is indeed far more energy-intensive, and therefore destructive, than train travel. Mainly due to the exponential increase of wind resistance with speed. On a planet of 9 billion people, airplanes will simply not be a sustainably form of transport by any metric.
Deutsche Bahn paid for my hotel and meal the last time my train was delayed, though I did have to make the booking myself and claim reimbursement.
They are required to by law I believe.
The EU law applies, but companies get out of it by:
- encouraging you to take multiple tickets (so you can't claim compensation on the whole trip and becaise of missed transfers).
- saying it's not their doing (DB specialty).
- in some cases accepting an "alternate schedule" (typically by changing your ticket at the company's suggestion) will void any claims.
In some cases you have better chances hiring a taxi for 2000km and forcing the company to pay.
On the opposite, on (very expensive) French TGVs you get compensation starting at 30 minutes delay (connections counted) whatever the reason and SNCF will do their utmost to bring you to destination or ensure you get accomodation.
> The argument is that travellers don't care why the train cannot move or why it is delayed
Deutsche Bahn does not think this is true and neither do I. If this was ever the thinking, they've performed or read studies and changed their mind
You can very clearly hear the drilled setup "<delay info> grund dafür ist <error category>" rigidly being regurgitated every. single. time. a delay is announced. The middle words are (per my understanding) a formal way to say "because of" and it's not something you will hear in daily life, so I presume it's the output of a committee and corporate requires them to say this, no matter if they know anything more than "the signal is red". Whether they know or not, the detail is always at a level that sounds like malicious compliance. I'd rather they say "we don't know" or say nothing at all. And if they do know, I'd hope they make up a new sentence like "someone was spotted on the crossing up ahead after the barriers closed. Someone is checking the cameras to make sure it won't come to a collision" but we instead get the robotic "we have come to a stop on the grounds of person on track". It mimics their training samples and what colleagues got into the habit of saying so I guess they think it's good like this, but is not actually helpful
Idk what creates this useless information culture, but they clearly know that passengers do want this information
At the station itself, on the other hand, you might as well play "delay bingo". Is it an earlier training running late that is now slowing down other trains? Is it yet another Stellwerksstörung? Or maybe it's urgent track repairs? It might also be an Oberleitungsschaden!
To be honest, I don't care about excuses. Yes, problems happen, but this is systemic. Does it help me if I know the train tracks are broken yet again? It does not. The reasons (excuses) they bring up ring hollow. I don't feel that drivers or station staff would appear stupid if they don't tell. They are victims, too.
In the UK they do tend to say what the actual problem is, even if it's someone "under a train". But it has resulted in mockery for things like "leaves on the line" from people who apparently know how to run trains safely. You can't win really.
By always talking only about non specified "problems" and getting people not to expect any further information it is easier to hide when it's a suicide.
I cannot speak for other countries; but in Denmark, they are always crystal clear when the train has hit someone (»personpåkørsel« in Danish); and even when they suspect they might have hit someone; so when I say "technical problems", I mean technical problems. Besides, I am not sure I see the point of hiding when they've hit someone?
There's a lot of evidence for suicide being socially contagious, particularly through communications to the general public which will inevitably find their way to people who in that moment are particularly vulnerable. Newspapers publishing suicides causes an untick in subsequent suicides. Newspapers publicizing murder-suicides even causes an increase in murder-suicides. Publicized information about suicides by train increase the rate of suicides by trains.
It is therefore a beat practice to generally avoid mention suicide, because mentioning suicide means prompting people to think about suicide and in some cases that means prompting people to consider suicide. This is known as the Werther effect, you can look that up if you'd like to know more.
I'm in Norway, I was once at the railway station and someone collapsed on the platform and needed medical attention. Conductors of both trains currently at the platform attended the person, so train traffic was delayed.
The official reason for the delay, according to the Ruter app, the info screens and announcements over the PA system, was "signalfeil" ("signal error"). So at least in Norway, we clearly have a culture of describing all sorts of problems, including completely non-technical problems like someone having a medical emergency, as a problem with the train signals.
At least the last few times I had those they were announced as "accident with injuries along the tracks" or "People on the track".
It's usually reported (briefly) in the local news.
Sometimes the train conductor will admit it or you can tell because the reason they give is different each time.
I find it stupid, it is what it is, just say it. This double speak serves no purpose.
I am always a bit annoyed when the root of the problem is not explained. This is the case most of the time (DB of course). I would really like to have a bit more information. Even if there is nothing you can do, it helps to understand how big or small the problem is. Then you can make a decision based on it. Like getting out in the next station or something.
Part of the reason is that train drivers often dont even know themselves. They might simply get the signal to hold the train or that it needs to be diverted.
I think they look stupider by not saying anything. They look stupid by all of these constant delays, cancellations, and the occasional utterly surreal self-inflicted problem like in the article. That's what makes them look stupid.
Just explain what's wrong. Arm passengers with the best info you can give them. And figure out a way to let people disembark close to where they need to be.
DB has become a complete joke. I've had to travel to and through Germany several times these past couple of years, and almost always there's a problem.
I once paid 80 euro for a taxi from Essen to Dusseldorf because they cancelled the train that would connect to the last ICE to Amsterdam. When I got to Dusseldorf on time, the ICE arrived at a different platform than announced. I only noticed that because some people were suddenly leaving the platform. I warned a few people who still hadn't noticed it. I bet a lot of people still managed to miss that train after all the trouble making it to Dusseldorf.
My sense is that this has happened over the last 20-30 years as overall competence has just dropped in many of these key positions. COVID was a good example of this - lots of humming and hawing about why decisions were being made, and garbled messaging about the reasons. Basically they get angry and defensive about blaming the "peanut gallery" or "armchair experts" while not being specific, because they themselves don't know why or how something is being done, and therefore being unable to defend their own positions from solid ground.
I've always considered the S-trains to be pretty good -- at least in my experience. At least on par with the NYC MTA that I'm used to.
Unfortunately nowadays traveling with DB has become a game of Russian roulette. If you get lucky the train arrives at the destination ahead of time and if you're unlucky most probably a delay of 4+ hours and missing your connecting train.
The main reason for this is lack of competition for DB in Germany. I used to date a guy who works at infra department in DB and based on what he told me, I couldn't believe how inefficient and massively complicated DB is. They have internal departments which acts as separate entities to mimic competition and each department has to place bids among each other to get contracts (more bureaucracy) but then they have an IT department and no matter how cheap or good outside IT providers are they must get the service from internal IT department (so much for competition).
At this point DB needs a complete overhaul and let go of so much dead weight to make it working again and unfortunately German politicians are just throwing more money at every problem hoping they would magically solve themselves rather than fixing the actual structural problems.
Before the DB became a public limited company, their services worked remarkably well. I know from first hand experience because I was already a customer then.
The privatisation and the crazy idea that it could somehow not being run on a deficit is what ruined it. Of course the competition thing is artificial, and the internal structures are kaput, but I doubt that more competition would fix it.
Surprisingly, 90% of the train personnel is still pretty good, acting friendly and professionally.
The main issue is over-utilisation and under-investment of the rail network. Like in many other EU countries. There is no evidence that a state monopoly would perform any better given today’s state of infrastructure and increased traveler numbers.
The under-investment stems from the neoliberal idea that it should be run at a profit and that competition will make everything super efficient.
The under-investment is predominantly in infrastructure, which is owned by states or regions and not under any competition.
And this under-investment stems from the neoliberal idea that transport should run at a profit rather than be treated as a service that has a cost.
> The main reason for this is lack of competition for DB in Germany
Cannot be - there is no competition in Switzerland, but things run pretty smoothly -> in the case of Germany I'd rather say: "lack of oversight, controls, 'konsequent zu sein'" -> in the case of Germany's DB I think that nobody at all levels gives a *hit about its problems.
Things work well in Switzerland because the Swiss spend a lot more money on rail. That's unfortunately the secret.
> If you get lucky the train arrives at the destination ahead of time
I can't recall that this happened to me. The "lucky" scenario is when the connecting train is even more late so you can still catch it.
> Unfortunately nowadays traveling with DB has become a game of Russian roulette.
Ironically, Russian trains (even over distances of thousands of kilometres) are usually almost perfectly on time.
Germany's DB seems to fill the same niche as other companies there, like Telekom: semi-private companies living off old state-built infrastructure that they're now incapable of (or unwilling to?) maintain.
Being on time over thousands of kilometers is a lot easier than being on time over dozens of kilometers. Especially if you share the same tracks with cargo trains, regional trains, and high speed trains and stop at every other village because that was the condition the nimbys required for allowing you to build the track in the first place.
Local trains in Moscow and Saint Petersburg ("elektrichka" with all local stops) may get delayed by a few minutes sometimes, true. But e.g. several trains being delayed by ten minutes because of an ice rain is newsworthy. At least that was the case on several directions I knew about.
I don't really buy that this is the core issue, even though it may very well be one issue. Rail was operated efficiently and on time in the past when competition did not exist even in a contrived manner, and rail is not really an industry in which real intra-industry competition is really possible. Rail competes with flight, and personal and mass surface transportation. It cannot really compete among rail operators in an efficient manner.
It is way more complicated than that, but you could commoditize the rail separate from the transport of goods and people, where they each compete on price for capacity, but it all gets extremely political very fast, i.e., public transport people vs goods transport that primarily pays for the whole network.
In the UK the railways used to be kind of bad in the nationalised British Rail days. People moan about the current privatised rail but it mostly works.
It is also extraordinarily expensive, and since the cuts in the 1960s you have a fraction of the railway lines. It is absolutely terrible.
Who knows if it was better in the nationalised days, but it sure needs some unification and central governance without a profit motive today.
> Who knows if it was better in the nationalised days
I do. I was there. It wasn't.
Also if you look at the usage numbers they dropped off in the nationalised days and picked back up after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport_in_G...
I was around but not a heavy rail user in the nationalised days though the stories back then were quite reminiscent of the current DB stories.
Swiss trains are run by a national company and they’re great.
Yeah, I don't think you can simply say public ownership vs private is necessarily better or worse. Overall competence and values seem more important.
> internal departments which acts as separate entities to mimic competition and each department has to place bids among each other to get contracts (more bureaucracy) but then they have an IT
Same here, with a big German semiconductor player you all know. The IT department has to battle the non-it departments and external contractors for internal software dev jobs. It's a made up game, costing 70% of our work time (just the beurocracy).
That’s pretty strange about this competition thing. I’ve been repeatedly informed that the government is much better at running things like this.
The irony is that OPs train, the RE5, was actually not run by DB but by 'the competition': a private company called National Express.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Express_Germany
Classic. Capitalism ruins another perfect system.
What do you find strange about it?
I believe general wisdom in the US is that trains are best when run by the government at zero cost. This is presumably the best way to get transit. So the idea that competition would improve things is odd.
I know the author mentioned this, but I just got nervous imagining this as a tourist who doesn't speak German at all. This shouldn't be like this. Why they don't help at all?
It's also funny considering how here in South America we look at Germany trains (and Switzerland trains) as always on time, and the best train system, etc. But I am sure if this happens here it would be on the cover of newspapers.
It's also funny considering how here in South America we look at Germany trains (and Switzerland trains)
That's very outdated, DB has been terrible for a long time though. Switzerland is still the best though. Here are some stats for 2025:
https://chuuchuu.com/2025wrapped
Since you have to scroll down quite a bit to get the list of most reliable European trains (with percentage on time):
1. Switzerland 97.8%
2. The Netherlands 93.9%
3. Belgium 88.6%
4. Austria 82.2%
5. France 79.7%
6. Italy 62.0%
7. Germany 58.5%
(Not sure why these are the only countries in the list.)
After living in Italy for a few years - if you're doing worse than Italy with your train schedule it's time to reflect hard.
Germany and Italy should gang up together to make the trains run on time and... wait a minute.
Hey Japan wants to join. I know we are a bit far away but we can form some sort of a tri-something axis.
I think, the joke about Germany and Italy should team up is a reference to the new CEO of Deutsche Bahn, Evelyn Palla, who is from Italy. The "to make the trains run on time" gives a hint here, because this is her declared task.
Not about Germany, Italy, and Japan, forming some sort of axis, I guess.
Japan wants the trains to run on time too!
The tri partners have a mutual goal.
I heard that Japan's trains cannot compete with the Germany's trains. /s
As per my other comment, Swiss trains (especially SBB) are not as pleasant as they get credit for. I get a lot that "you know, in other countries it's much worse", and it reminds me of software hosting, where it was normal in the past to be offline occasionally. Then Google et al. came and showed that much more reliability is possible with good engineering. I think there would be a lot of room for improvement.
I disagree. Swiss trains are a delight. They even have trains going up mountains (although some of those cost extra). Public transit in Switzerland was extremely reliable when I was there, and also according to official statistics.
Unlike other commenters, I agree that there are some (arguably significant) things to complain about. The first one is price - tickets are quite expensive. I frequently travel Zurich HB -> Lugano. This is 200km and costs a whopping 120+ CHF round trip. Zurich -> Geneva, Zurich Bern are similarly expensive. However, it's a bit hard to fault them as Switzerland is an expensive country and perhaps the high prices keep the service good.
What I am less able to excuse them for is capacity issues, especially on weekend and Friday trains on popular routes in the Summer. That Zurich Lugano train is packed to the gills most weekends during the summer such that it's standing room only for most of the 2 hour ride. They need to add more trains or at least more cars.
Reliability is not something to complain about. The trains are punctual, that's for sure.
Eh? Just checked in SBB Mobile, Zurich<->Lugano is 68 CHF roundtrip (with Halb-Tax, of course, but if you live in Switzerland, it doesn't make sense to not have it unless you have a GA travelcard) with 2nd class.
Complaining about Swiss trains is beyond me.
Keep in mind that a train in Germany counts as one-time if it is less than 6 minutes late. In Switzerland, it's 3 minutes.
Also in Germany, a train that did not even arrive does not count as too late.
There is also a concept of the "Pofalla-Wende", which is when a train is so late that it just does a 180 and drives back, to mitigate that the delay doesn't carry over to the train's next route. Of course, that means that it skips the stations at the end of the route.
Experienced that a few months ago. Next time I‘ll be tempted to pull the emergency brake which will cost them at least half an hour to get the train going again. Or so I have been told.
In Germany in 2025 it got worse with only 55% of trains being on time (defined very generously as being less than 6 minutes late).
I find this figure absolutely baffling. How can you run a train system with half of all trains being late?
Someone has never been outside the Western world, lol.
In many countries the train comes when it comes and goes when it can, regardless of any fictional like schedules.
(Hence the occasionally heard witty announcement in the UK…)
“Please mind the gap between the timetable and reality.”
I have. Mali didn't have trains at all. Our Indonesian train was on time.
It's not like countries outside Europe can't make trains run on time. Japan's are even more punctual than Switzerland's.
Canada: 30% on-time
https://media.viarail.ca/en/press-releases/2025/q1-2025-time...
That does not make Germany look any better but I find the "percentage on time" not very useful compared to the "years of delay" metric. And arguable a average/median delay per train would be better? Also some delay volatility data would be interesting.
If you look at France for example, 80% of trains are not punctual but the "total delays" is actually on the low range, France being on the large side with lots of lines, I would say that it shows that the delays (20% of the time) are actual shorts.
I gather that this is an average of all trains. In Italy, the high velocity train are quite punctual, but the slow regional trains drag the average down.
The less complex your train network, the easier it is to ensure trains are on time. France, Italy and Germany possibly have larger networks than Switzerland.
Then split your network into segments you can handle. Switzerland receives lots of international trains. Not only that; it has a lot of rail companies, serves even tiny villages, and has the highest use per capita in Europe. Size of the network is a lame excuse. German trains used to be fine. Now they're a disaster.
Switzerland has all public transport synchronized across the country. In any of the countries you mentioned they don’t even gave synchronized public transport at city level.
The swiss have a more challenging geography and weather than Germany.
They also spend far more per capita on their train system.
All that and afaik they still manage to connect all important places.
No, Swiss SBB is just generally very competent and has insane amount of traffic in comparison to any European rail.
Except that The Netherlands has the busiest rail network in Europe [1] and still manages to be second in that list.
[1] https://www.acm.nl/en/publications/acm-rail-monitor-netherla...
Talk about a very appropriate domain name lol
I recently moved to the Netherlands to study, and I experience that a lot. Despite almost all official information everywhere being written in both Dutch and English, in-train announcements are only done in Dutch. I have to constantly listen to the announcements and try to understand based off their vibe if they sound like something critical or not.
Dutch announcements in the Netherlands. Fancy that. Almost like it's the national language or something.
The Netherlands is in the EU. English is the most widely spoken language in the EU, even after the UK left, because it is by far the most common second language. Nearly half of the people in the EU can speak it.
In Northern Europe the percentage is even higher. In the Netherlands there are almost as many people who speak it as there are Dutch speakers.
Taking into account people from other EU countries who are there on business plus tourists there is a good chance that if only one language was to be used for train announcements more people on the train would understand if it was in English then if it was in Dutch.
This is imperial mentality. Dutch is the language of the Netherlands not English and they have the right to use it.
If we follow your line Dutch will go the same way as Welsh or Basque.
And the dutch aren’t very well known for their imperial mentality?
The Dutch were ridiculously bad at imposing their language on other countries. Little trace of it remains in Indonesia, or New York. Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten have never taken to it. South Africa is kind of the exception except even then Afrikaans has played second fiddle to English for 150 years, and they have sought to differentiate their language from Dutch in more recent times.
Portugal has been better at that game when you consider its size.
> If we follow your line Dutch will go the same way as Welsh or Basque.
No it won't. Mirroring important announcements in two languages is a thing most countries do, and their languages are far from extinct.
It already is, mate. There are people who move to countries such as the Netherlands, Iceland and Sweden and insist on using English all the time. I've even heard of Dutch using English with each other. There are people who've attempted this in Spain, but it's harder there since there are so many Spanish speakers.
The ongoing non-adoption of Esperanto remains one of the world's many tragedies.
Yes and no. Esperanto has strengths and weaknesses, and some see it as Eurocentric, but let's just leave it at that.
Every language has strengths and weaknesses. Perfect is the enemy of good. If your definition of 'good' is 'relatively easy and technically international', Esperanto is very suitable. (Not to mention way better than the status quo, in any case.)
Ideally announcements should be bilingual, but if there’s only one language, it’s better to inconvenience any number of foreigners than even a single native who doesn’t speak English.
In Switzerland, on some trains there are trilingual announcements: German, Italian, French.
Nobody suggested that dutch announcements should be removed. You can make announcements in two languages.
Why have Dutch at all? "They all speak English."
Not everyone speaks English though.
The point of an official language is that the government makes it as convenient as possible living your life knowing only that language. It wouldn't be that unreasonable IMO to switch official language to English, but seeing as NL is a democracy, that ought to be a democratic decision. A referendum of some kind would probably be best. It's not a small decision to be taken lightly.
But it's still nice to offer information in other languages in certain situations. Infrastructure used heavily by tourists and recent immigrants who don't speak the language yet should be made as usable as possible to people who don't know Dutch. Making important announcements in both English and Dutch on trains is an example of that.
Thanksfully, dutch is reasonnably easy to understand (not to speak) if you know english and the actual context.
Or maybe that is just me having grown to understand dutch and flemish as a cyclocross rider and spectator.
Yes, I'm obviously not mad with them using their own language, and I am studying it since I live there. But it's in the EU, and there is a lot of international tourists on the train, who shouldn't be expected to learn the national language of every country they visit just to navigate it.
Yeah, why bother using their own language at all? They all speak English and are just pretending. I want all the people in all the places I visit to be just like me.
Yep, only semi-consistent exception is that Amsterdam Central & Schiphol are usually also announced in english. Including delays related to these stations.
But, for example, Rotterdam or Utrecht are already a lot less likely to be announced in english.
I was once in a train that announced Schiphol in 5 languages. That's how you announce an international airport.
In Switzerland, the major train lines announce in English (as well as German and French). Minor train lines often only announce in the local language.
Honestly, I don't see the problem. As a tourist, you have to be prepared with apps, or you can ask someone for help. Happens all the time, and most people are happy to help.
Someone living here needs to learn the local language.
Since you moved to Netherlands is understandable they speak Dutch. You should consider learning it off you want to get by in the society.
> we look at Germany trains (and Switzerland trains) as always on time
When taking an international train from Germany to Switzerland, don't count on it that it will run through to the final destination.
SBB (Swiss National Railways) started to block German trains if their delay is more than 15 minutes (so, basically every DB train) and won't allow the train on their network.
This is only peripherically educational. Constantly delayed DB trains completely fouled up the scheduling on the extremely dense Swiss network. So they just won't allow it anymore.
On a sidenote: In 2024 SBB trains were 93.2% punctual. Connectivity punctuality (where you have to catch a connecting train) was 98.7%. A train is counted as punctual if the delay is less than 3 minutes (half the German figure).
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.
I wonder how many times a low-effort "truthy" sounding comment like that is written without someone like you to correct them and to clarify. There's also comments here suggesting UK's privatisation fixed BR that I do not have the energy to correct anymore, so they just sit there being wrong for all to see
Is their comment true because you want it to be, or is it actually factually inaccurate and biased as many other people are saying?
> They are forced to (at least try to) make a profit for their shareholders,
This is not true at all.
The shareholders set the targets and since the shareholder is the government they can set any target they want: profitability, more trains, cheaper tickets etc..
If the shareholder wants to inject 10% every year in stead of taking a profit they are absolutely free to do so.
The DB AG has been specifically founded to be "market-oriented" and profit-making, so yes, it is true.
I am sure the state could try to do _something_ about it, but I am also sure that a very strong car lobby here in Germany is working against that. BTW, the road network, which I would consider to conceptually be the same kind of infrastructure as the rail network, is to my understanding mostly built and maintained by state organizations, so it is possible to do it that way.
I guess it is also harder to market "let's subsidize this private company with tax payer money so they can continue to offer mediocre service" to voters, compared to "let's use tax payer money to build and maintain one-of-a-kind critical infrastructure from which everyone (with a car, which due to the less-than-great alternatives is a lot of people) can profit".
Again, having it organized as a private company adds indirection, diffuses power and responsibility, and adds a certain more or less implicit expectation of what private companies are supposed to do. That's my main issue with it. Private companies aren't supposed to run critical infrastructure as a monopoly for profit. It's the states job to provide and maintain critical infrastructure in the interest of all.
>The DB AG has been specifically founded to be "market-oriented" and profit-making, so yes, it is true.
Again, if the shareholders decide this is the reason: yes.
But shareholders can just as easily set other targets or incentives.
>I guess it is also harder to market "let's subsidize this private company with tax payer money so they can continue to offer mediocre service" to voters,
The government owns DB AG, it is not a private company. It is a public company.
> The government owns DB AG, it is not a private company. It is a public company.
It is a private company, as in it is a legal entity under private law. This is in contrast to a "öffentlich-rechtliches Unternehmen" (I don't know if this even has a proper translation or equivalent in other jurisdictions). There is more than two options here, it can be both privatized and public according to your definition.
Any private company is fully free to financially ruin themselves if this is what the shareholders want.
You are under no obligation to make a profit.
Do you know that the government has set those targets?
> They are forced to (at least try to) make a profit for their shareholders [...]
Not true. Shareholder primacy is not as huge as in Delaware.
And in the end it's the government that owns all shares and thus can decide how much profit the company should make.
Just because it is even more true elsewhere does not mean it is untrue here.
That's ridiculous. DB is not even trying to become profitable, not is there any evidence that it's sole shareholder, aka the government, sets it as a target.
Well apparently they have been somewhat profitable from 2016 to 2019, and they have been paying a dividend to the state more often than not. I don't think their goal is actively loosing money?
"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.
It's very much privatised in the sense that it's operating on a for-profit business model, rather than a for-benefit model.
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.
German trains do typically announce in English. If they don't, that's the exception. Just ask around. Most people here speak English and will be able to repeat what was said, especially if they're under 40 or so.
> Most people here speak English
Germany is the country where I found the highest number of people not being able to speak English, even people working in accomodation!
French people probably know English but they refuse to speak it; Italians don't know English that well, but they try their best using rolling R's and gestures.
(I'm a bit ironic)
I've learned they very quickly switch to English if you speak to them in German :)
English people can speak Italian though, just add a vowel-a on-a every-a word-a
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Colonial my arse.
Announcements in English aren't done for every station. Usually only for central stations and airports.
Funny thing, but the Swiss are looking at banning DB trains because they are never on time and messes up Switzerland’s public transport schedule.
I thought they already rejected delayed trains. Trains that are on time are still allowed. But I'd love to see Switzerland take over some of those international connections.
> But I'd love to see Switzerland take over some of those international connections.
The Giruno EMUs of the SBB serving the Eurocity from Hamburg to Basel are having technical malfunctions causing delays & aborted trainrides for the last few weeks.
The Eurocity(Express) Zurich-Munich is the most delayed long-distance train route in Germany. Most of the German route is only single-tracked and overcrowded.
I did learn German at school but it didn't help much when trying to get to Munich airport last year. I could understand what was going on with the cancelled trains at the station I boarded at, but the train I did catch end up tipping us all out after a few stops.
I could make out a bit of what the driver said, but not enough to be sure of the detail, which is what really mattered. I expected to miss my flight, but just made it in the end.
> Germany trains (and Switzerland trains) as always on time, and the best train system, etc
It's true of Switzerland and probably Austria. Germany is famous for having infrastructure issues that will take some time to resolve.
Eg see https://chuuchuu.com/2025wrapped for some stats
I'm a heavy public transport user in Switzerland, and even though it's almost a meme how reliable the trains are, reality is different. Yes, they operate in a way that make the stats look good (x% on time), but they take tradeoff to get there. E.g. they won't await connections if another train is a few minutes late. So you might have to wait for 30 minutes for the next one, or even longer if you're unlucky. And there's the occasional big incident, where you get stuck for several hours. I missed flights that way, even though planning in 3 hours of buffer. There is zero compensation in such cases as long as they bring you to your destination on the same day. Plus, several trains are regularly way too crowded.
They changed the policy maybe 5-years ago about a train waiting for a late train to come in because they found that it added additional delays to the entire system. I prefer the new way.
> it added additional delays to the entire system
Yes, obviously. And that hurts statistics. That's like killing sick cattle to be able to say that 100% of yours are healthy.
No, it means they contain the damage and run the system in a healthy manner.
Exactly, seriously complaining about the fact that the system is designed to run on time rather than trickle down delays is beyond me.
In my experience, they do sometimes still wait (at least that was the case for a few trips with delays last summer).
(And tbf I'm ok waiting 30min, with Taktfahrplan how much you wait is usually max 1h and often much shorter, my experience in other countries is often hours of delays in case of trouble)
> I know the author mentioned this, but I just got nervous imagining this as a tourist who doesn't speak German at all. This shouldn't be like this. Why they don't help at all?
How much help does your home country give to German tourists who don't speak English?
Swiss trains are very civilized. On an ordinary intercity train can sit at a table with a white tablecloth and have a beer or wine and a proper dinner. It really makes the time fly by. The SBB also has merch store with their own line of watches.
> Why they don't help at all?
If it's anything like the UK, the staff have incredibly secure jobs and recently secured some good changes to their working conditions/pay. It's probably not in their contract to announce in other languages, so they do exactly what their contract says
Idk how it is in Germany but my wife is currently trying to became a train driver in France and there are far more requirements that what you would imagine.
Even if the job is actually opened to basically everyone (and that’s pretty nice), you have to be in perfect physical and psychological shape with pretty strict tests, you have to be intellectually apt enough to follow the training which is pretty intense. You have to accept work conditions such as not knowing your work hours until the day before. You have to accept sleeping who knows where at least 2 times a week. You have to accept having only one weekend off per month.
So what happens is that when you have that much filters and you still want to hire train drivers, you can’t afford to expect your drivers to know another language on top of all of the rest.
Nothing is perfect but living in the UK after living in France, I have now a lot more love for SNCF than I used too.
Actually I’m a taking the train everyday to go to work and I have barely any complaint with the SNCF.
Most of the time they do what they can to deal with issues.
I don’t feel like there are too much issues it’s just they are extremely bad at communicating issues when they happen.
Sometimes the train is not there when it should but on the screen it just disappears as if it passed. Most of the time it’s just 2-5 minutes late but you can’t know. Maybe it’s just late. Maybe the traffic is stopped. Who knows.
I just dont understand how they don’t have people whose job is just writing messages for the information screens.
What is worse is that in my region, they have a pretty decent community managers for live information but they only post information in twitter because why not. So they already have the people doing this work but those people are saying different things than what the screen shows. Just let them write things on the screens :D
Why is that? Better service?
I have found station and train staff in the UK to be very friendly and helpful.
They do have very good pay (drivers can earn as much as some airline pilots) and a very good pension scheme on top of that.
I wish I could say the same. UK trains are so unreliable and expensive I barely ever use them.
drivers have amazingly good pay compared to say bus drivers, but station staff and on board staff don’t.
> Germany trains (and Switzerland trains)
Other commenters have already set the record straight, pointing out that these are clearly not in the same cluster.
See also https://www.thelocal.de/20250430/switzerland-suspends-deutsc...
Pay-walled, but the title says it all: "Switzerland suspends Deutsche Bahn trains due to chronic delays". DB is so unreliable that it impacts the networks of neighboring countries.
It's not so bad, with luck you'll eventually end up at a station outside of Germany.
Swiss trains are always on time. I've heard they've start to refuse delayed German trains entry to the country because their delays disrupt the system too much. The Swiss train system is excellent. The German train system is a joke.
Germany had a great train system but Germany also has a big automobile industry that spends a lot of money on lobbying.
In the end of the 90s with neoliberalism being very popular, it was decided to privatize the trains. The effect was only minimal investments in the infrastructure and a gradual rotting away of the train network. Now we a reaping what we have sown.
The enshitification of the German trains was done on purpose so they don't compete with cars.
I'd reverse the question ask why Germany (or any other country where English is not an official language, and does not majorly rely on tourism for income) would provide any public information in English? Commercial services can choose to do so a matter of self interest, but why would state financed services?
Because the State wants to attract well educated international workers to fix it's failing economy?
Problem is that failing to communicate will lead to huge productivity holes, so to "fix it", either the natives need to learn a non native language or the incoming immigrants need to learn the native language..
So, attracting the international workforce to come Germany vs being able to fully utilise them are completely different ballparks..
This is Germany we're talking about, right? Something like half the population already speaks English to some degree and that is specifically concentrated in the part of the country that is already highly educated and would be working with those immigrants.
A "well educated" international worker willing to relocate in Germany would probably learn the language.
Educated immigrants often consider countries interchangeable. They are in a country, because they found an opportunity and took it. But they are not committed to stay, because better opportunities could arise elsewhere. When you have already immigrated once, doing it again is only going to get easier.
Immigrants with fewer opportunities are more likely to try to learn the language and integrate. When a country is offering them something they can't find anywhere else, it makes more sense to go through all that effort. Even knowing that they will probably never fully fit in.
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You're really wondering why a state-funded service would consider the needs of tourists?
Yes. AFAICT, catering to the needs of tourists ranks very low among German voter priorities.
But catering the needs of the tourism sector ranks where?
I do not see the relation, mate.
English is the most common lingua franca.
I have my own DB story. About 15 years ago I was supposed to take an overnight sleeper train from Copenhagen to Cologne. We had beds booked. It's about 22:00 and we're on the platform ready for bed.
The train arrived on time, we checked our tickets to see which coach we were on and walked down the train looking for it. We get to the end of the train, odd, we must have missed our carriage so we turn around for another pass. Then we start to notice other confused expressions.
We eventually figured out the problem: they had accidentally left the sleeper coaches in Hamburg, a full 180 miles away as the crow flies, or almost half our entire journey.
After waiting on the platform for about an hour, busses arrived to take us to Hamburg. We're now quite tired and our bed on a train is now a seat on a bus.
We finally get to Hamburg at about 3:00 the next day, walk to our beds and we're ready to collapse. Surely they're not going to come and inspect our tickets at this time?
They came and inspected our tickets at around 3:30. Two and a half hours later we were in Cologne. Yay.
Deutsche Bahn has gone from not perfect to straight up disastrous and antisocial in the past years. They use scamming approaches more misleading than airline's and in cases straight up lie. It's rightfully headed for insolvency despite billions of wasteful and wrongful state funding. I hope that company goes under as soon as possible. Any other solution to the railway system management is better than DB. DB is not going to make it
Deutsche Bahn ist anything but wasteful, it's underfunded to the tune of tens of billions per year. Cleaning out trees more up to ten meters away from railways was seen as to expensive, now 6m tall trees fall in them all the time during storms. Having two railways next to each other was seen as unnecessary, now we have no backups when one fails.
Swiss railway is seen as the ideal DB should strive for, but fact is that Switzerland invests more than double per capita into its rail infrastructure. German stinginess now compounded over decades, and that's not the fault of management.
Underfunded and wasteful are not opposites. When there is not enough money to do things properly there is often a lot of duct tapping going on which waste available resources without fixing anything. There is scarcely anything more expensive in government than saving money.
> They use scamming approaches more misleading than airline's and in cases straight up lie.
Would you mind sharing some examples? My only complaints with DB are cancellations and delays. Well, the ticketing might be a bit confusing the first time you realize "ticket" and "seat reservation" are two completely independent entities. Similarly, rules for which train you're allowed to take might be a bit confusing. But I wouldn't call it scamming.
After privatization, the Deutsche Bahn became private enterprise and is now 100% owned by the German state. As such, insolvency isn't going to happen. Though it would be funny.
If a company fails this hard, the solution isn't to feed it more government money to prop it up. It's to let it fail and rebuild from scratch.
Blacklist everyone who was involved above a certain rank. Put together an entirely new structure. The only real way to get rid of this kind of rot is to make the consequences of dysfunction hit.
The DB is and always was fully owned by the government, this is not the usual case of "dumbass executives mess things up".
Unfortunately, the DB first got hit by Thatcherite neoliberalism in the early 90s that led to "unprofitable" things like switches, railyards or lesser-used routes to be torn down and the real estate sold off (to prepare for a privatization that THANK GOD never happened), and then we got 16 years of Conservative traffic/infrastructure ministers whose job priority was to funnel money to Bavarian highways [1], not towards railways.
Unfortunately, while the left wing loves to prune its ranks in purity tests (partially because its voters demand accountability), the Conservatives have a solid "better dead than red" voter base.
[1] https://www.merkur.de/politik/csu-parteitag-bayern-markus-so...
The RE5 is operated by National Express. You have not been kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn.
The connection in question is probably https://bahn.expert/details/RE28521/j/20251224-a0049123-9494....
According to this page, it actually did stop at Troisdorf (though, that doesn't have to be correct). I don't see why they should have been able to stop at Neuwied but not any of the stations in between. Most of them are possibly too small, as the RE5 is quite long for a regional train, about 200m. The usual "RE" on this track, the RE8, is only about 110m max. Bonn-Beuel should have worked, though.
So there are actually train companies in Germany that are worse than Deutsche Bahn?
https://nationalexpress.de/de/
DB is continually the worst train experience I have in Europe. I have never been on a train in Germany that's on time or that stops at the right station. Several times I've had to find someone young (and who speaks English) and say, "I'm just going to follow you to the next train."
I've been told that the UK is worse, but I don't have much experience with it outside of Eurostar.
Passenger rights are very good in the UK. It's easy to claim Delay Repay, where you get 25% refund after a 15 minute delay, 50% refund after 30 mins and 100% refund after 60 mins. Other train operators are obliged to help you get where you need to go if the company you intended to travel with has cancelled your trains, or you've missed a connection due to a previous train you were on being delayed.
I've had the last train out of central London for the night cancelled at about 1am and you can just message the train company on social media and they'll pay £100+ to get you a taxi all the way to somewhere like Cambridge.
Also, not sure how it is in other countries, but in the UK, everything is entirely open data. You can go to a site like https://map.signalbox.io/ to see a live map of every train in the UK, and sites like Realtime Trains let you get all the details about every train (eg. https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/search/simple/gb-nr:KGX)
Yes, you'll get a refund. But that isn't much use to you if you need to be in a certain place at a certain time.
Some operators begin at 30 minutes
And some operators love to ignore their obligations
Our protections are good on paper but in reality quite poor. London is of course better than the rest of the country though.
I don't consider having to message a faceless social media team on "X" to get a taxi refunded good customer service at all. And they are definitely pushing for you to pay first and then get a refund, which is not in the spirit of the contract. My mother doesn't have "X" and wouldn't know where to start
UK has airline-style pricing that goes up extortionately as seats run out, making it prohibitively expensive to use. It's also frequently late and/or trains randomly cancelled, although you can plan around it, you end up 1hr+ late on most long journeys.
On the plus side: local journeys are great. Delay Repay means you get up to 100% of your ticket back if you're delayed. If you cannot make the last train due to delays, they're obligated to get your home by bus or even by taxi. Train stock is (in my area at least) new and very comfortable. Views are good!
My experience of the trains themselves has been fine in the UK.
Ticket prices vary a lot and are unpredictable. I have not a last minute ticket from London to the midlands for just over £20, but they can be a lot more (several times as much?) for the same journey even booking ahead.
I definitely prefer the train to driving if I am going long distance by myself, but if its multiple people the car becomes a lot cheaper.
Local services in cities are pretty good. I never owned a car in London, nor in Manchester until I had a child.
Deutsche Bahn is completely state owned, UK rail is privatized. They're both pretty bad. China's new high speed rail is state owned, while the Japanese network is largely private. They're both far better than UK and Germany. I wonder what are the main determinants of the quality of large infra networks? State ownership only seems to have a very loose correlation, where even the sign of the relationship is unclear.
You're actually misrepresenting it with that imo.
DB is state owned, yes ... but it's run like a private company. It's basically the classic "privatize profits, socialize losses" - done as a yearly routine.
Not even remotely exaggerating, it's incredibly corrupt.
DB‘s quality decline started when this move to privatization happened. They didn’t put money into maintenance, closed lot of tracks and ignored all warnings by experts who predicted this exact scenario more than a decade ago. Most of the time now DB issues seem to be connected to a lack of available tracks. A super fast ICE has to wait for some slow train to clear the path. There’s an issue on one track and thus the entire traffic is backed up till that’s resolved.
I do think they’re working on improving these conditions. But I wish they did more to communicate that. Where is the big marketing campaign explaining how they got there, apologizing, and explaining how they will do better?
When the owner of DB is owned by the German federal government, they all rule the whole company, who gets the profit? The German federal government? (It's a sign of stupidity to claim DB is privat. It is not. It is not.)
That's why I said it's incredibly corrupt. It's an Aktiengesellschaft which is fully owned by the state, so profits would remain in the ownership of the company and their leadership to do with as they please, e.g. pay themselves whatever bonuses they want . (Or pay out to their shareholders? Lol, nope).
losses get pushed to be picked up by the state/taxes.
That's why it's privatize profits, socialize losses.
But there has just been a leadership change, maybe things will improve..
" It's an Aktiengesellschaft which is fully owned by the state, so profits would remain in the ownership of the company and their leadership to do with as they please, e.g. pay themselves whatever bonuses they want . " That's plain wrong. The owner decides which happens to the profits and how much the leadership got paied. Besides that, it is just rambling. Again calling the DB privatised is a sign of stupidity.
I guess you slept through the last 10 years if you think that. It literally happened, multiple times.
I guess that makes you the person that's...?
Welcome to public-private "partnerships", featuring socialism for corporations with extractive profiteering of users.
The determinant is the amount of money invested in infrastructure.
No matter whether the train operators and the network operator are private or a state monopoly, all decisions about major upgrades and new lines are made and funded by the government. The network operator just deals with the maintenance.
Nationalisation(or sometimes privatisation!) is seemingly seen by many as panacea, but it won't help you if your network runs at 150% capacity every day.
Not completely. Transport for Wales is state owned, or at least Welsh government, and control most of the local trains in Wales and out to some bits of England. Some of the UK infrastructure is state owned or funded. The state provides the licences as well, so they are not off the hook in that sense.
> UK rail is privatized
50% of operators are now state owned
Not that it's a guarantee for things to get better...
I think it depends on where you are going. My local commuter link into London is OK and reliable, if expensive.
Long range trains from, say, London to Manchester are often overcrowded and ridiculously priced.
I take those long distance trains and it amazes me the choice and how low the cost is. You can choose an empty high speed service in peak time with a 20 minute frequency for a high cost (comparable to flying), you can book ahead for a lower price - especially in non peak services, or you can choose a flexible lower speed (comparable with service in the BR days, 3.5 hours) for far cheaper than it ever was.
Season ticket prices are under 20p/mile into London
Nationalisation will likely break this and increase costs for all but the richest. For the last decade the public have been clamouring for “simplification” because they couldn’t understand the restriction codes. Now it’s being rolled out they are of course seeing price rises and complaining “not like that!”
> Season ticket prices are under 20p/mile into London
False, as per my other comment
I agree with your other points though
People who claim the U.K. is worse have no idea what DB is like and just think that “nationalisation” makes trains half the price and twice as reliable.
I've used trains in the UK and Germany. The German trains are cleaner and more spacious (two floors in some cases).
When comparing to the UK you have to also factor in how absurdly expensive it is. Eg a monthly ticket to the nearest city ~25km away is 292 EUR (nowhere near London. A city with not very high wages either). And the train is just 2.5 carriages and full every day.
A typical season ticket into London is under 20p a mile. Outside of London it’s far more expensive (35p a mile is common), because the railway has not had the investment London has over decades. Platform lengthening (of possible) is not cheap, requires buying new land in crowded towns and cities. Modern train stock isn’t cheap either
25km each way is 680 miles a month.
Most people will commute ~19 days a month, given vacations and sickness.
From my example, that's ~794 miles (corrected) a month, £255, £0.32/mile. Not as expensive as some other routes but still can be as as high as 12% of your take-home wage given the low salaries in that city.
Moving onto London... /under/ 20p a mile? Which route is that??
Just some random examples I picked:
Alton to Waterloo: £529, 1786 miles, £0.29/mile.
Guildford to Waterloo: £453/mo - 1140 miles a month, £0.39/mile.
Gravesend to London Bridge: £436/mo, 836 miles a month, £0.52/mile.
Brentwood to Liverpool St: £336/mo, 706 miles a month, £0.47/mile.
St Albans to Thameslink: £440/mo, 756 miles a month, £0.58/mile.
(Mileages from https://www.scotrail.co.uk/carbon-calculator )
Most people do 5 days a week, 46 weeks a year - with 6 weeks holidays.
Alton to Waterloo is £5520 a year, 50 miles each way or 23,000 miles a year, 24p per mile.
Cool so one single example that doesn't support your claim and zero interest in discussing it on a wider basis.
Southampton 20p/mile
Brighton 17p/mile
Battle 22p/mile
Compare to say wilmslow to Manchester (33p/mile), or northwich (29p/mile)
Compared to to people doing one off journeys. London-Southampton 77p/mile, Brighton 46p/mile, Battle 53p/mile
Brighton is £559/mo for the Thameslink only ticket (the cheaper one) and 50.5 miles to London Bridge. Even being generous saying 22 days a month, that's 25p/mile.
Just give up.
I've proved your "A typical season ticket into London is under 20p a mile" claim wrong multiple times.
Southampton to Waterloo is just about the exception at ~19p/mile if you assume 22 days per month which I think is exceptional.
Annual tickets are 40 weeks meaning 5.75 trips per weekly ticket (230 a year). Newbury works out 21p a mile, Ipswich 23p a mile, Cambridge 22p/mile, so yes prices have crept up just above 20p/mile in the last year or two.
UK trains are terrible. I don't have direct experience to know if they are worse than DB trains, except for DB's dire performance being a running joke amongst my German colleagues at work.
I bet that UK trains "win" by being far more expensive than German trains, along with absurdly complex pricing. If you choose the wrong ticket you could also "win" a criminal conviction!
Don't worry though! We're currently building the most expensive bit of high speed rail in Europe, that won't even go into the centre of our capital city [edit: apparently it will now, see reply], or further north than the Midlands. Passengers who have the audacity to want to travel further north will have to transit over to the old tracks, creating even further capacity problems.
All of this is entirely avoidable, if the government just took a few common sense measures, but sadly it doesn't seem to be anyone's priority.
UK and DE appear to use different punctuality metrics with a train being late after 3 minutes in the UK but 6 in DE.
Latest punctuality figures for UK are 84.8% and DE 88.1%. Making an assumption on distribution I’d guess UK comes out slightly better.
Of note, DE long distance stats are pretty bad!
UK: https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/ebmnxxih/performance-sta... DE: https://zbir.deutschebahn.com/2024/en/interim-group-manageme...
I’ve taken four international DB trains in the last 2 years, into Germany from Belgium and Denmark, and out to Switzerland and Austria.
In all 4 cases the train was delayed in Germany - the longest by 4 hours, one by a mere 30 minutes.
How does the DE figure take canceled trains into account?
> that won't even go into the centre of our capital city
Is Euston not the centre? Where all the other trains from the north-west come into, and literally on the same road as Kings Cross St Pancras? Plus Old Oak Common is going to be an interchange with the Elizabeth Line.
People also miss the fact that a big reason why HS2 is being built is to take load off of the West Coast Main Line, which is running at full capacity at the moment. There's no room to run additional services. Even though some unfortunate compromises have been made, this will still massively benefit parts of the North because they'll be able to get more frequent services once the line is no longer clogged up by trains from London.
Oh I have we uncancelled the Euston connection now. Good news finally. Hopefully we'll build beyond Birmingham too, because otherwise passengers travelling north of Birmingham will add extra stress on the overloaded WCML.
> We're currently building the most expensive bit of high speed rail in Europe
Largest most expensive jobs programme in Europe perhaps more accurately... lots of pigs' snouts in the trough.
UK slam door trains where the door appeared locked but then came unlatched when another train passed and sucked people out to the their deaths before the advent of the safety lock.
> Several times I've had to find someone young (and who speaks English) and say, "I'm just going to follow you to the next train."
I'm on the other side of this. I end up chaperoning lost tourists on my DB disaster trips with a regularity that I should be getting a paycheck from DB.
If you've never been on a train that stops at the right station, maybe the problem isn't with DB.
> DB is continually the worst train experience I have in Europe
Oh c’mon have you tried trains in Slovenia? The ICE from Budapest with a constant 230+ min delay, the regional one from Ljubljana to Celje where half the track is seemingly under perpetual construction (so transfer to a bus!), passenger trains delayed all the time waiting for freight trains, trains randomly going 20kph on some segments, and lately even vandals sabotaging the tracks. And don’t worry, they announce all of that exclusively in Slovene with no extra answers.
I’ve been on DB and it wasn’t that bad. It was expensive but at least the train didn’t max out at 80kph.
It's so weird. That doesn't seem to be the lesson to be learned from Nazi Germany. The train going on time was not the part to fix.
For my job, I travel all over Germany very often. I take the car, train, bus, or sometimes even the plane. The train is the most comfortable means of transportation in Germany. Of course, there are delays, and sometimes mistakes happen that result in very long delays. But where doesn't that happen? I find traveling by car to be the worst. How many times this year have I been stuck in traffic jams for several hours without being able to go forward or backward? No one pays me compensation for being late. With the train, I even get some of my money back if we are late. I find this blog post ridiculous. The rail system in Germany is extremely complex and tightly scheduled. We have regional, long-distance, and freight traffic on the same tracks. Of course, the train can't just stop anywhere when there's a problem. Grow up. For those who are interested: I traveled from Berlin to Konstanz for the Christmas holidays, and both trips were on time. I paid €70 per trip and didn't have to worry about traffic, icy roads, or snow. I worked on my laptop for 6 hours on both trips. It couldn't have been more relaxed.
The train is indeed the most comfortable means of transportation in Germany, but it's so unreliable nowadays that it's practically unusable if you need to get somewhere on a schedule.
Want to get to the airport 2 hours before your flight? Sorry, you have to plan in at least an extra hour, because there's a 40% chance your train will be severely delayed or canceled.
This unreliability drives people who need to get places on time to other modes of transportation. But if you don't mind being randomly delayed by an hour, the train is great. It's sad, and it didn't use to be this way.
Want to be at airport at time? Go with DB a day before and sleep at hotel near airport
> the train can't just stop anywhere when there's a problem. Grow up
> didn't have to worry about traffic, icy roads, or snow
Aren't these statements contradictory? I think "grow up" means problems are unavoidable and the adult thing to do is expect them and accept them, and then you say you didn't have to worry, as if problems never happen.
To me it sounds like you just got lucky on your Christmas trips. Two trips on time hardly prove a rule that there's never trouble, and in any case you directly state there's trouble sometimes and that's something to accept.
Now I don't know the stats on problem frequency, which of course matters. But that's different from "don't have to worry". Opposite really. "Here's how much you should worry".
According to the Deutsche Bahn, 61.9% of passengers arrived at their destinations with less than 15 minutes of delay in November 2025.
You can decide whether a 38.1% chance of being delayed by more than 15 minutes is bad. I think it is.
Source: https://www.deutschebahn.com/de/konzern/konzernprofil/zahlen...
I don’t think it’s ridiculous. A complex system that delivers customer further from destination than they were originally from, is flawed by design. And we all know what the problem is exactly: it is the design for capabilities that the company could not afford based on its budget/planning/KPIs. DB did not invest enough in infrastructure to support the big dream, and now they also have huge aging and retiring workforce problem. So let’s not pretend it’s normal and business as usual: complexity is not an excuse for mismanagement.
DB does not decide how much to invest in infrastructure, that’s decided by politicians.
Politicians do not dictate operational decisions. If they allocate X for infrastructure, the company should scale up or scale down to match that budget, rather than overpromise.
”The company” is not one company. The infrastructure manager (DB InfraGo in Germany) is managing tracks on behalf of the state. Operators (a regional operator in the case of this article) run as many trains as they want/are allowed, which in practice is more than the system can handle reliably. There are laws regulating how track access is awarded, so even when a DB group operator runs on tracks managed by DB InfraGo there is no single ”company” that makes a certain promise. The remedy is political either way, either change how track access is awarded to limit the number of trains allowed or increase funding for added capacity and maintenance.
I'm glad at least someone has a sense of proportion here. German trains have problems for sure, but the train system in Germany is nonetheless fantastic.
It's fantastic compared to Amtrak. It's terrible compared to the Swiss, Chinese or Japanese rail systems, or even just the Deutsche Bahn 20 years ago.
lmfao sorry to say that to both of you: were you lobotomized?
Where doesn't that happen?
In any neighboring country, where punctuality is at like 74-99%, depending on the country.
The DB is at 48.5% (Oct 2025) to 60% (2024 avg).
Where are you getting those numbers? Thats impressively terrible.
DB is a joke and a disgrace to Germany. I have actively avoided traveling by train for many years. The company is customer-unfriendly from start to finish. I find the confusing ticket prices particularly bad: Sparpreise, Super-Sparpreise, Frühbucher-Tarife, Flexpreis, Sparpreis Gruppe, BahnCard, Gutscheine, ...
If you don't want to pay extra, you have to book six months in advance and be familiar with the fare system. It's super frustrating. It's just a train ride. I don't want to have to plan and organize it like buying a new car at the best price or trading stocks. And in the end, you can't even count on arriving on schedule. If you're unlucky, you'll be stuck at the train station in some godforsaken village.
I prefer to travel by car. The travel costs can be easily calculated based on the price of gas and fuel consumption. The total maintenance costs for a car are transparent. You are much more flexible and autonomous when planning your trip. The probability of arriving more or less on schedule is almost 1. And if you do get stuck in traffic, at least you have a little private, quiet, warm, and dry space around you.
If it were reliable, inexpensive, and uncomplicated, I would still find it more sensible to travel by train. But that is far from being the case. Instead, DB manages to combine the disadvantages of administrative bureaucracy and market economy.
Yeah, this is the great irony of it all. Germany really wants to discourage taking a car for "environmental reasons" and so on and does everything to encourage public transport.
But one thing is clear: I won't be bothered, robbed or even stabbed in my own car, and I also won't arrive in a different village lest I drive there myself. I won't arrive three hours late either, or have to stay overnight in some shitty Hotel because they couldn't find a replacement train.
The German public transport, like many other things in Germany, is an absolute fever dream for a "developed country".
Cost of a car is extremely hard to predict, not just because of unexpected repairs but also because the price of gas is literally political.
The train experience in Germany is as bad as it is because of lobbying by the car industry and corruption both in the government and train operators. Not enough investment over decades paired with the absurd idea that train fares need to cover operating costs. Nobody would ask this of road networks, it’s just infrastructure that a society pays for. In addition to that the Deutsche Bahn suffers from common inefficiencies of large corporations that are not mitigated in effective ways by its leadership.
> Cost of a car is extremely hard to predict, not just because of unexpected repairs
Cars aren't complicated. Make the right choice (buy cheap, buy japanese or french, avoid wet V-belts, prefer timing chains). Change oil and oil filter often. Keep an eye on the brake pads, shock absorbers, brake discs, tires, brake fluid, rust on the bodywork. Taking care of all this is surprisingly inexpensive. Of course, you can also have a car mechanic do all of this. Then you pay for their labor. But I really don't see any nasty surprises that might be lurking there. Of course, it depends on how well informed you are. If you've never looked under your car, then it's obviously a surprise when the floor panel is rusted through.
I understand that this is unreasonable for most people. But there is scope for ensuring that costs can be planned very well. However, I must admit at this point that you might as well deal with the complicated DB tariffs if you want to.
> but also because the price of gas is literally political.
Super 95 currently costs between €1.60 and €1.80. I still find that pretty easy to budget for.
> The train experience in Germany is as bad as it is because of ...
I agree with all your points. I'm just totally disappointed that we as a society can't manage to make public long-distance transport appealing. I would love to live in a world where I would feel like a complete idiot if I drove from Leipzig to Stuttgart and back instead of just taking the train.
I feel like we lost humanity somewhere in modern world. I grew up in 3rd world country and if this were to happen, train would literally stop somewhere, anywhere. (With the assumption it’s safe from crewing into another train).
But the idea that you go 55 minutes just because of policy; and skip 15 stations is crazy to me. Again with the assumptions that it can safely stop somewhere for 5m and I’m pretty sure the answer is yes.
I have fond memories of train stopping close to my house for various random reasons and I’d just get out so I don’t have to walk back from the station. The modern world where everything is “safety issue” and “someone else’s problem” is where we lost our ways, and it’s never coming back.
I worked for a massive German company you heard of, this sounds more like the typical German philosophy of strictly following the process -- as absurd as it might be -- and refusing to take initiative for anything that is not explicitly defined as one's responsibility.
As a French, the culture shock was brutal and I never really got around that work attitude. I went through a similar issue back when I used to take a regional train in France, and the crew swiftly adapted by bending rules to accommodate a difficult situation caused by bad weather. I'm not sure this could happen today, but it was a thing 10 years ago, we used to trust the operators back then.
So much in German work culture - and also culture in general - is about covering your own arse. If you follow the procedure, even if the outcome is disaster, you are not at fault; you were just implementing the rules, and you cannot be held accountable. It's the fault of whoever came up with the rules, except that is usually not a single person, but some amorphous entity that ran through some decision making process years in the past. So, no one is really at fault or can be held accountable.
It's always some magical higher power preventing you from doing the sensible thing. One favourite excuse is insurance liability. We can't do the sensible thing, because the insurance wouldn't pay if something bad were to happen, even though the odds of something bad happening are virtually nil.
You can also observe this in German politics. "Oh, we absolutely cannot do <common sense thing> because the rules won't allow it." Well, you could change the rules, but then you would have to take some actual responsibility, and we can't have that.
That sounds a lot like industrial safety culture: blame the process, not the worker, so we can iterate on the safety built into the process if there is a failure, because doing so lessens the chance of future failures. It’s a great way to build airplanes.
Theoretically ... in practice, Boeing's most rigorous days in the 80s and 90s were directed by empowered individuals in the manufacturing org, and when it went full "strict process only" in the 2000s and 2010s the quality fell.
I don't think that's due to following the process but rather systemic cultural issues. The process doesn't exist in a vacuum. There's a good faith meta process that needs to be followed to incrementally fix issues as they arise.
Bad faith actors and cultural dysfunction can break pretty much anything no matter how well thought out it might be.
> Bad faith actors and cultural dysfunction can break pretty much anything no matter how well thought out it might be.
U.S. politics today in a nutshell.
McDonnell Douglas merged with Boeing in 1997. Timeline checks out.
It's also leaving out that system only works (worked) for building airplanes because it happens (happened) to be an industry with a hugely passionate workforce. Switch it to contracted out wage slaves and 'the system' doesn't work. Because the system never 'worked', many passionate people worked via sheer force of will/desire/care/investment into the final product. It was about the people all along.
The idea in the aerospace industry is that you should not blame the pilot, since pilot error became a all-catch rule no matter if there was design or system errors. The classical example is the button for the landing gear, where pilots continued to accidentally press it and crashing the plane. The engineers added guardrails to the button and the pilot error rate went down.
The lever for the landing gear and the lever for the flaps were easily confused. After landing the pilots intended to retract flaps but accidentally retracted the landing gear instead.
At first they assumed their recruitment process accidentally favoured stupid people so they made sure to only recruit smart pilots. But it kept happening. Then they put a little flap on the end of the flap lever and a small wheel on the end of the gear lever and the problem went away.
I simplify. Read the full story. It is cool!
That's my dad who worked at NaSA doing aeronautics stuff said.
Pilots fuck up all the time so blaming them doesn't excuse anything.
And I find myself butting heads with people over that all the time. Coworker (smug satisfied voice) well if the end user fucks up it's not our fault. Me (trying not to sound really annoyed) yeah it's still our problem.
Although it has far from mainstreamed yet, I like how the software industry has the notion of a “UX bug”: if the user failed at anything, the software is at fault, because it wasn’t easy enough to use.
Sort of, but the difference here is that it's really "blame the person who created the process, not the person following it". The people with the authority to alter faulty processes don't want to change it, even if it's clearly bad, because then they become "the person who created the process".
Industrial safety must (if it is to be effective) recognise that people are an important part of the process! They're so often forgotten, with disastrous results.
People need to be given timely information, communication channels, and authority to straighten things out when they go awry. That's good for safety!
It's also a crap way to run a culture when you scale it.
You need to make the people best positioned to notice something is stupid responsible enough to make them say no fuck you because otherwise every oversight and edge case will be substantially more likely to cause harm because they have less skin in the game.
See also: Cops getting "paid vacations" for bad stuff.
Except a lot of the safety in any given process comes from the people: if technicians, pilots, and air traffic controllers were not empowered to assess the situation and make decisions then there would a heck of a lot more accidents.
My favorite part of German work culture is watching an excel sheet together and going over the numbers.
My actual favorite part of German work culture is that meetings always have an agenda, that part is a delight when doing business with German customers.
Your meetings have an agenda? We just debate something and are stuck on some minor unimportant point that doesn't matter and the meeting goes into overtime and then we schedule 2-3 follow-up meetings where everything we said is now completely irrelevant because our assumptions were incorrect from the start. And then you finally get to work and you can't implement it like it was specified since everyone forgot that you can't really do X so you have to it some other way making everything that was discussed completely moot.
Sorry, the zoom meeting link has changed so now the meeting will take 4 hours and you must get the agenda by FAX.
(this is what happened to OP)
As a German I envy your meetings with Germans
I toured a German Siemens factory and was startled by the unfamiliar safely culture.
Big bits of equipment moving around fast and limited guard rails.
The culture of taking personal responsibility is vastly different to where I’m from.
>If you follow the procedure, even if the outcome is disaster, you are not at fault; you were just implementing the rules, and you cannot be held accountable. It's the fault of whoever came up with the rules, except that is usually not a single person, but some amorphous entity that ran through some decision making process years in the past. So, no one is really at fault or can be held accountable.
Worse. You can't even take responsibility even if you want to, that's usually against the rules too.
... I had to take out a special insurance when working from home as a freelancer, and share evidence I had done so with my client as -- if someone slipped outside my house because I'd not swept up the snow somehow the company who was paying me would be liable for the insurance claim...
... Yep.
It's for similar reasons why everyone is up at the crack of dawn frantically shovelling snow outside their homes.
Rather spoils the fun of towing the kids to school on a sled when every 5 meters there's a perfectly swept bit you have to drag it across.
Don’t worry. You can drag them on the street! Safety first and all that.
Reminds me of the "we can only send helmets" to Ukraine thing ... that apparently wasn't a real hard and fast rule but when originally presented you would have thought it was some magical rule set in stone.
TIL the entire German work culture is literally the Nuremberg defense. A bit on the nose.
Didn't the Germans get in trouble for "just following the rules" back in the mid-20th century?
"I was just following orders." --Any German soldier after 1945
It's interesting considering that based on the German military doctrine at the time low ranking officers on the ground had a huge amount of independence while the French ones were stuck doing nothing and waiting for orders to be signed and approved..
Of course maybe that didn't apply to committing atrocities to the same degree.
> you were just implementing the rules, and you cannot be held accountable
That kind of explains why they tried to pull it of at Nuremberg. And why some nazis that weren't sentenced internationally got good jobs in post-war Germany. For Germans they weren't really at fault if they were just following procedures.
That's not the main reason though. The reason the denazification was mostly a sham is because a lot of federal positions required good contacts and experience in that field and you couldn't find anyone qualified who wasn't in the party. Based not just on first hand accounts on the family side but also lots of research. A lot of higher ups also were well connected so they got an already short conviction halved to released early in order to get a position in the government.
yes but there are so many cases where they took the worst of the worst and gave them high profile jobs with way way way to much power for high ranking nsdap members.
Rheinhard gehlen and everyone around him is a something that could have been prevented.
And so many high class nazis where in such good positions because they where experts on anticommunism. For the americans and brits it was "safer" to give positions to exnsdap officiers then people from the SPD(socialists)
Gehlen kicked even the only high ranking spd member in secret service out
for god sake they even hired klaus barbie. that guy had entertainment partys where the guests could torture jews homosexualls etc... and he killed most of french opposition. Got hired from the bnd and cia as expert on anticommunism
Germany didnt change much..
fuck we even voted a full member of the nsdap as chancelor. Kurt kiesinger. Yes we had two Nazi chancellors!!
honestly the only reason the denazification was shit was because most people at power at that time where kind of nazis.
edit:// btw the DDR had somehow solved the problem and didnt had as much nazis in high position.
"I was just following orders," is a bit of a meme, but it's also true, and even more so in the context of Prussian-style military discipline. Disobeying an order was not an option. You carry it out no matter what, but the responsibility lies with the commander. It gets more murky for the civilians who theoretically could have walked away, but a lot of them had a similar mindset that they were just doing their jobs. And you have to keep in mind that all of the Nazi's racial ideology had been codified into law at the time. So you were once again just implementing the rules, even if those rules were actually harmful.
But what this episode also highlights is the opposite of this in the form of the American approach that is much more flexible and willing to bend the rules if necessary. Rightfully, the Allies could and probably should have brought everyone to justice, but they realised that a lot of the Nazi scientists were extremely valuable assets that they needed to get a leg up on the Soviets. So rather than execute them or put them in prison and throw away the key, they recruited them.
That's kind of interesting, though considering that the German army (and presumably Prussian before that?) was know for giving a relatively huge amount of leeway and authority to more junior officers.
Supposedly while the French and British officers were frozen waiting for new orders to be telegraphed when something didn't go according to plan, Germans took the initiative based on what's happening on the ground. US and other countries adopted this doctrine after the war because of how unexpected successful the German army was (despite being outgunned by the French and the soviets who had better tanks and more trucks just couldn't figure out how to use them efficiently)
> Disobeying an order was not an option.
There's always an option. You could die. And if you didn't choose that option before committing atrocity as ordered you definitely deserve death afterwards.
They got good jobs because the Allies did not really care about punishing the Nazis.
At the end of WW2 a strong West Germany to oppose the USSR was more important than punishing some middle manager and the quickest way to get the West German state together was to use a lot of the existing bureaucracy.
> They got good jobs because the Allies did not really care about punishing the Nazis.
And the fact that Germans did not really care about punishing nazis didn't matter at all?
As far as DB goes, I'm pretty sure it's mostly an issue of systemic technical and consequently social collapse.
The system runs beyond its limits and consequently the culture collapses because the people inside learn they have no agency.
The German rail network is quite good on paper, with dense and high frequency connections even to relatively remote locations.
But keeping that functional (particularly with constantly rising demand) requires far more investment than it receives.
All the examples of great rail systems (France, Switzerland, Japan) are both simpler in network structure and invest more relative to their passenger load.
The privatization of the train system in Germany was a particularly insane disaster that is only now, 30 years later, being undone/repaired.
If you look at an org chart of the DB these days, the most fascinating part is that DB consists of almost 600 separate corporate entities that are all supposed to invoice each other.
Speaking with insiders, it appears that when the privatization happened, the new corporate structure took what was essentially every mid-size branch of the org chart and created a separate corporate entity, with cross-invoicing for what would normally normal intra-company cooperation. I think the (misguided) goal was to obtain some form of accountability inside a large organisation that had been state-funded and not good at internal accounting.
This fragmentation lead to insane inflexibility, as each of the 600 entities has a separate PnL and is loathe to do anything that doesn’t look good on their books.
Add to this a history of incompetent leadership (Mehdorn, who also ran AirBerlin into the ground, and who was also responsible for the disastrous BER airport build-out), repeated rounds of cost-cutting that prioritized “efficiency” over “resiliency of the network” etc. etc.
DB is currently undergoing a massive corporate restructuring to simplify the 600+ entity structure, but there has been a massive loss of expertise, underinvestment in infrastructure, poor IT (if you see a job ad for a Windows NT4 admin, it’s likely DB), etc. etc. — it’ll take a decade or more to dig the org out of the hole it is in.
It was a privatization in name only. The German state held 100% of its shares since the beginning. As such, it might have no longer been subject to the state specific demands of hiring etc. - but instead found itself in an uneasy tension as the only supplier of services to an entity that was something between a customer and a shareholder.
Which brings up an interesting question: How do you structure something with a large piece of infrastructure like a rail network in a way that could benefit from the market forces of competition and innovation?
> Which brings up an interesting question: How do you structure something with a large piece of infrastructure like a rail network in a way that could benefit from the market forces of competition and innovation?
A rail network is near to a natural monopoly. You can build overlapping rail networks, but it's complex and interconnecting instead of overlapping would usually offer better transportation outcomes and there's a lot less gauge diversity so interconnection is more likely than overlap.
All that to say, you can't really get market forces on the rails. Rails compete with other modes of transit, but roads and oceans and rivers and air aren't driven by market forces either.
Transit by rail does compete in the market for transit across modes. You can have multiple transportation companies running on the same rails, and have some market forces, but capacity constraints make it difficult to have significant competition.
> capacity constraints make it difficult to have significant competition
Thirty years ago, you would be correct. In the modern day, you could tie switch signalling to real-time auctions and let private rail's command centers decide how much to bid and thus whether or not they win the slot for putting their cars onto the shared rails. The public rail owner likely needs to set rules allowing passenger rail to pay a premium to secure slots in advance (say, a week) so that a timetable can be guaranteed to passengers during peak rush hour, but off-peak slots can and should be auctioned to naturally handle the difference between off-peak passenger rail and not-time-sensitive, more-cost-averse freight rail.
You can’t. Every attempt at privatizing rail is a failure with worse performance, higher prices, and an inevitable level of special treatment by the state due to the monopolistic utility-like nature of rail infrastructure. Not everything needs to or should be privatized.
This 100%. It should be seen as critical infrastructure because of everything it can enable when run well.
> It was a privatization in name only.
Not, that "insight" again. Yes it was privatized and yes it is still completely owned by the state. "Privatization" is a term of art (in German) that refers to the corporate structure not the ownership. There are also public corporations in Germany, that are fully owned by random people: e.V. = registered association.
I believe modern economists are studying how ownership should be assigned. The thinking is that contracts and rules handle the majority of situations but emergencies and edge cases require an owner who has authority and whose interests align with the thing they control. And you want a mechanism to reassign ownership when the previous owner is incompetent.
In the case of a national train system, you may want to create a national entity to develop, coordinate, and make the physical trains and support technologies. You would create regional or metro entities to control the train network for their local area including the train stations. They coordinate with each other via negotiated contracts. Any edge cases or emergency falls under the purview of the owning entity. For example, the national entity controls the switch from diesel locomotives to the newest engine. The local authority is responsible for repairing the lines after a natural disaster.
If an entity is egregiously incompetent or failing, the national regulatory authority, with support of the majority of all the different train entities, takes control and reforms it.
keep the rails as a state-owned monopoly, let different train operators run on it. Basically we have that for airplanes, and it works well enough.
>invest more relative to their passenger load.
For Switzerland does this account for the almost double salaries or only absolute spending?
If you spend 1€ in Switzerland I imagine you get much less work output than for 1€ in Germany.
Raw investment numbers don't necessarily matter, but the productivity of said number. Even if things are more expensive in Switzerland, if they make efficient use of said investment, then it can work out ok (or even better).
I have no idea if this is actually the case, but you have to take that into account or Switzerland would not be as successful as it is. Higher incomes have historically been a symptom of productivity (and while median incomes and productivity have decoupled, especially in the angosphere, it is still usually correlated).
>Higher incomes have historically been a symptom of productivity
If I go to Zürich I get a burger for 30Fr that I can get in Southern Germany for 15€ and in Berlin for 8€. That is with roughly the same quality.
I'd say past productivity leads to network effects and investments in one area that boost local salaries and decouples them quite strongly from current productivity.
My previous company had a per-dollar extremely unproductive location in silicon valley. The people there weren't at fault. You don't magically become more productive because you live next to SF.
That's the crux: we must invest in trains instead of planes.
I have no idea how planes are the dominant form of transport for relatively short routes (like within the bounds of a large country or to an adjacent one) and how even in Europe the train networks can be a bit of a mess.
Like surely it’s easier to run a railway network when compared to the insane complexity to safely operate an airport and all the work that goes into plane maintenance and pilot training and so on.
You need a lot of infrastructure for trains (and a lot of it isn't even used all that much -- it's not like all rails have a train passing by every 5 minutes). You also can't get much use out of your rolling stock because the speeds are fairly slow. You also don't have the same flexibility as planes have regarding routes.
The upshot is that trains are a lot costlier than most believe think and most railway routes require state subsidies (with goods transport usually being an exception), whereas air traffic works so well it can be taxed heavily.
Air traffic is not taxed heavily compared to other modes of transport - on the contrary, it is very heavily subsidized (at least in Europe): Regional airports often strongly depend on state subsidies, airlines are exempt from petroleum taxes, flight tickets are VAT-exempt.
In Germany (and also e.g. Switzerland), long-distance trains are expected to run either at cost (or make a profit). Short-distance trains (regional transport) are usually subsidized.
Another factor is that building new rail lines requires eminent domain and acquiring land across multiple jurisdictions etc.
Why not invest in a vast 24/7 high frequency electric bus network instead of the big infrastructure costs of trains?
Sounds neat but what kind of range limits would that impose on each trip? Switching from one means of transportation to another, even if both are buses, increases the total travel time significantly. Not to mention all the hassle involved for passengers.
trains can be superfast. For example a tgv from strassbourg to marseille is 5-6h. Same with car is for me 8h. Bus is even slower so I would wildy guess 12h. Plan is btw 1 1/2 hour.
Why?
Planes are faster, and there is actual competition keeping prices down. There is no competition on railroads, no accountability, no nothing. More importantly, railroads have to be managed centrally to work. And this makes them overwhelmingly complex, resulting in an ever-growing bureaucracy.
Air travel is decentralized, and while individual airports (cue: BER) can get screwed up, it doesn't cascade through the whole system.
We just need to add a bit of carbon pricing to reflect the true price of flights.
No amount of money will overcome the fundamental issue: monopoly.
Airlines are subject to market competition since any competitor around the globe can spot a poorly run route and buy their planes into those slots. If they can execute more efficiently than you, they can afford to lower prices (or increase the level of service) more than you, and thus put you out of business.
Trains do not work this way. No amount of investment can overcome the cushy institutional-rot, laziness, and demotivation that inevitably results from being a monopoly, as most train routes are not subject to competitive forces due to the real world constraints of the infrastructure needed.
France, Italy, Austria (and probably others) don't have monopoly on long distance train. For instance, you can take a DB/Renfe/Trenitalia train on french high speed line, or in Austria take a Westbahn train instead of ÖBB.
That said personally I much prefer the mostly fixed pricing (and no reservation required) of swiss network than the dynamic one of other countries.
It doesn't really work all that well. The "everything above the rail" model suffers from the fundamental problem that "everything above the rail" is just a minor component in the overall cost of rail.
Yes, that's the same as for roads/highways, those are better publicly managed.
China and Switzerland seem to do fine with trains.
The German rails network went downhill when they decided to socialize the losses and privatize the profit. Failure is blamed on the grunt workers, which are absolutely not interested in taking responsibility as a result of this. The fact that there are rotting railways everywhere and the DB waits until it gets so bad for cities to step in and take over part of the cost is a wonderful example of this. The new ICE's speed is actually lower than previous generations.
I have seen this systemic problem in other domains I worked in. The problems are very similar, and at the end of the day I can somewhat relate to the workers attitude of "why should I lean out of the window if I get punished anyway". But in some cases the workers are unfireable and oftentimes it is exactly that attitude that let the management get away with the terrible working conditions (most of the times more psychological than physical abuse) so it feeds into each other.
Just an aside, as a railway-nerd:
> The new ICE's speed is actually lower than previous generations.
While not the fastest ICE, the new ICE-L (assuming you refer to it) with a top speed of 230km/h, is not actually slower than what it is supposed to replace on most routes: InterCity trains, topping out at 200km/h.
ICE-L, btw, was planned to be a IC train, but just like before with IC-T/ICE-T (same top speed of 230km/h), and IC X (ICE 4), DB management has a tendency to decide next-to-last minute, that new vehicles must earn money and thus get rebranded ICE, which is both more prestigious and (at least in a fictional world without "Sparpreis") pricey.
TL;DR: This would be outrageous if ICE-L was to replace ICE 3 (neo; 320km/h +) services - but it is not.
Yeah, I didn't feel like looking up the exact details, so thank you for adding that. I didn't know that it was rebranded like that, I was just baffled at the outcome. Our mechanical engineering professor was responsible for the ICE breaking system a long time ago and those guys were all extremely good.
The other aspect is that there is a whole host of periphery issues, one of which is track maintenance, making it so for a lot of segments the ICE will not reach its top speed.
Could be. It used to be that to get phone service in Germany could take up to a month after putting in the order, that’s when it was state controlled. After the reforms installations were quicker.
So to me, there doesn’t seem to be a panacea except to hold the services accountable in some way.
That's a different situation / scenario and addressed a different problem.
The government is the most efficient and effective at big capital spending and with what I would call static operations. Competitive private entities are the best at delivering value on the front-end.
Monopolist/cartel private entites combine the rapacious nature of rent seeking with the lazy inefficiency of bureaucracy to great a giant ball of failure. Effective privatization requires either creating a framework for a robust competitive landscape OR tight, effective regulatory control. There's no universal correct answer.
If competition is in place and companies can win or lose, they will move mountains to yield marginal gain. If you let them get fat & lazy, you will need to move a mountain to do anthing -- even make more money!
> If competition is in place and companies can win or lose, they will move mountains to yield marginal gain.
... in the short term, happily screwing over society at large and possibly even themselves in the medium to long term. Perverse incentives are everywhere.
> After the reforms installations were quicker.
And everybody has the same "market" price.
Add to that the transport buisness beeing marginal to the company who is mainly a immo speculation company trying to sell the strips of inner city land they hold.
Immo being real estate (Immobilien), for the curious.
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The general reason is, the rule exists for a reason, and the "low worker" does not understand the bigger picture, so you should follow it blindly before doing something harmful you can't foresee. It's not always working well, but to be fair, also not always bad. Knowing how much you can stretch the rules can be an art which takes a long time to acquire.
Some cultures are more sticklers for creating and following rules and bureaucracy than others, though.
A good example: Here in North America I'll jaywalk without a thought if there's no traffic. In Germany, you'll get grandmothers calling you a child-killer for setting a bad example if you did the same.
Another example: Both France and Germany spend roughly the same amount (in raw Euros) on their militaries. France (which ALSO spends and develops a lot of their own kit) has a functional and effective military, including the only non-American nuclear aircraft carriers, and a bunch of nuclear attack and ballistic submarines and it's own nuclear deterrent. Germany is barely able to maintain their much smaller infrastructure because of its ineffective bureaucracy (there was a scandal a few years ago where over 80% of their euro fighters were combat ineffective due to lack of maintenance).
Of course, the very idea of jaywalking was created to remove the obligation to not kill people from drivers and shift it to the very people being killed, but this doesn’t seem to bother the meddling grandmothers.
> Of course, the very idea of jaywalking was created to remove the obligation to not kill people from drivers and shift it to the very people being killed, but this doesn’t seem to bother the meddling grandmothers.
I'm kind of curious how you expect this to work.
A driver is driving down the road at the posted speed limit. Instead of crossing at an intersection, a pedestrian steps into the road from between two parked vehicles directly in front of the moving car. By that point the car cannot be stopped before it hits the pedestrian because of the laws of physics, so who would you have at fault and how was that person expected to prevent it?
The driver needs to go at a speed where they can stop in that scenario. We’ve normalised the idea that they shouldn’t have to, unfortunately.
These are generally the same boot licking demographics who'll sit and wait out a 2min light cycle at 1:45am rather than treating it like a 4-way stop. Putting their money where their mouth is puts them head and shoulders above the types that tend to dominate the discussion on such issues.
I was in Germany once at a red light for a pedestrian crossing. After the last pedestrian had fully crossed the street and the pedestrian light turned red I drove off. I did not wait for my own light to turn green which is typical in my country.
The person behind me flashed their lights. Cultural difference I guess. Why wait when there is nothing to wait for.
I live in Australia, which is culturally the polar opposite of Germany[1], and you'd get a similar response here. If the police saw it, you'd be fined at least $500, and risk losing your licence.
1: Australia is very egalitarian, rather than hierarchical. Pragmatic, rather than bureaucratic. Australians are direct and emotive communicators. Spontaneous planners, etc. etc.
In Southern Europe, not many people wait for a red light if there isn't anything to wait for. Even the police blasts through red lights if nobody is using the pedestrian crossing.
Risk/cost ratio? A pedestrian acting irresponsibly can of course do a lot of damage, but the likelihood of killing someone is much lower than if a vehicle is breaking the rules.
Isn't that the argument for the alternative? The risk of being distracted by other traffic and missing a pedestrian who was obscured by another vehicle is much lower when there are no other vehicles or traffic, and then the rules are indecorous for not taking into account the change in risk.
"Bootlicking"? I guess you'd love if non-bootlicking neighbors decided to do a rave party outside your window at 3am. Every day. Or maybe a nice drag race on your street at 1am.
I mean, only people who think for themselves can do that!
There is a huge difference between someone being annoyed by some thing based on how it affects you and that thing just so happening to be against the rules vs being annoyed by a thing that's of no consequence to you for no reason other than because it's against the rules.
Regardless, I don't share those values. I have stared into the abyss of what people who praise conformity and the common good will do to a municipality if given free reign to regulate it's minutia and I do not want. My neighbors on one side blast music in a language I don't speak until a couple hours after my bedtime most nights and the neighbors on the other have barking dogs. I don't even notice them anymore, same with the nearby highway noise.
What consequences? Who doesn't like music?!? Oh, and I'll just throw that candy wrapper on the ground. After all, it's of no consequence.
You THINK that your rule-breaking has no consequences. This is called in the safety science "normalization of deviance", and it usually leads to more and more rules being ignored. And not necessarily by _you_ but by other people.
This is colloquially known as "being a bad example".
Litter is a great example. You people and your rules for everything weren't what changed it's prevalence. Social changes and general attitudes were.
Like I said, I've stared into the abyss of what you people will do to a society if left unchecked. You are worse than the alternative. That's why I live where I do.
Well, yes. By making sure more people are bootlickers and don't want to challenge the authority.
Have you lived in any country where you are not coddled by the society?
That’s not boot licking, that’s “I don’t want to get a ticket, and just because I don’t see a cop doesn’t mean there isn’t one.”
Fine then. They drive the speed limit in the left lane or whatever. Point is that the people who advocate for the rules in obscenely trivial situations when deviating them them is in fine taste tend to be drawn from the pool of "robotic rule follower with no extra thought given" type people. Which has the side effect of making them consistent with what they preach.
> "In Germany, you'll get grandmothers calling you a child-killer for setting a bad example if you did the same."
Yeah, some Bavarian villagers can be hylariously weird. I, personally, have jaywalked all my life growing up in East and West Germany, and I only got "the lecture" twice: once in deeply pious Bavaria, and once in... Spain. Both involved the rolemodel-shaming routine as kids were to be seen, but only one came with a small fine attached.
> "Here in North America I'll jaywalk without a thought if there's no traffic."
Most likely not a POC and not from NY or Washington D.C., I see (I'm reporting for a friend). Ah, anecdotes. The spice of life!
Nobody cares if you jaywalk as long as no children are around. If there are children around, most people will avoid crossing a red light even if they otherwise would cross. But that's not a rule-following thing, it's a "don't set a bad example to children" thing. It's easier to teach children the rules about how to behave in traffic if you have fewer adults obviously violating them.
That would make sense, except that one of the universal rules of childhood is, "Adults get to do things you don't get to do, usually for damn good reasons, so get used to it." Every child knows this in their bones, even when they don't like it.
Kids are stupid and follow what adults do. If I judge that I have the time to cross the street at red light without getting hit by the incoming car doesnt mean that the kid standing next to me is even seeing the car and crossing right after me.....
Showing kids good example is good. What you mean is showing them bounderies. Getting shit drunk in front of kids and telling them how much fun it is but they cant do it is behaving like a child
> A good example: Here in North America I'll jaywalk without a thought if there's no traffic. In Germany, you'll get grandmothers calling you a child-killer for setting a bad example if you did the same.
This varies wildly in Germany. In Hamburg, at 7 - 9 in the morning near schools or kindergartens with kids around, many people are following good traffic behavior. At 9 on a university campus, or at 9 at night no one really cares.
Note that what is eschewed and illegal is crossing at a traffic light when it is red. Just walking 50m away and crossing there is fine.
Yeah, I think people who have not experienced the system have no idea how absurd the German process mindset is. If it's not part of the process, it's impossible - damned what the reality on the ground is
Frenchman here and so true. I was taking the bus and it was stuck in traffic and I was like "hey can you let me out I life right in that street and shit aint moving" .... no fucking way. had to wait 10 minutes and then walk back to my place... driver was completly ghostinh me after he said the magic german words " I am not allowed to do this".
In france they Busdrivers let me out between stops if I ask them before.
Germany is crazy rule obsessed. they also have the crazy mentality that if you put it into rule problem is solved xD
American bus drivers wouldn't do this either, at least not in the cities I lived in.
Although Germans are famously methodical, my experience with German bureaucracy was that it's quite flexible. They will break you, and when you finally give up and seem like you're about to cry, they will roll their eyes, and oblige you, stressing how exceptional and magnanimous they are for letting you get what you want. In reality, they were rooting for you the whole time, but did not want their flexibility to be taken for granted.
I document German bureaucracy for a living. I cannot stress enough how "vibes-based" the entire thing is. Half the job is convincing bureaucrats that you're either overprepared or litigious to be worth the trouble.
The best strategy I've found with such bureaucrats is to bike shed them with an obvious but easy problem that you fix with much adieu so they can feel like they've found you out and feel like they've done something. Meanwhile they will ignore all the subtler things that might be much harder for you to deal with.
Ah yes, the queen's duck! I've told that story countless times. I bet it's super effective here.
https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/
(p.s. I don't mean to nitpick over a perfectly clear message, but it's "much ado")
Reminds me of this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3EBs7sCOzo
What really ought to bother people more than it does is that within just about any white western country/culture you can run the same comparison with "decently well off" being the german side and "everyone else" being the english side.
Reminds me of being en route with Lufthansa to Germany, needing an emergency landing in Turin, being shepherded onto a new working plane by Italians, then continuing to Germany where the whole plane load arrived without tickets from Turin...
The gate people tried to tell us it was impossible to be there without tickets, as if we were somehow collectively hiding them and a bit of persuasion would convince us to find the non-existent tickets! Not one person found they had a ticket, despite this allegedly being impossible.
i love that meme which shows three identical paper clips in a row but one is upside down relative to the others which is a minute difference. the caption reads “chaos German style”
> "[...] this sounds more like the typical German philosophy of strictly following the process -- as absurd as it might be -- and refusing to take initiative for anything that is not explicitly defined as one's responsibility."
Neither absurdity nor "German philosophy", but just stock-standard safety and security culture in action. Or more specifically in this case: generelle and objektspezifische Dienstanweisungen (general and location-specific administrative instructions or regulations) [1]. You don't follow them, it's you who's on the hook. :)
And when was the last time anyone here visited a railway control centre in a metropolitan area? Yeah.
1. [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dienstanweisung]
The German philosophy is also very much prevalent in Sweden.
I worked in the Swedish office of a multinational for a couple of years and the one experience I had where Swedes were selling a complex multi-million euro project to Germans was one of the most bureaucratically filled initiatives I’ve ever experienced in my life. Not sure if the project ever really took off, but I’m thankful I was able to avoid it beyond the initial week of discussions.
Oh yes. Driving over from Copenhagen to Malmoe (10 km) it's like you've entered the land of the robots. It's nice and clean though.
I worked for a company where we brought in teams from a couple European countries after a merger.
The absolute "I won't do anything more than I explicitly have to." was brutal. It was hard to even talk to them as they seemed terrified / constantly defensive of being asked to do something outside their typical process. They never were asked as long as I was there but man they were on a knifes edge about it at all times.
I'd even be on the phone with folks I met and got along with and I'd ask them about what they saw on a ticket they used to own, and I'd get angry made up rules about "I don't have to tell you anything because that ticket doesn't belong to me anymore!" Like bro ... we had a good time having beers together, I'm not your boss I'm a peer asking, it's still both our work hours ...
They were smart folks, got along with them otherwise, but it was just a horrible experience working with those folks when it came to work. Company eventually just shut down those offices, complied with whatever local laws were required to do so and washed their hands of those locations. I didn't blame them.
If you don't know german culture, this story might be hard for you to imagine. Fact is, germany has a massive stick up its ass. If there is a written rule, they will follow it, no matter what.
<the typical German philosophy of strictly following the process -- as absurd as it might be -- and refusing to take initiative for anything that is not explicitly defined as one's responsibility>
you summarized my 5+ year experience living in Germany with one sentence in a way that I have never found the words for - thank you, really, thank you
I feel that in Germany, the original intent of the many rules, processes, and procedures has been lost. Employees are trained to operate such that every situation is governed by a rule/process/procedure, and their job is to look up the situation in a massive leather-bound book of branching rules, see which rule applies in the given situation, and then… apply the rule. But, they will do this only if they assess that helping you falls under their job’s responsibilities. Sometimes your situation is neat and clean, and was what the rule-writers thought about when they wrote the rules. Sometimes, not.
TLDR: if you have an edge case in the German bureaucratic system (forms at the doctor’s office, Deutsche Bahn travel troubles, closing a bank account), you are f***
It is certainly my biggest dislike factor with my stay in Germany, and I'm still struggling to come to terms with it: do I dislike it enough to compel me to move away? is this something I can accept? How much can I influence and improve things that I directly interact with?
It seeps in everywhere too, with almost all aspects.
Day-to-day with restaurants, cafe, shops. Almost all interaction feels like it's actively checked if it's in their process or job description. Shop staffs are typically disengaged and can't really help you with anything outside the normal process.
Healthcare, both receptionist and doctors. You can see the rushed service because they are only compensated for limited amount of time by the state insurance. This took me a while to figure out; the process really defines what treatment you get, with what equipments, as well as the duration, and they have to do their best with the constraints put by the process.
An example: with Wurzelkanalbehandlung, the process says (at least back then) only 1 hour of Laborkosten can be compensated by the state insurance. This means if the dentist took more than 1 hour to work on you, that would be done at their personal loss, and thus the incentive to rush the procedure.
Going private helps (they tend to be more relaxed after the mention of of Privatzahler, and gives you access to newer equipments not yet acknowledged by the state insurance processes), but you still have to research, find, and pick the right practice.
Bureaucracy, administrative. You often have to deal with clerks that just go "I just work here", the rules says this and there's nothing I can do, throws hand in the air. Goodbye, next person please!
In day-to-day work, I can also see it. New hires tend to be more into the work, and questions things, but the system does push everyone to just follow the process and not do anything more. I've seen my colleagues slowly shift into this mode, delivering what is outlined, nothing more, not questioning the intent behind the work (or at least, doing it much less than before, because the system does not incentivise that).
I would summarize Americans (and perhaps most English speaking countries) as perceiving this mindset to be callous, ineffective, and a dereliction of autonomy.
But I'm interested in how Germans perceive Americans in reverse? If shop staff went out of their way to help them find a product, shoot the breeze, or recommend a lunch spot, would Germans tend to see this as being overzealous? Would it cause embarrassment, or be a pleasant surprise? Just curious.
I tend to view shop staff having a random talk with someone while I’m waiting to purchase or ask something as a dereliction of duty. If you want to catch up with a friend you can do it on your own time.
Every country is different and you need to learn slightly different ways of dealing with them in each. On a bad day it can be pretty exhausting.
It turns out, people everywhere want the same things, in the end. They just go about them differently.
In Germany, it often helps frame it as both of you trying to work with the rules together; as a framework to build within and on, rather than a cage to hold you in.
Doesn't always work. Nothing works all the time, (especially if the other person is having a bad day themselves and just wants it to be over). But if it helps even once eh?
The difference in healthcare between private and public insurance is, as far as i know, because if a doctor sends you for some test or something that your insurance feels was unnecessary then the doctor has to pay for it with the public flavour. At least, that’s what I heard but could be wrong.
For anyone who likes trains I can recommend The Train (1964), it's a fun little war movie with Burt Lancaster about French resistance in 1944
A German saying "I was just following orders" sounds scary if you think of certain olden times.
I feel the same. I was in Kuwait city a few days ago and decided to learn their public transport system which is buses only but was pretty extensive and abundant with good google maps integration.
When you get on the bus there's a big sign stating the rules of riding the bus which include strictly stopping at designated bus stops ONLY and threatening fines. For the rest of the day I watched every bus driver stop anywhere they like if a person hailed the bus, allowing people to get in while waiting in red traffic lights, and if you talked to the driver he'd drop you off anywhere you wanted as long it's possible. Those drivers make nothing from this so they are doing it because this is life and also because there's no real enforcement against it. Also you can get in through the exit doors and leave through the entry doors, whatever you like.
I decided I feel ok about this and don't want it to change
Venkatesh Rao offers the following definition of the "Fourth World"
Fourth world: Parts of the developed world that have collapsed past third-world conditions because industrial safety nets have simultaneously withered from neglect/underfunding, and are being overwhelmed by demand, but where pre-modern societal structures don’t exist as backstops anymore.
This is what this story reminds me of.
Isn't that basically what happened to the USSR? (Yes not technically "first world" but highly industrial and bureaucratic)
People in the USSR at least had the good fortune of already living in a world where they were highly adept at recycling and barter and maintenance, and in the case of the chechens also community self defense.
I think most of America would be fucked as most people don't know to how to do anything but their job plus buy things with money from their job. The top 25% of handy people might be able to change their own oil and that is it (not that they can't learn more, but it takes time).
>I think most of America would be fucked as most people don't know to how to do anything
Most of America would be substantially less fucked than the slice of mostly officer workers who mostly have enough money that "spend money rather than upskill or barter" is their default mode of operation you see via HN.
First World was US/NATO aligned. Second World was USSR/Warsaw Pact aligned. Third world was unaffiliated with either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World
I think this is relevant because the colloquialism of it meaning "developed" versus "undeveloped" doesn't work when you try to build on top of it
it's impossible to build on what Third World means or add lore like Fourth World when the definition is on a shaky and now non-existent foundation, while much of the unaffiliated world is highly developed now.
Yes. Also, fitting the USSR into the extended framework, by not recognizing that it already was in the framework to begin with.
IIRC Wikipedia says the term was coined ca. 1950s, so it could be argued that the USSR's decline was already factored into the term.
> IIRC Wikipedia says the term was coined ca. 1950s, so it could be argued that the USSR's decline was already factored into the term.
What? The Soviets got the bomb in 1949 and launched Sputnik in 1957. That makes no sense.
That success was not evenly distributed.
Regardless, the Soviet Union was very far from collapsing in the 1950s. Again, what are you talking about?
Someone already assigned "Fourth World" to stateless nations, so it's probably fifth world by now.
The developed world does have decaying infrastructure but moving it between the private and state sector has caused problems. As has lockdown and other international policies. Our local government's main interest seems to be in shutting streets off and designing bad cycle infrastructure that is little use to cyclists (I am one by the way). It is letting our streets fall to pieces and spending lots of money erecting physical blocks.
https://old.reddit.com/r/fifthworldproblems/top/?sort=top&t=...
This is just silly. The German train system has problems. Does that mean total civilizational collapse? No, it doesn't.
Collapse is the other end of the spectrum. This is an institution whose practices/policies only serve itself instead of its customers/purpose.
It's progress, taken to its extreme. From a certain point of view it's effectively the same as collapse.
What does that even mean? We're talking about an organization that serves billions of riders per year. Their passenger numbers increased 20-30% since 2020 so even if their delays are bad clearly it's not bad enough that most people seek alternatives.
If I'm using your transit service and you take me on a several hour detour without my consent passing a dozen or more possible stops because "you're not cleared for that", you aren't serving your mandate and I'm never using your service again.
I might even pull the emergency brake before it gets that far and cause you more problems, even.
I am sorry but this is not Rao's but Umair Haque's and he considers the UK and the US Fourth World.
Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall are fourth world stateless nations.
There's no indication of any failures of the industrial layer in this story. The train was working, it didn't crash into anything, everyone was safe.
The train worked, the railway did not.
Safety failures are not the only type of failure.
I’d say it’s mostly a North-European thing, not the whole world. I am a latin american living in Sweden and the overwhelming lack of empathy and humanity you’ll experience in the healthcare system is borderline unbelievable (until you learn to expect and deal with it). They trust the system so much that whenever it doesn’t work, it’s basically ”well bummer”. You become the 1% for which the system has failed, and you’re supposed to just take one for the team (since everyone else is having a good time anyway). The thing is simply that you have to learn to see the good side of the system and understand that you can’t have the cake and eat it too, unfortunately.
As another 3rd world citizen living in Northern Europe, I usually describe it as "processes and rules over common sense". They understand your situation, they agree with you, they can solve your problem, but they will not do it because it goes against some obscure rule, or it would not follow a specific mandatory procedure step by step, and who knows what are consequences.
And quite frankly, they don't give a fuck. They have been conditioned not to give a fuck from an early age; the system works 99% of the time, so nobody really has to care about each other. There is literally no benefit in giving a fuck about another person, in fact it is quite possible that you'll end up being punished by the system for breaking the rules. It is a Leviathan whale state swimming through the sea with millions of little fish sucking on it, and they sure as hell don't care about the few who fall off during the trip.
> I’d say it’s mostly a North-European thing,
I think it's a "busy tracks" problem in general, which yeah, is a problem in Europe in general. You can't just stop a train in the middle of some track, there are a bunch of other trains coming too, who can't just pass unless you get to a place where that is possible, which isn't everywhere.
None the less, the rest of what you say is true of Sweden, but I don't think it's the reason a train refuses to stop on some train tracks.
My point is that, in a country where people act like well, people (and not robots), someone would be bothered by this and might try to solve the problem in some creative and unexpected way. Someone might think "damn, we're ruining these peoples' christmas, let's do something" and then fix it somehow. Here it's more like "well bummer, deal with it" in both cases. I doubt that a bunch of adult, highly-skilled people could not have a conversation over the phone and arrange for a train to stop 5 minutes on a track so people could get off. Are you saying that there are so many trains in the same track at the same time that stopping for 5 minutes would cause an accident? I think that a lack of willingness to give a fuck is much more likely.
> Are you saying that there are so many trains in the same track at the same time that stopping for 5 minutes would cause an accident?
No, but these places generally prefer to take care of the collective, even if it means slightly worse conditions for some individuals. This is impregnated into our brains from early on, and somewhat humorously "codified" in the Law of Jante, among others. From the outside, for the last two decades, it seems to be slightly changing more and more into another direction, but that's how it was when I was born and raised there at least.
Once you understand the common perspective of "sacrificing the individual for the group", it becomes a lot easier to understand this sort of reasoning.
Personally, I don't agree with it, together with a bunch of other weird social rules, hence I don't live there anymore. But the other side of the fence, where every rule is constantly broken by everyone, "just in this case" but 100x times a week, isn't so much better after all. Just different. Some people seem to be wired for some things, others not so much.
> the overwhelming lack of empathy and humanity you’ll experience in the healthcare system is borderline unbelievable (until you learn to expect and deal with it).
Curious to hear what strategy you've learned over time.
The most important thing is to learn to expect and plan ahead, so that you don't get caught by surprise as much as it is reasonably possible. I do not expect anyone to act with humanity, so I start playing the system as early as possible. If I think something might be a problem in two weeks, I start calling them today, knowing that it'll take them two weeks minimum to take me seriously. If I go the the ER, I take movies and games with me (and lots of paracetamol) because I know it'll take several hours for anyone to even say hello to me, let alone do something concrete. I also, maybe more importantly, do not expect anything from the human side. Basically I see them as robots, so I deal with them as robots: explain everything calmly, repeat myself 100 times, and even more importantly, do not get angry. You get angry, you lose. It doesn't matter if you have an internal bleeding and you're dying, the moment you start screaming, nobody will take you seriously anymore. You have to be slow, strong, and systematic: repeat yourself, call again in 1h, then in 4h, then next morning, then next morning, until at some point something happens.
I feel like we lost humanity somewhere in modern world
I feel the same. It is easier to hide behind rules, regulations, bureaucracy etc. Not saying we should stop following rules, but using a bit of common sense and having a bit of compassion would go a long way.
I also remember reading about a train that Japanese railways kept running, just for one kid, she took the train to school. They kept it running until she finished school, just for her (I know, someone is going to point out the inefficiency, cost etc about this story, but that is a separate conversation). I suppose stories like these are going to become rarer and rarer as time goes by, as everything has to be "efficient" and everyone has to follow some "rules".
I think you are mentioning a viral but incorrect story: a station was scheduled to close at a given date, a student mentioned in an interview that it will close after her graduation, but then some news sites claimed that the date of the closing was related to the graduation. The station was also used by a few residents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%AB-Shirataki_Station#In_...
The story is a bit suspect in that surely it would be more efficient to just hire her a taxi once a day. Even an expensive Japanese one.
I suppose it would be slightly inconvenient to her to change habits, as well as a bad precedent. Still, hard to accept there was no additional factor involved in the decision.
> I grew up in 3rd world country and if this were to happen, train would literally stop somewhere, anywhere.
I'm from Bangladesh, and the attitude you're describing is one reason why the country is poor and a mess! Deviating from the schedule for the sake of a single person is completely insane and maddeningly inefficient. It's classic third-world mentality. In a good country, the system would never tolerate such deviations. In a really good country, someone wouldn't even ask for such accommodation for themselves, because it would be shameful to inconvenience others even slightly for one's own sake.
That seems pretty wildly orthogonal to me.
Did the individuals and industries that truly drove fabulous innovation and development in the first world REALLY do it from a mindset of "it would be shameful to inconvenience others even slightly for one's own sake"? There are an awful lot of stories of rulebreaking out there... "The Wild Wild West" turned into some of the richest parts of the world, that name doesn't suggest that a society needs to follow the rules to the point of extreme shame to avoid staying poor.
It's not orthogonal. If you look at societies that industrialized early, their social development diverged hundreds of years before industrialization actually happened. When my dad was born in 1951, 90% of the population of Bangladesh lived in villages in extended kinship networks and multi-generational households. In such an environment, the informal rules of families dominate society. Bangladeshis have a very relaxed attitude towards time and rules. It's not a big deal if you're late in my dad's village, because everyone knows you and that you'll arrive an hour or two after the official time and will plan accordingly. If you inconvenience someone, it's not a big deal, because you're all family and you'll reciprocate the accommodation another time. (That's a key point! Kinship bonds form a kind of collateral that ensures that accommodations will be reciprocated in the future.) Plus, the country is blessed with three growing seasons, so nobody is in a hurry anyway! And if you're persistently causing problems, it will percolate to higher ups within the families and they'll set you straight through informal processes.
Contrast somewhere like England, where, for whatever reason, extended family networks began breaking down as far back as the middle ages. People in England were living in small nuclear family units back in the 14th century. When your neighbors aren't related to you, that forces people to rely on formal rules and procedures. You can't count on future reciprocity backed by the collateral of kinship ties. And if someone is causing problems, you need formal systems, based on rules and procedures, to deal with them.
These formalized systems are, in turn, far more scalable! You can plan and organize civilization building when everyone is socialized to follow formal timetables in a way that you cannot when people are socialized to follow the informal timing consensus. And the lack of individual accommodation is a feature when you scale from small networks of a dozen or so related individual to millions of people moving through the London Tube every day.
A small amount of rule breaking is tolerable, even beneficial, within a society where everyone otherwise rigidly adheres to rules.[1] But there is no developed society that isn't rule-based at the baseline level. In some places, like England, this rule-focused culture developed organically. In other places, like Japan, there was a deliberate effort to destroy extended family networks and clan structures and replace those frameworks with systems of formal rules and procedures.
[1] America is a good example of a society that is less rules-oriented than say Japan, and arguably derives some benefits from that. But even in America, we pay a price for that. Americans just aren't as good at large scale social organization as the Japanese or Taiwanese, and we compensate by structuring our society in a more decentralized way where less such organization is required in the first place. Ronny Chieng has a funny bit about how New Yorkers try to force open subway doors that have already closed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifX0oafDe3Q. This behavior, multiplied by thousands of occurrences per day, slows down the whole system.
When it comes to formalized social systems vs. informal ones, I think deciding which is better comes down to what you're trying to optimize for. Some people prefer a more rigid, punctual and formal society, where you know precisely what to expect and what not to expect, and you can rightly get upset when the expectations aren't met. Others (myself included) prefer those societies where everyone knows everyone else and everybody's related if you go back 10 generations. In my experience, which to be fair was as somewhat of an insider to the group, these kinds of societies are less stressful. They feel better to live in.
> Others (myself included) prefer those societies where everyone knows everyone else and everybody's related if you go back 10 generations. In my experience, which to be fair was as somewhat of an insider to the group, these kinds of societies are less stressful. They feel better to live in.
I agree. My mom comes from a family with thirteen siblings in Bangladesh, and moving to the U.S. was a very lonely experience. I felt the loss, but mostly got over it because I was young. My mom never did. My dad remembers a very happy childhood in his village, even though back then 20% of kids died before age 5.
But if you’re optimizing for economic development, informal societies are a hindrance. Informal societies have strong kinship networks,[1] and the intensity of kinship networks is correlated with many negative metrics: less functioning political institutions, less innovation, less specialization of labor, and lower economic growth: https://historicalpsychology.fas.harvard.edu/assets/files/20... ("We establish a tight empirical relationship between kinship intensity and economic development ... A one-SD-increase in the KII is associated with: ... a ~35% decrease in per capita luminosity and GDP worldwide ... [and] a ~10% decrease ..., within-country."); https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic... ("We report a robust association between in-marriage practices and corruption both across countries and within countries.").
[1] I'm not aware of any informal societies that don't have strong kinship networks.
Well, for a single person, yes. But for most people on the train?!?
Sadly, this attitude of designing mediocre and over-complicated systems and then sticking to them no matter the cost is very German nowadays. And we hate it. But we can't help ourselves. And this does not affect trains alone; it also affects our tax system, every government process, and often businesses.
We are unable to design better systems; we are unable to design simpler systems, and improvising is a skill we have eradicated from our minds.
> I grew up in 3rd world country and if this were to happen, train would literally stop somewhere, anywhere.
In many places without rigid rule enforcement, that kind of flexibility can actually feel more humane in practice, even if the overall system is worse. What frustrates me in the US (and sometimes in Europe) isn't rules themselves, but how aggressively and impersonally they're enforced in very ordinary situations.
For example, a friend of mine in New York casually crossed a line at a small PlayStation event and was stopped by a bodyguard as if he were bypassing airport immigration. I had a similar experience at a small event, maybe 300 people, where I tried to cross a line to get coffee and was abruptly blocked by security (they were just preparing the snacks).
Compared to more informal cultures, this kind of hyper enforcement can feel oddly hostile, especially when it's disconnected from any real safety concern.
There's a saying
"In a developing country nothing works but everything is possible. In a developed country everything works but nothing is possible"
In Lord of the Rings, fellowship of the ring when Gandalf arrives in Shire and Sam runs to meet him he says, "you're late!" to which Gandalf replies, "Deutsche Bahn is never late but arrives precisely when it means to".
The quality of culture and people you're dealing with has a huge multiplicative factor as well.
"I'm going to manufacture precision optics at competitive prices, right here, and I'm gonna tool up a factory to do it" is bold but believable in Houston or Dallas. It's a fucking joke in Trenton or Newark.
Likewise there's a whole bunch of ex-soviet 'stans and random east asian countries where such a statement is far more believable than middle easter, african and latin american ones that are of comparable GDP.
And in Germany - it seems - nothing works and nothing is possible?
Same here. An Amtrak train would just stop at the next convenient road crossing, if there were really something preventing them from stopping at the scheduled station. Most Amtrak stations don't even have staff, or any way to prevent people from coming and going, so this would most likely involve construction on the station platform itself. That’s fairly rare but the last time I took the Zephyr headed east there was exactly that situation. The construction crews had the whole platform blocked off so we boarded at the road crossing a block away.
They can't realistically do this in Germany because the tracks are so much more busy than the US. There would more than likely be a train coming the other direction within the next few minutes, and they cannot guarantee all the people have time to vacate the track area.
Right, but Germany has stations every few miles. Here in America the next station might be hours and hundreds of miles away. Better to stop ¼ mile away instead; people will hardly know the difference. The point is that if for any reason they cannot reach the station then they’ll always stop at the nearest safe place instead. The crew always have an alternate stop.
For really long construction work they’ll actually build an entirely separate train station, like they did in Denver Colorado a few years back. They knew that the construction of the new station downtown would take a few years, so they built a really cheap platform a few miles away on a siding and moved all the arrivals and departures there for the duration.
Yeah, I was on Amtrak in North Dakota somewhere and we got stopped for a couple hours waiting for a plow train. So like half the train got off in the middle of this field to play in the snow while we waited.
The Amtrak people I've met over the years pretty clearly want to do a good job in a system that is stacked against them.
I don't understand ome detail of this story: Amtrak platforms are about 110cm high. That's more than waist high for most people. So how do you let people get on and off at a grade intersection instead of at a platform?
Lol, most Amtrak platforms are at track level! I think the cars are 8” above track level, not waist high.
Every car has a metal step that will be placed in front of the door by the attendant.
Edit: Oh, except for a few lines on the East Coast where the trains are only single–level. Those are 48” above the top of track.
Looks like we both had incomplete information. I didn't know that some trains have their doors really close to the ground and it's actually very inconsistent. I'm getting a clearer picture now.
It is at least consistent within any one Amtrak route. The ones that go through the north east have to go through tunnels that can only accommodate single–level cars, while all the other routes have the double–level cars where the doors are really close to the ground.
The trains carry a step that can be placed on the ground outside the door, so you can step down from the car.
See "An Excessive Explanation of North American Platform Heights": https://youtu.be/duASHyreTRg
And now you tell me how those doors function at 110cm height instead of ground level ;)
https://media.amtrak.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Autumn-1...
I've ridden on Amtrak trains. The door for the passenger compartments is in the middle of the observation cars, the oval on the lower level is the window on the door. You can see 3 of them on the 3 cars. The crew would put out a step at stops which was helpful considering the age of most of the passengers.
Up top are seats and maybe a lounge, below are bedrooms, bathrooms, and storage. There's a spiral staircase to change levels.
The locomotive has steps right outside the wheels with handrails.
I'm not sure I follow what you're trying to say.
It's pretty obvious where the doors are (middle), which have windows. My point, replying to my parent, was that they said Amtrak platforms are at 110cm height. The lowest part of those doors are not at 110cm height, but much lower, almost as if the platform was much much lower than my parent claimed ;)
And yes, trains do exist, which either have doors at two different heights (these don't seem to) or that either automatically fold away so you can get out at ground level via the stairs that are revealed/created by the mechanism or that simply stay up for platform height entry/exit. Used both types. Now, whether or not Amtrak has those in specific parts of the US I can't say.
Anywhere doesn't help you much. You want to stop at a station with sufficiently good connections to continue your travels.
This situation seems pretty unusual, even for the DB. A regional express train should have many more stops than that. It sounds a bit like they switched the train to a direct connection to the final stop because they switched to the other side of the rhine (so you can't make any of the other planned stops anyway).
The major mistake here was not making the stop in Troisdorf. At the point where they missed that they should have planned the earliest usable stop for the passengers that needed to leave there.
I would also assume that there is no safe way for the conductor to halt at any earlier stop. A safe halt would need to be planned at a higher level.
My experience with these "fixes" is that they are worse than the other worst solution (in this case, step out in Köln Süd and get some other train).
There is really A LOT going on through the tracks in NRW and Düsseldorf/Köln/Bonn. It's sad people just read an article like this and just blame it on the poor guy as if he was a monkey.
The guy actually wanted to do something nice (get people closer to Bonn, so they could change a train with an easier alternative). It didn't work out, but this shows how bad the sync with these systems is, and safety is and must be prioritized.
People don't understand how many freight trains travel on those tracks.
Not if you live near the tracks! Obviously that’s a bit of a safety issue, though, not to mention taking a few minutes time from (potentially) hundreds of people to gain a few tens of minutes for yourself.
> bit of a safety issue
OK, so you disgorge however many people, at what age, with or without babies in ipushchairs or people in wheelchairs, onto the tracks, and they avoid the passing 100mph trains, they then walk along in the dark and rain for a few miles looking for a gap in the fence?
Sure, just a "bit" of an issue.
No, you let them off at the nearest station or level crossing. Here in America that would generally be within a block of where the train was supposed to stop anyway. There are a few stations with “underground” tracks that would have to let you off a little further away, but every station has some safe place to do so. It’ll be a place the crew knows about ahead of time as well.
There in America your trains have steps down to the floor so letting people off at level crossings are fine. You also tend to have
American railways are far less regimented than European or Chinese, when you have 3 trains a day you can do stuff like that
You can do it in any train system designed to be resilient to failures. The Germans have apparently designed a system that incentivizes (or even forces) the conductor (or the dispatchers) to do ridiculous things that waste hours of their customer’s time to fix instead of simple and obvious things that take minutes to fix like just stopping at the next available station.
Around here if the Conductor gets a call from dispatch telling him that a station is unavailable, the dispatcher will already have cleared the train to stop at some logical alternate location. That might mean another train station in the same city or a specific level crossing. It might mean delaying or stopping conflicting traffic. They’ve thought ahead and planned a way to fix the problem _without_ carting passengers an hour out of their way.
I mean, to an extent... like it would still give passengers an earlier opportunity to correct course.
If they got off at the next stop after troisdorf they could take the local bus back to Troisdorf (ten minute wait worst-case).
At later stations they could get on the train in the opposite direction (30 min wait worst-case).
> I feel like we lost humanity somewhere in modern world. I grew up in 3rd world country and if this were to happen, train would literally stop somewhere, anywhere. (With the assumption it’s safe from crewing into another train).
While Iran is not a third-world country per se, you'd be surprised how many times the bus driver would stop at random locations closer to passengers' destinations as well as bus stations.
There's more flexibility in day-to-day life of Iranians; people are expected to follow the rules but there's also this ancient concept of "morovvat" in the culture which encourages self-sacrifice for the betterment of others. Ask any tourist who's traveled to Iran and they tell you about the hospitality of Iranian people; e.g., you ask someone how to get to a place and they literally pause whatever they were doing and walk you to that place so you don't get lost!
It's strange how the image of Iran has been stained by the theocratic government (which Iranians protest against many times...).
Note that DB definitely has processes to add stops ad-hoc. It's just that nobody bothered in this case.
It's a big, systemically failing organization running way beyond its capacity. Failures rippling through and compounding in a tightly coupled rail network.
If they weren't able to announce the train would stop at one station, why do you think they'll be able to do that at another?
I'm pretty sure train conductors aren't allowed to just stop somewhere unscheduled for good reasons, there's always a train behind and in front of them with no buffer.
train conductors are not controlling the train. that is done from a central (regional) control center that manages all trains of the region. only there someone decides where trains go or stop
Usually the train driver is in radio contact with central control and can request changes to the points, signals etc so they can make unscheduled stops. For example if there's a medical emergency on board and a passenger needs to be transferred to an ambulance.
Of course doing this can have ripple effects on other services, and if a common factor has severely delayed dozens of different trains, the central control room might not have enough staff to deal with dozens of unscheduled stop requests.
Also everyone complains about punctuality. A train stopping "nilly willy" somewhere it's not scheduled can very much cause exactly that in such a tightly scheduled system. So if you can, you avoid it.
Since we don't know "the other side of the story", we can't really tell. All people here see is the "I got kidnapped". If the story was written from the control room person's perspective, they might write a fascinating story about how they single-handedly avoided 17 trains being late by sending one train on a detour.
Would be awesome if there was someone on HN that knows if DB actually has the capacity to run a scheduling algorithm for their network within a few minutes, repeatedly, for many different trains at a moments notice. What kind of infra do they have for that, what do they use? With a large, interconnected, network that's tightly scheduled already that can't be easy.
OP was also unlucky in that he was on a regional train. They prioritize long distance trains usually as a regional train can more easily wait on a lower speed limit track somewhere than a fast long distance train on a potentially shared single track bottleneck.
Best example of this is when they hit someone. Train has to stop, control center has no say in it.
(For longer “technical” delays, keep an eye out for emergency vehicles without their sirens on.)
> Train has to stop, control center has no say in it.
And then you have cascading delays across a whole region.
Yes that was my point.
Used to work for a bus company: lady had asked driver to drop her off 10 meters from the next bus stop. Then fell into a hole, broke her leg. Then sued us.
At one university in Denmark that opened in 1972 there used to not be a train stop. Instead of going to the nearby city central station and walk for half an hour, you’d pull the emergency break in the middle of a field, traverse the field and reach the university. Pulling the emergency break was of course not allowed, but it was very common.
Today, pulling the emergency break to get off in a field would quickly end you on surveillance videos and with a large fine for obstructing operations, possibly with a detour to the police station for a stern conversation.
I miss the “yeah, whatever” attitude.
The Germans follow the rules too strictly and in South America we ignore the rules too lightly.
I wonder if there's a country somewhere with the right balance.
I think for all of our problems, the US does get this right - we know when to be formal and when to be informal, and its something that is well culturally ingrained - that is the spirit and intent of the rules should be considered as strongly as the actual words.
France, while not perfect, is still balancing it +/- correctly.
France has a reputation of being permanently on strike, but is perhaps the only European country that is simultaneously northern European and Mediterranean at the same time.
No idea if there still is, but there definitely used to be. These things change over time, as culture does. Half a decade ago, pretty much everywhere in Europe followed rules less strictly. The balance was almost surely better.
We live in a society where complaining is considered "verbal abuse" or "harassment", but where we have to put up and shut up about everything going on.
The message out of 2020 and 2021, is that the big people know what they're doing and we don't.
We live in a society where being the victim of verbal abuse or harassment or various isms and all sorts of other petty things confers legitimacy and power upon one's opinion. There's a subtle difference.
Thankfully it seems to be waning slightly.
No, I don't mean that at all. I've had to complain about things before and they accuse you of shouting (when you're not). They almost want people to swear, and rile them up, because that gives them the excuse to do nothing.
>They almost want people to swear
that is sadly exactly how most people operate now. Somebody gives legitimate critique to an issue? simply tone police them and you can claim all they say is [ism] or hate speech and therefore not even worth engaging with.
You're reading way too much into my use of the word "opinion". It's just whatever side of whatever the issue is be it customer service ad Burger King or some arcane discussion about compilers.
Yes, I'm aware of identity politics, but that is not what I'm talking about. I'm a member of a couple of minorities myself, and it confers little privilege on me with or without the abuse.
You're missing the point. Some people are quick to claim that the other person is being unreasonable in a way that's socially agreed upon to be bad as a justification for whatever their thing is, whether that's being a lazy worker at a min-wage job or anything else. And of course sometimes these people don't even wait for unreasonable behavior. They will characterize "hey can you please do your job" that way because it suits them.
This is a figment of living in a culture where being right but distasteful in a variety of poorly defined but broadly similar ways effectively makes you wrong. Toward the other end of the spectrum is stuff like "I don't care if he's a card carrying nazi he builds good rockets" and other stuff like that.
This has been done in USA using slow moving freight inner-city. Just can't do it on passenger service. It is illegal, but there is no one around to enforce it, the vast majority of the time.
I can neither confirm nor deny, I may have done it to get to/from the grocery store from near my house when I didn't have money for a car.
>I feel like we lost humanity somewhere in modern world.
When every useful idiot is screeching about statistical optimization you lose any optimization for anything that isn't measured or isn't optimized for.
Like it's not hard to imagine the breathless comments on HN about how trains should never(TM) stop without a platform if they'd have stopped the train on both sides and some old lady tripped and fell and broke her nose on the rail.
It reminds me of letting a child that's too young to not be stupid pick it's own dinner and it picks of candy then to the surprise of nobody with a brain it's cranky later despite being calorically satisfied by the numbers.
>The modern world where everything is “safety issue” and “someone else’s problem” is where we lost our ways, and it’s never coming back.
It'll come back if there's something bad enough that happens to kick society back to a point where "lol we ain't got the spare resources for that shut up and go away" becomes an acceptable way to deal with the peddlers of these things. But anything that gets us that far won't be pretty.
> trains should never(TM) stop without a platform if they'd have stopped the train on both sides and some old lady tripped and fell and broke her nose on the rail.
Yes. That is a good reason to not stop without a platform. But I tell you one even better. Look at the layout of the Troisdorf station. There are tracks with platforms, and there are through tracks. The trough tracks are surrounded by live tracks on both sides. If the train stops there, unlocks the doors, and somehow coaxes the people to climb down those people are immediately on a live track. To get off of it they have to cross the track and climb up a raised platform. And who knows when is a train coming on that track. The risk here is not breaking the nose of one old lady (which by the way, can easily kill an old person) but forcing hundreds of passengers into a meat grinder. But go on with your snark.
Dumping people on the tracks is not the solution here. Going beyond the station and stopping there (which is always safe in the "other trains are not going to run into yours" sense, that is what signals are for) then letting the signallers set the points for you to reverse back into the station is the solution.
>Yes. That is a good reason to not stop without a platform. But I tell you one even better. Look at the layout of the Troisdorf station. There are tracks with platforms, and there are through tracks. The trough tracks are surrounded by live tracks on both sides. If the train stops there, unlocks the doors, and somehow coaxes the people to climb down those people are immediately on a live track. To get off of it they have to cross the track and climb up a raised platform. And who knows when is a train coming on that track. The risk here is not breaking the nose of one old lady (which by the way, can easily kill an old person) but forcing hundreds of passengers into a meat grinder. But go on with your snark.
This is unfortunately exactly an example of the type of take I was complaining about.
Just let the people who are actually there and can actually see the situation use some judgement.
Arbitrarily halting traffic on an arbitrary section of track isn't something the parties involved don't know how to do. It's something that happens somewhere in the rail network every day for some reason or another. It's a supported function. I trust them to be able to invoke it.
> Just let the people who are actually there and can actually see the situation use some judgement.
Okay. But we are beyond that. The people who were there handled the situation and we both seem to agree that they didn't handle it well. We just seem to disagree how they should have handled it differently.
Your proposal is that they should have dumped people on the tracks. My proposal is that they should have done more to get the train next to a platform.
> This is unfortunately exactly an example of the type of take I was complaining about
Tell me where do you disagree. Have you looked at the track layout of the station? Have you looked at images of the platforms?
Wait, are you saying you did?
> Wait, are you saying you did?
I'm confused about what are you asking. Are you asking if I have looked at the layout of the station and the images of the platforms? If so yes. That's how I'm describing it in my first post.
You can too. Here is a general layout for passengers: https://www.bahnhof.de/en/troisdorf/map
You can look at satellite images of the station via google maps, or you can check the track and signalling arrangements on https://www.openrailwaymap.org/
On top of that you can see the platforms in question on wikimedia: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/S13_Troi...
You can't be honestly claiming that the people exercised poor judgement when their freedom of action is constrained by the fact that they are hemmed in by all manner of rules in a highly rule following culture and that that poor judgement is justification for further reduced autonomy?
They ("ze germans" broadly speaking) should've handed this 300yr ago by not heading down a path (in their defense it probably wasn't obvious) to a culture that create obvious failures by following rules to the point of absurdity.
The train is just an example, and unfortunately there's no control train. If not the train then the absurd and trivially avoidable failure will be something else.
It sounds like you are an expert on DB rules and how they affect the decision making of the various entities in this story. So I will leave that part to you. I personally don't form opinion on things I don't know about.
What I know, and what I'm repeating now in the third comment, is that it would not have been safe to let the passengers out on the platform-less track there. Not because of rules, but because of common sense.
Not with trains, but I have a GO Transit (regional) bus that passes within a block of my house, whereas the actual official stop is about a fifteen minute walk away. I have taken that bus home many times, and the drivers are always willing to pull over at the stoplight and let me hop off.
I wonder if it's not safety but money. In the UK, train operators pay station operators a fixed fee to stop. As a result trains can't just stop somewhere randomly (except I hope in an emergency) even if that would benefit many people. All this is, needless to say, very stupid.
They actually do. I was on a train a month ago from Sheffield to London and a passenger was on the wrong train and they scheduled an extra stop to get them on the right train. Kind of restored my faith in humanity a bit tbh.
They did this for me once on an Intercity or whatever they call them these days. I fell asleep and woke up to my Mum waving at me from the station platform in Lancaster or somewhere wondering why I had not gotten off the train as it pulled out of the station. The conductor was kind enough to stop the train at some random cattle grid barely-even-a-platform in the middle of nowhere and radioed the train coming the other direction to pick me up. Bless.
I don't think so as in this case Deutsche Bahnn owns both the station and the train. In the UK they've gone a bit crazy with the whole free market thing. Public transport should not be a market.
In Germany there's also the issue that the powerful car makers are always lobbying the government to budget cut public transport.
Germany does actually have station fees. And DB isn't the only operator. The RRX trains, one of which OP talked about, are operated by DB and National Express, ordered by the RRX group comprised of VRR, go.Rheinland, NWL, SPNV-Nord and NVV, running on tracks and stations by DB InfraGO.
Transport for Wales has nationalised its trains. A lot of the infrastructure is paid for by the state as well.
By the way, I can remember the state run British Rail and that was bad too. Neither nationalisation nor private operators have done well with British trains over the past fifty years.
The current UK government is re-nationalising the railways. Several operators are currently nationalised (and the train fares have dropped!), and the plan is for all of them to be, once the contracts run out.
The Welsh government has already nationalised local trains.
I'm still not sure why everywhere's devolved except England.
London is one of the places that least needed to be devolved (because the UK is run like a city state). It is in England the last time I checked. Bits of Northern England have been offered it and refused it.
There has been some popular demand for Cornish devolution, but Whitehall is only prepared to entertain it within some greater south west region.
There is also some devo to councils.
The arrangement (now gradually coming to an end) in the UK is very silly, ToCs (which run trains) were district from the ultimate station owner (which was various notionally for-profit companies but of course always ultimately the government) and the track owners. Most of that nonsense is being gradually absorbed into a single government owned passenger rail entity.
A "one under" (likely suicide) plus signal problems (which can be basically anything) meant I was delayed by over an hour home from Yorkshire on Saturday, but that also means it was effectively free.
There was a post on hn by someone who built a model to predict which trains are going to be late to get ticket refunds and travel for free (albeit slower).
On a warm summer evening, on a train bound for nowhere, a passenger missed their stop.
Conductor radioed ahead and the train heading the other way stopped when we passed it and the passenger was transferred over.
They didn’t have to do that, but it was nice.
They’ve also hired a cab for a station miss that was their fault.
Lost humanity is right, and it stems from lost community.
During the Great Financial Crisis astute observers pointed to the loss of local bankers for most transactions as a component of the multifaceted structural causes. When you have your mortgage through the bank down the street, you're much less likely to mail them the keys instead of paying your bill, especially if you have to see the banker in the grocery store etc.
What did we do about this? Of course we didn't learn anything - we actually further consolidated banking.
The same is true of train service, traffic etiquette, and political discourse. The tragedy of the commons is exacerbated by moving away from local community.
It’s been boiling for a long time. Steinbeck wrote this nearly a century ago:
"I built it with my hands. Straightened old nails to put the sheathing on. Rafters are wired to the stringers with baling wire. It's mine. I built it. You bump it down — I'll be in the window with a rifle. You even come to close and I'll pot you like a rabbit."
"It's not me. There's nothing I can do. I'll lose my job if I don't do it. And look — suppose you kill me? They'll just hang you, but long before your hung there will be another guy on the tractor, and he'll bump the house down. You're not killing the right guy."
"That's so," the tenant said. "Who gave you orders? I'll go after him. He's the one to kill."
"You're wrong. He got his orders from the bank. The bank told them: "Clear those people out or it's your job."
"Well, there's a president of the bank. There's a Board of Directors. I'll fill up the magazine of the rifle and go into the bank."
The driver said: "Fellow was telling me the bank gets orders from the East. The orders were: "Make the land show profit or we'll close you up."
"But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don't aim to starve to death before I kill the man that's starving me."
"I don't know. Maybe there's nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn't man at all. Maybe, like you said, the property's doing it. Anyway I told you my orders."
At the end of the day you have to actually shoot someone from time to time to keep everyone in line.
It's way cheaper to not wrong people or to not walk up so close to that line than it is to secure the full stack and pay everyone what you'd need to pay them to compensate them for the risk of being the unlucky guy who gets scalped on livestream or whatever form sloppy retribution takes.
During the 30yr prior to the GFC the kinds of Americans who don't work in downtown offices, don't get compensated partly in RSUs and who aren't represented well in internet discussions and mainstream media complained fairly unanimously about the same things. Regulation forced their main street economies to either consolidate or pack up for China. The industrial employers got scooped up by the conglomerates and turned into poorly paying meat grinders with no "good" jobs or left entirely. The grocery store and hardware store became a Walmart. But nobody listened to them when they complained.
You're touching on points that Ayn Rand touched on in Atlas Shrugged, which as it happens uses the dynamics of the running of a railway as a metaphor for organisational incompetence and which opens on a scene of railway workers refusing to take initiative and following policy blindly.
Where she started to go a little weird is she thought anyone who had an idea had the right to just go do that, and society can go hang (she grew up suffering the worst Sovietism could serve up, her concept of community was damaged as a result). Unfortunately, her ideas are now held close to the hearts of some of the most powerful people on Earth, who are also going a little weird.
I'm actually OK with experts deciding that a particular policy is the right way to keep people safe. What I'm not OK with is using the policy as a prop to avoid independent thought or agility. I'd rather that instead of a procedure or a policy, people were taught a way of thinking about the World.
"We're not allowed to stop at the next station because we're not registered to do so", is a statement made in deference to a policy regardless of whether it makes sense or not. "We need to spend a few minutes making sure we're registered at the next station before we go any further" complies with the policy, but is a person taking ownership of resolving the problem, and comes from a place of empathy for the passengers on board. We need more of the latter, but unfortunately the Randian version we're now getting is "We'll stop or carry on wherever the driver feels like because he is sat at the controls so there's nothing anybody can do about that".
Your quote is missing a crucial bit. The full quote is «we're not registered to do so, so we are on the wrong tracks».
You were supposed to take the last exit, to be on the local road instead of the highway. No, we cannot let you off on the highway. We are not allowed to stop here. There are no stops. We wait for another exit. Sorry.
Was that the situation?
> I'm actually OK with experts deciding that a particular policy is the right way to keep people safe.
That's actually the nub of the topic. Humans can accumulate some expertise in this or that topic, to some limited extend. But they can't integrate all the cases that actual people are going to face in an anticipated manner.
There are different kind of attitude with expertise. Some people will grow humility as they realize how little they know and how tiny their individual contribution actually is in the grand scheme of cosmos. Other will grow a metastased ego and leverage on the little few things they believe firmly to grab as much political power as they can to enforce whatever fantasy come to their mind as they get out of touch from feedback from the rest of humanity (except the yes-man court).
If an expert have meaningful things to share, of course it should be considered. But not as an absolute authority. Experts can also be fake people, or bribed, or missing clues about the specific context, just as well as be perfectly on point with well framed context and best intention to the general public at heart. But taking blindly anything that an expert labeled person for unquestionable certitudes is a receipt for the kind of trouble exposed in this thread.
Tracks 3, 4 and 7 at the station in question are not adjacent to a platform. It sort of makes sense to route a train over these if there is no stop planned there (intentional or not).
Here's the map of the station:
https://www.bahnhof.de/troisdorf/karte
Of course it does. So it also makes sense that if you are operating that train, you make sure you don't end up on tracks 3, 4 or 7. You stop and verify that the signalling and routing is in place to let you stop at that station before it becomes too late and that option becomes impossible.
This is basic management, it's basic competence.
The train was misrouted because nobody cared about routing it properly: the driver, the conductor, the signallers, the routers, the management. Something weird happened and everyone shrugged and started to hum "Que sera, sera" to themselves, rather than committing to doing a job in the passengers' interests.
So true. Another third worlder and it's still the same. On the interesting side, if they didn't stop we would make sure a coach or two (empty of course) experiences some arson or fractures. From major to minor depending upon how pissed the locals were. No, I am not condoning it course. Trains should not be burnt. Buses are a different story though. (That included not stopping even after the "chain pulls" :P)
Or maybe the tracks the train was routed onto didn't have platforms at the station.
In 3rd world countries it might be acceptable for people to jump out of 5-foot high carriages onto live tracks with trains running at 100mph for convenience, but not in Germany
He has a loaded lawyer and is not afraid to use him. The world is filled with economic traps like this. All the economic advantages gained by the commoner, would unravel by one risk of harm coming for the driver and the company.
Humanity has been codified into rules, and the rule does not allow throwing out people somewhere random, because that would be differently inhuman (and someone would sue you if they have a bigger harm than lost time).
Ugh. don’t remind me. my fiancée and I live in different cities in Germany. the train ride is 5 hours. but it has been 15h in the past just because DB is DB. and the only thing we got for it was like a 10 eur discount voucher. 10 hours of my life partner’s time is worth a lot more than 10 eur. i have cussed them and their mothers countless times, DB is a garbage transportation company owned and ran by garbage people.
Sounds like Amtrak in the US, except here you get no compensation at all. And I've always been told how great the European railroads are.
In some places, European trains are decent. I don't have much experience with US trains other than them having very high steps to get onto.
in switzerland it’s amazing. france is way more efficient too because the low and high speed rails are largely physically separated. in germany everything shares everything and they rely on proper scheduling to make it work. which is never proper
Europe is a big place
This has nothing to do with lost humanity.
In my experience, this doesn't always happen, and I say this as someone who traveled very often on that same RE5. The situation is what it is (poor maintenance, etc), but the main issue is that the tracks are shared with freight trains impossible to stop given their weight, so to avoid collisions and have a nice (albeit late) Christmas, they made that call to play it safe, rather than have a freight train crash into a train full of people.
I wouldn't blame it on the person, I would rather blame it on the shitty system the train driver has to rely on - apparently so unreliable they had to do what they did. Keep in mind, that's a delay also for that person who very likely doesn't want to work on that day either - the same person that has to deal with that level of BS every day now.
Of course, just to be clear, there is always the German ready to save the world by following an idiotic nonsense procedure, but that's everywhere in the world.
> I have fond memories of train stopping close to my house for various random reasons and I’d just get out so I don’t have to walk back from the station. The modern world where everything is “safety issue” and “someone else’s problem” is where we lost our ways, and it’s never coming back.
You got lucky many times. All it takes is that one time someone makes the wrong call and you get smashed by a train. In Europe this is very rarely the case, because exactly of these "nonsense" rules.
The main issue is the shitty maintenance/sync with other trains etc. "Digitalization".
How long would it take for the train to register at a station? What happened to traffic control via semaphores?
This situation is an absolutely perverse application of policy.
I have no idea, but don't you think that the driver would have rather stopped at that station, instead of traveling an additional 50km or whatever?
The situation is rather an indicator of how bad public transportation has become due to lack of investments, maintenance, expansion, etc. For years they didn't care a bit about this.
Why should a driver risk his life and/or job to save the day, when the issue is bigger than him/her?
i think most humanity left when corporates began to dominate industries and everyone just had to follow rules and structures
Why NOBODY pulled emergency stop
Nobody on the train was registered to do so.
Remember the rules are written in blood
I lived in Berlin for 10 years. In my experience, people complain too much about German public transport. But comming from a south american country with reasonably good public transport, I found German's one very good.
The only thing I can agree is the "speaking only in german as if it was the lingua franca of the world". Germany is part of the EU. The EU has 24 langueages. You should at least speak in English. And no, my mother language is not english but spanish.
I had a 10am international flight to the US out of Munich. I boarded the train at the central station at 7am.
At 8:15 they dropped us off several stops away from the airport, claiming this train could not continue because it was so delayed. So we hung out in the country...
I finally go to the airport at 9am, rushed to the gate, but they people manning the counter had left (it's usually the flight attendants that man the counters I guess). I called the airline to try to get someone up there, but after waiting 45min on hold the flight had boarded and it was too late.
also, whatever jackass put ellipsis "..." substitution on the Munich flight board because "H32" or whatever was too long to fit into to their div and they couldn't bear messing out their UI, needs a flogging. The UI on the flight board is completely useless, but OH does it it look pretty
My first thought on seeing the headline was: Charlie on the M. T. A.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdymgQmdK_A
So that is what the classic "Cheney on MTA" Lisp implementation paper was named after. It felt like a reference, but I never had an idea about what it was referring to. Thanks!
Ha, that was my immediate thought as well!
Unfortunately travelling in Germany by train has become a mess, hence why so many reach out for car or inland flights.
Delays are to be expected, trains cancelled without reasoning, train stations skipped in similar ways as described on the article, and if using connections, better plan for at least 30m interval, while taking into account a plan B for every connection that might be missed.
I've attempted to take two DB trains this year, while travelling both through Germany and with Berlin as a destination. In the end there were seven trains, and 8 hours extra lost travelling with DB. My compensation was pitiful.
Living in the Netherlands (not native Dutch) I will now rather fly than take a train if it means that I can avoid using DB.
For contrast, tomorrow morning I am heading from the Netherlands to Paris with a train (non DB), and don't really expect anything but a pleasant and smooth journey.
> I was trying to travel 35 kilometers. I was now 63 kilometers from my grandmother’s house. Further away than when I started.
Oh boy. There's something deeply human about the frustrations of state institutions and bureaucracy.
From the linked article:
> How are train cancellations and delays compensated when traveling with the Deutschland-Ticket?
> In the event of a delay of at least 60 minutes at the destination station due to a delay or train cancellation in local transport, you will receive €1.50 compensation per case.
> Amounts under €4 will not be paid out due to a legal de minimis threshold. However, you can accumulate multiple late payment claims.
https://www.bahn.de/faq/deutschlandticket-verspaetung-erstat...
Maybe worth mentioning that this „1.50€ compensation“ rule only matters if you use the „Deutschland-Ticket“ which is a fixed price ticket for a whole month, unlimited travel on the Regio lines (short distance trains, i.e. non IC)
If you bought a regular route ticket you get 25% and more than an hour delay, and 50% at more than two hours. Not sure how it is with other multi-use tickets.
This, combined with the certain delays CAN make traveling by train quite affordable… /s
https://www.bahn.de/service/informationen-buchung/fahrgastre...
Planes have never diverted people to the wrong country. It’s always state institutions.
Happens regularly. And if you don't have a visa for the new destination, well, too bad.
E.g. on December 20 a WizzAir flight 4768 was diverted to Thessaloniki (Greece) instead of its destination Skopje (North Macedonia): https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/WZZ4768/history/2025... . Those with Schengen visas (or appropriate passports) got a bus to Skopje. The rest allegedly waited for three hours and then got returned to Cyprus (EU, but not Schengen), but to a different airport (Paphos instead of Larnaca). So if someone had a car left on Larnaca's parking, too bad.
Of course it does. I forgot ya is can’t tell sarcasm when it splashes them in the face.
But when a train had to divert and delays someone by an hour or two it’s somehow kidnapping.
Here's just one example of planes doing exactly that. https://dailynewshungary.com/wizz-air-tirana-podgorica-fligh...
Reminds me of my time in Scotland. I commuted by train, and they published stats that showed my route as 95% on time "excepting conditions outside our control". In the year I was there, the train arrived on-time exactly once. Apparently very little was under their control.
They did occasionally announce the reasons for delays. Two that I remember: "Leaves on the track" in Autumn, what a surprise. "The wrong kind of snow" um...it's Winter, it snowed, it was nothing special?
The leaves are actually a big deal because they get crushed into a slippery film that stops the wheels making good friction with the rails. Occasionally you will see specialised debris-removal vehicles moving along the tracks and spraying them
> The leaves are actually a big deal because...
Because of the substandard, cost-cutting line-side vegetation mismanagement coupled with the NIMBYs and save-the-planet warriors getting up-in-arms. Plus high wages making proactive vegetation management not cost-effective due to the extent. Network Rail is well aware of the issue but due to budget cuts, can't do much.
Behind every excuse on the railway, if you peel back just a tiny bit of the layer, you'll see the real reasons. In the UK it's usually "we need to spend that money on the NHS and welfare" and "ROSCO profits are not put back into the railway"
Since it is a recurring event, one would assume preventive steps are taken such as frequent cleaning of the tracks in autumn.
On a recent train from London to Bath. it was delayed because the train in front of me had hit a swan and came off worse for the wear. Its passengers had to disembark, and ours had to stop to take them on.
On the train back, we were delayed by the train in front of us catching fire.
The most maddening part about this experience is the helplessness. Its inconvenient, sure. Ive been late because of traffic, etc. Being carried along well beyond my will without a breakglass: Fine, I'll just walk! option makes my skin crawl.
Events like this seem to only be explained by accountability sink[0]. Naming it gives me some brief sense of sanity.
I appreciate that there is a safety concern; where's the humanity in large systems, especially as we trend towards more automation?
[0] https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/accountability-sinks
As a Russian, this is such a bonkers idea to me. I only took a Deutsche Bahn train once so far. It got delayed 20 minutes. When I complained about it on social media, I was told something like "what do you mean, it arrived and took you where you wanted to go".
Russian trains only get delayed if there's something seriously wrong. Like an accident or an act of sabotage because of the war. A month or so ago, a Sapsan train from St Petersburg to Moscow broke down en route. People had to wait for hours to get out. It made big news. As far as I can tell, this is a weekly occurrence in Germany.
Oh man, DB has one of the worst experiences in my well traveled history.
If you don't buy a seat, you don't get a seat. I was taking the 4am train 8 hours from Brussels to Berlin, and I bought seats for both legs of the trip. To sleep, of course.
The first leg of the trip was delayed, so they gave me a free ticket on the next train, 40 minutes later, but with no seat.
So, exhausted as all hell and wanting nothing more than a little nap, I was forced to stand in one of the hallways between the carriages, unable to rest much even vertically because people had to push past me to get to the bathroom.
Absolutely horrid experience.
This train (RE5 (RRX) 28521) is not operated by Deutsche Bahn.
The operator is called National Express. Their trains look completely different than the ones of Deutsche Bahn.
https://nationalexpress.de/de/re5
As I live around the area where this happened and I am well aware of how DB is on this route, this story sounds extremely sketchy - why would the train change lines to the other side of the Rhine and not stop at any of the 17 (!!!) stops along the way to Neuwied? Especially with people in it?
The problem was a broken relay, no trains were able to run for a few hours through Bonn. The official statement said that the trains have stopped and were replaced by buses.
I know how sketchy it sounds, and it was even documented in DB Navigator. But DB makes this information inaccessible a couple of days later in the app, so there is no way to „proof“ it except asking DB itself.
Just to be sure: your blog post mentions 24.12.2024 - did you mean 2025?
Is this the right connection?:
https://bahn.expert/details/NX%2028521/j/20251224-a0049123-9...
The RE5 seems to be operated by National Express, not Deutsche Bahn, right? (but DB InfraGo is most probably responsible for the routing)
Yes it is! And yes it was a typo! Thank you for finding the link to it. I was trying to find it before but couldn’t find it in official sources, DB deleted it from the official app. It did not stop at Troisdorf though.
It is operated by National Express, but I guess the routing comes from some other company (likely InfraGo)
Well I’ll be damned, I’ve really seen it all, OP sorry for doubting w
At some point your Regio Express turned into an Intercity. Free upgrade!
> Apparently we were not registered at Troisdorf station, so we are on the wrong tracks. We cannot stop.”
And of course there is some huge fine or even potentially jail time if you moo in protest and pull that nice red lever to avoid the Christmas present of this bureaucratic idiocy (after all, you have legs that are capable of crossing train tracks and eyes to do that safely)?
It's for emergency.. if that happened to me I'd argue in court that I thought the driver went insane (because a system can't work like that) so it qualified as emergency..
But back to my country (Poland), it's better here - some had problems with physically getting out on the right station, and when the conductor saw it she even encouraged us to pull this lever in those cases so we don't have to get out at the wrong station.
Hyper-ventilate some, scream "Its too hot in here, I think I'm dying!" and presto-bango your very first panic attack and mental breakdown.
To some extend I'd like rail operators being forced to follow the same rules as airlines in terms of compensation for delays. As the only thing that seems to work in cases like this is financial motivation.
I've seen this in the same region, possibly on this exact line last year. I was going from Paris to Copenhagen, managed to have only 5 hours of delay. The return journey took 30 hours more and I could only get one hotel night reimbursed.
I changed my ticket to get a French train as soon as possible.
Other survival story: I lived in Northern Germany in the late 2000s as a young exchange student. Almost all the DB lines in the region would go through a particular railway node where, almost every Friday, someone (probably an evil reincarnator) would commit suicide, blocking the whole region.
My reflex: so as soon as the train would stop, I'd get out, get a taxi, then convince 4 other people to go to Hamburg or even Hannover with me, sharing the cost.
Never regretted.
You got Deutsche Bahned. IF anyone watches Jet Lag The Game on YouTube, they play hide and seek games around Europe, and whenever they're on a Deutsche Bahn something almost always goes awry.
I used DB quite a few times last month and all of the delays and problems were listed on the trip planner website (in German and in English) despite there being no notifications at the departure station and the train driver speaking in German only when communicating.
We had a trip planned in which we needed a specific train. The website said “there has been an incident on the tracks. There will be a delay of 20-50 minutes waiting for a platform. Not all connections will be made,” and that is exactly what happened. This worked for our time window so we took the train. But there were a lot of confused and upset passengers who had absolutely no idea what was going on.
I’m sure DB has many problems, but one of them appears to be communication that surely isn’t too difficult to fix.
I like the Norwegian model: The train company is obliged to put up alternative transport to your destination. If they don't provide an alternative within reasonable time, you can demand refunds for documented costs for alternative transport up to fairly reasonable limits.
I've been bundled into taxis by the train operator in Norway because it was expected, but also likely cheaper for them to ensure full taxis than have people arrange it themselves and end up with everyone able to demand the maximum refund.
The costs are low enough that it's not a problem if it happens occasionally, but does create some real pressure to actually fix issues if it happens often enough.
This has been EU-wide legislation for quite some time, see https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/passenger-right...
> EU countries can decide to exempt some rail services. These exceptions may apply to urban, suburban, regional, long-distance domestic trains
I never understood why the Germans cannot get their shit together on commercial train travel. Austria manages to coordinate a wonderful federal train system across nine federal states without issues via the ÖBB, the Swiss also seem to have it down.
Fundamentally, the Germans tried to cheap out on high speed trains by trying to engineer them to run on normal tracks so they didn't have to build new, expensive high-speed tracks like France and Japan did.
This is the fundamental mistake underpinning their train service since the long distance trains frequently have to wait for other trains to pass, cascading delays through the system.
That and an almost criminal level of underinvestment in the past 20 years or so.
I travel to Cologne about 5 times a year. 2h ride, usually 25 minutes late in each direction. Just go to the board bistro right away, order some food (if available), grab a beer or coffee and don't look at the time.
I tried taking the train to Prague this year for my birthday. I’m from Berlin so taking the train made sense on paper. I could have taken the car but I thought that it might be more relaxing to just sit for the 4h or so it takes.
In Dresden we were told that they had issues with the power lines on the Czechia side and had to leave the train. It was still an hour to the border but seemed to be the best place to dump all the people and let them go the merry way the rest of the journey. The basic service was a printed paper directly out of the connection lookup system. No info if this connection is actually the best or makes sense since other travelers will be also on route. We had to switch trains 2 more times and arrived in Prague at around Midnight. Let’s say I really don’t want to take the train anywhere at the moment. Sidestory. Check the current state of the S-Bahn Service (run by DB) in Berlin. One wonder why they bother to announce issues with the system day in and out. They could just switch over and announce when stuff is running smoothly instead.
Something similar happened to me between Essen and Dortmund while trying to get to the airport. The train stoped around 50 minutes between stations without a chance of getting off the train. I lost my flight as a result.
I have also been left in remote villages when the last train of the day broke for some reason at 12:30 am. All travellers and myself had to look for Ubers, which the government also tries to suppress.
I agree with some comenters that German companies seem to prefer to stuck with Bureaucracy other than finding what could be confortable or even human solutions.
> All travellers and myself had to look for Ubers, which the government also tries to suppress.
No one is trying to suppress Uber. They are just obligated to adhere to the law like anyone else in this business.
The ticket mentioned in the article seems to be a Deutschland ticket, unfortunately compensation is low. For time sensitive trip I often consider other option.
The weirdest thing in my city is that the bus driver often forgets 1 or 2 stops. There was a kid bursted into tear when she lost her direction on her way back home from school because the bus driver took a "wrong" path.
We have this sickness in the UK too. I think it may be terminal. It is some combination of regulation, not trusting anyone's initiative, mindless rule-following, "safetyism", never empowering front-line staff to make decisions, managerial tier expansion, and a few other things besides like infrastructure neglect, "financialisation", and general ignorance of the world of things, of the real, and over-reliance on the world of words, of laws, of construct on paper and not in steel and stone.
I'm not sure if I should be impressed or concerned that none of the passengers pulled the emergency stop.
If this had happened in Eastern Europe, someone would have probably pulled the emergency brake and ran off.
I would not have blamed them.
When you have a simple journey and no interruptions DB in long distance is pretty good, not excellent but solid. But with more complicated things traveling with DB is not well thought out and they don't see what could be possible. Changing a platform should show you in-station navigation door to door. DB navigator should not show you impossible journeys, it presents you with train switches where the second train already left once you arrive or displays the stop is canceled entirely. DB Navigator and bahn.de have a monopoly over german train routing and ticketing, but are not subject to anti-trust regulation enough or run by the government directly (dataquality issues, etc). DB is very much against grassroots movements trying to improve customer experience and quality, like community built ticket stores or wallet and calendar integration. I also think the ministry of transportation and politicians are at fault for not getting DB to step up their game. Trying to privatize DB, rigid regulations for how DB has to run and not enough attention to rail as a whole for example. I would consider the "ampel" (21-24) to be one of the better ones. After some reforms, the government is still not in a position to control the monopolist enough.
I have my own travel story involving DB. I had a ticket for a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt am Main to Warsaw. When I tried to check-in online a day before the flight it told me I had to do it at the airport. I fly a bit, so I knew what that meant - they overbooked the flight. The next day I got my "no aircraft entry guaranteed" boarding card of shame at the airport and learned at the gate that they overbooked the plane by three persons! After explaining my EU passenger rights, I got them to confirm my €250 compensation and since I was in an adventurous mood headed for the Frankfurt Flughafen Fernbahnhof train station.
The manned DB Travelcenter was still open so I walked in and asked for an international ticket to Warsaw. The gentleman (who spoke fluent English) typed a bit on the computer and told me he cannot sell a ticket for the Berlin-Warsaw leg of the journey due to a "system error on the Polish side". I knew that probably meant the Berlin-Warsaw-Express is at full capacity again and they don't sell tickets with no seat indicated for that route. I asked for a ticket to Berlin instead (€207, 2nd class) and went for a hamburger - still had about an hour until the train.
The train was initially supposed to arrive delayed 5 minutes but that was soon to change. The delay kept ticking up to 20 minutes, 45 minutes, 1 hour (around this time the DB travelcenter closed for the night) then two hours then cancelled altogether. I wasn't sure if my ticket is valid for the next train (the DB website was a bit vague about that) so I called my friend in Hamburg who confirmed I was good to jump onto the next train which would arrive on schedule in another three hours. I tried getting a Capri-Sun from a vending machine but it got stuck and wouldn't fall out. So I sat at the empty station with noting but rats as company until 3AM when the next Berlin-bound train arrived on time. In Berlin I got out at Sudkreutz and jumped onto a FlixBus to Poznań (€22) and stayed the night over at my friend's place (I badly needed a shower at that point) before taking a train to Warsaw the next day (€16, 2nd class).
Now, I technically did eventually use my Frankfurt-Berlin ticket but I was quite annoyed at DB so I applied for a reimbursement due to a cancelled train, which was granted in full. I also applied for reimbursement of the plane ticket from Lufthansa which was also granted. With the additional €250 compensation for denied boarding I actually made money on that little adventure but I probably wouldn't do that again. Gotta check in earlier from now on.
I lived 15 years in The Netherlands and 3 years ago moved to Germany.
Back in NL I used to complain about trains being late...
Boy oh boy was I not ready for Germany and Deutsche Bahn. I heard stories, but it was so absurd at times that I treated them as comical acts.
Then I traveled long distance on DB...
- trains being late by 15-40 minutes is NORMAL. It's included. At this point I feel like it's even planned. - the "thrown out in the middle of nowhere" happens! Ruthlessly. Operationally. With zero empathy or guidance. One minute you traveled inside the train approaching your destination another minute you are on a station in some village, knowing nothing about "why?" And "what is next?"
I still take trains - but I do not plan any appointments on arrival. As arrival is theoretical and not guaranteed. I just take a gamble and sink hours into the journey. Read books. Watch movies.
P.s. I am surprised that DB is not held more accountable for the absolutely shit service they provide.
And being delayed for 15-40 minutes, getting thrown out in the middle of nowhere, or having to continue by bus is an inconvenience for most people, but a nightmare for people with disabilities. Imagine being in a wheelchair, having a digestive condition (Crohn, IBS, etc.), or some sort of anxiety. I imagine that there are groups of people in Germany that simply do not travel anymore.
It is an area where proper governance is failing. I don't know about Germany, but in The Netherlands, Dutch law requires at least 90% of the trains to be on time (less than 5 minutes delay). If national train company do not reach those numbers, they are fined and I think in an extreme case they can lose their concession.
> they are fined
NS is state-owned so all fines are just money transfer between two branches of the government. Also, they know that "the trains fail with current amount of public funding, I wonder if less funding will improve the situation" is not good logic. Therefore there won't be any actual fines.
> and I think in an extreme case they can lose their concession
And then what? Most of the country will be left without trains? The company will be dissolved and replaced by the Chinese? Not gonna happen.
> the trains fail with current amount of public funding, I wonder if less funding will improve the situation" is not good logic
Tell that to the current government (and most of the previous governments in recent years).
You can't put money into it! Guess NS will just have to increase ticket prices _again_.
And then what? Most of the country will be left without trains? The company will be dissolved and replaced by the Chinese? Not gonna happen.
I don't think it would happen all at once for the main network, but Arriva sure likes to get more and more lines.
> Dutch law requires at least 90% of the trains to be on time (less than 5 minutes delay
Yes, however, any train delayed more than 30 minutes gets canceled entirely and doesn't get counted in the statistics. The train this article is talking about would not be registered late under Dutch terms (though it probably wouldn't have traveled comically far without stopping).
Not saying Dutch trains are as bad as German trains, but applying the same laws won't fix DB's problems.
> P.s. I am surprised that DB is not held more accountable for the absolutely shit service they provide.
That's the famous German efficiency, not to waste time on things that were not done or caused by being inefficient in the first place. There's no point in wasting time on improving some process, fax machines still work, don't they?
The accountability part is what makes me more angry. I get to lose so many (maybe hundreds?) of hours a year because of how bad DB works. Meanwhile the executives at DB get their nice boni each year and absurdly high wages for what they do... which is consistently worsening the train experience year after year. Probably none of them even use the train.
Totally reminds me of Manhattan subways deciding to skip 6 stops after making some static noise on the speakers that nobody understands, and leaving you on a station that you have to pay reentry fee to go back the five stops you overrun (or run the lottery of staying for longer in case the next stop has an easy transfer.) Hopefully some day these absurdities of modern life will be fixed.
That reminds me in turn of a joke we used to have, that the afterlife is being on a subway car with constant, unclear, but important announcements. Maybe this stop is heaven, maybe hell, maybe nirvana, maybe oblivion. There's no way to tell. Getting off at the wrong stop would be catastrophic. So, you remain, forever, riding in this afterlife subway car.
I don't know what to make of this. Of course everyone has a right to be pissed off for losing time because of someone else's mistake, but at the same time the language is... I mean if you feel kidnapped because your train connection didn't work out I am not sure how you'd feel if you were really kidnapped. Was my family kidnapped when they were sitting for two hours in the airplane before takeoff because of xyz? No, it was just an unfortunate turn of events that happen from time to time when you fly.
German railways could be better, but at the same time it's nowhere near the level of complaining the average person makes, as in this article. I think it says more about the author than the company. "It's twenty minutes late, I consider this early". Despite the problems that exist, I wouldn't say I ever had the feeling of being relieved the train is only 20 minutes late. Especially not with local trains.
> I mean if you feel kidnapped because your train connection didn't work out
It's not "your train connection didn't work out", it's "you were planning to go somewhere, and the train took you somewhere else entirely, much farther away than when you started, and gave you no way out of this, and not even an apology or explanation". This is absolutely comparable to a form of kidnapping.
Yes because after kidnapping you are always allowed to leave the vehicle you were kidnapped with and continue with your day.
Sorry, but no.
If you got into an Uber and they took you to some completely different place, many km away from your destination, and didn't let you get out of the vehicle until they got there, would you not say that they kidnapped you? Would you not be tempted to call the police and press charges, even if they did tell you that they would let you go out once they reached their destination?
You do understand how a train works?
* It has tracks so it cannot go anywhere it wants to go
* It can only let passengers go at certain places, these are called stations
So no, I would not compare it to a random Uber driver that takes me somewhere random on a whim. I wouldn't call the police if an Uber took me on a different road if the original road was closed. Etc.
Please start making sense, thank you. I'm done.
The train took them 5+ stations away from their destination. They could very well have stopped in any of those stations, they just claim that some bureaucracy prevented them from doing so. Also, trains can in fact stop anywhere they want and let people get off. It's not normally done, but it could be a very good option rather than forcing people to travel much farther away than their destination.
If you want to continue the analogy via consequences, it's not a defense to kidnapping to say you let them go at the end.
For it to be a kidnapping there needs to be a realistic threat you will not be let go. Have a nice day.
Just so you know I was offended at the use of the term kidnapping from the article but for different reasons.
Still, in Germany only 58.8% of the trains were on time in 2025 [1]. Maybe it's not as bad as the author states, but it's certainly valid complaining about it. I lived in Germany for five years and for longer stretches it was certainly very common to have a 30-60 minutes delay. A lot of my colleagues would even do trips like Stuttgart <-> Leipzig by plane because they hated traveling with DB so much.
[1] https://chuuchuu.com/2025wrapped
I live in Germany and take the train all the time. There were always kind of clusters of issues, but lately I haven't had many problems, especially not major, don't really remember what the last time was I got any compensation for over an hour delay. The last time was maybe two years ago.
I wonder sometimes how these things develop because if you're objectively pissed off that your train was delayed, I cannot imagine enjoying taking the plane, or even worse a car. Like I haven't had a plane take off on time in my life. I took only a few business trips with the car and was stuck in traffic every single time. So objectively despite experiencing issues with DB myself, it's a lot better than my experience with alternatives. Stuttgart - Leipzig has a direct connection, and in my experience the biggest reason for a delay is when you miss a connecting train. E.g. your train is 15 minutes late but you had only 10 minutes to change trains. So other than the train going out of service I honestly can't imagine what the issue would be. You sit for 4h, can work comfortably, it's quieter than anything else, you can have a coffee or a beer, a meal etc. etc. And then maybe you'll have a half hour delay, but you can get that with anything else also.
When I was a child in France people were quick to say that trains ran on time in Germany... Well, in my experience there is no developed country with a worse train company than DB. Even Amtrack is still slightly better. In France people complain about the SNCF (especially strikes) but at least outside of strikes the TGV are mostly on time.
> no developed country with a worse train company than DB
Italy is pretty similar, and I would say even worse, but after reading / hearing more about DB I think they're just competing for being the worst train company ever
Should have taken the KVB/SWB line 16 from Cologne HBF to Bonn Bad Godesberg Rheinalle/BF instead, and the bus line 855 from there to Meckenheim BF, or so :)
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtbahnwagen_B#/media/File:K... / https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rheinuferbahn / https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtbahnstrecke_Bonn%E2%80%93... )
I read the story and I felt like the mentioned background characters in it, saying "Deutsche Bahn..." to myself at the end of every paragraph.
Once I was travelling back to home from Munich and the train stopped somewhere in Frankfurt in the middle of nowhere. Literally stopped on the tracks and it was completely dark outside except some far away lights from the houses around.
We waited for 3 hours, with 2-3 explanations which did not make any sense. After 3 hours the train started riding again and I arrived in Cologne, which is ~1h away from home still, and they said this is the last station. I needed to spend the night in Cologne in a hotel, because it was 3 o'clock in the morning and there was no other train to my hometown.
Fortunately I was able to get a refund plus the hotel cost for that night back.
3 hours!! Unbelievable. In the UK we would smash the doors/windows open these days after an hour or two. We got sick of the railway having no contingency plans for getting people off stuck trains in bad conditions
Munich-Mühldorf regional train. Once it forgot to stop at Markt Schwaben (it always stops there). Passangers had to wait 30 min for the train to go back at the next station. Not even an apology.
There are also pleasant experiences when traveling by train, but rarely in Germany.
The Swiss railways are excellent and friendly. In Milan, I was unable to catch the reserved train to Zurich, but the conductors on the Swiss train that was just departing even accepted my ticket for the Italian railway.
> At some point you stop being a passenger and start being cargo.
It’s much worse than that – FedEx would never treat cargo like that. If they took cargo further away from its destination than it started and then left it there for the customer to sort out, that would break so many SLAs …
DB is well known to be used as a "golden parachute" by german politicians. When they loose popularity in politics they escape by giving themselves a high payed position at state owned DB company. Problem is they have no knowledge in managing a railroad.
I rode DB many times, all over Germany and from Düsseldorf to Cologne weekly for months. Luckily, never had an issue. By far my worst experience has been Trenitalia. I lost a couple of connections during the same vacation because the train was late and in both opportunities no one could tell me what to do, let alone give me a refund. In one trip the teller while exhaling cigarette smoke on my face shrugged then suggested I took a bus from Campiglia to Piombino, which ended up been one of the scariest rides of my life (I have crossed the Andes in South America by speeding buses racing each other with 200 ft exposed cliff drops on the side, so I’m not strange to scary rides)
When was that? DB has gotten much worse in the past ~5 years
There're certain kinds of rewards to encourage traveling by rail in Europe. For example, a training course I attended refunded part of your travel expenses if you took a long-distance train. And there're people who believe in not flying for the sake of the planet.
But at this point, I'm convinced you should avoid any train in and around Germany. This includes Denmark as well. Just take a plane, but don't have a layover in Germany. The same could probably be said about France. My first train from Paris to Nancy stopped for about 2hrs in the middle of nowhere. As the machinist said: "The train is tired."
Other countries like Italy or Spain seem to actually have well-functioning rail though.
> This includes Denmark as well
I regularly travel on DSB (2.5hr journeys, 4 times a month minimum), and only very rarely encounter issues. Staff have always been easy to deal with and on the rare occasion I've had to be refunded (the carriage with my reserved seat didn't show up) I've received it within days.
Avoid trains run by GoCollective though.
Nope, leave Italy off the well-functioning rail. I am a commuter, i use the train here since 2009 and it's terrible. We're going through the same experiences described in the post, but often even much worse. On December 1st, my train took 6 hours to travel 100km instead of 1 hour so we too felt like the post author.
My most recent Deutsche Bahn train was announced as being 3 hours late. I watched a few passengers leave the station to grab coffee nearby. The train arrived 10 minutes later, and left 5 minutes after that. The whole system seems broken.
I am never taking the train in Germany or through Germany again (or through Belgium, for that matter). The experience is consistently bad. NS, DB, and NMBS all perform poorly. Train travel itself has become unreliable and frustrating. Ever since I got my car, the difference in freedom is obvious.
I do support having basic public transport and solid bike infrastructure for young people, but once you’re 25 or older, there’s little justification for relying on such low-quality public transport.
I’ll be going to Prague next year, and I’m fully willing to drive for hours rather than sit on a train that keeps getting delayed, is unpleasant to be on, and costs far too much.
I thought in Germany you got unlimited train travel for €58?
Not for ICE, the only train worth getting for me. Also I don't live in Germany, in the Netherlands. Trains are expensive. Even though I live in the Randstad, near big cities, I don't have any good public transport here. It's just not worth it for me.
Yes, but not for the IC and ICE which are long distsnce trains. Those are still separate tickets as usual.
Local trains, not ICE or IC.
To think that, once we complete CA HSR, we too could have experiences like this. In fact, one of the best reasons to get trains in the US is so that we too can end up farther from our destination than when we started.
Deutsche Bahn seems very similar to most of the railway in England. Customer service is non-existent; delays are highly normalised.
The UK government hates how expensive it is to operate, so they are reducing subsidies and massively prioritising the most profitable routes and raising prices.
Staff got nice condition/pay bumps during COVID and all have the attitude that they are doing us a favour. I don't mean that lightly or that I've had one bad experience with a member of staff on a bad day. They are work-shy, offensive, rude, lacking training and plain bad tempered.
I'm very pro car now these days, which is exactly what the Government wants.
Customer service on British trains is excellent. It only takes a few minutes to claim Delay Repay if you're delayed more than 15 minutes, and you can even set it up to do it automatically for you. If your last train back home for the night is cancelled at 1am, you can message the company on social media and they'll pay £100+ to sort you out with a taxi for a distance like London to Cambridge.
I consistently find railway workers to be some of the most helpful and approachable people I have to interact with, which is remarkable given the sort of people they have to put up with. I think the sort of person you'll be speaking to certainly depends on the part of the country you're in though - in Scotland and Wales, I've seen people who've been let off for having a ticket that expired several days prior, and staff are happy to have a friendly chat if the train isn't too busy.
I've taken trains regularly in England for 25 years. I disagree.
What's your experience?
And it's taken a massive turn for the worse since 2020
England is definitely worse than Scotland and Wales I grant you that. And fwiw, in Scotland, they have far less powers to prosecute compared to England, which is why they seem like they are more lenient
As I responded in another thread, not all operators are 15 minutes. Not that 25/50% often isn't really that much compensation...
And that taxi is far from gaurenteed.
I get the sense you had one or two good experiences and extrapolated?
I'm pro car, I would much prefer to relax on a train, but the economics just don't work in the UK. I can't think of anywhere I want to go where taking the train is cheaper than driving
After paying for fuel, insurance, property taxes and maintenance (exclude the possibility of a car note in this scenario), is it still cheaper than taking the train?
Yes. Because the trains don't go from my house, and don't go everywhere I need to go, so I need a car anyway.
And this is precisely why I don't use public transit when traveling on vacation and rent cars instead. I also don't fly unless the drive is longer than 7 to 8 hours. Driving in Germany is also reasonably fun.
We in the Netherlands often complain about the NS (Dutch Railways)... but it had a 93.9% on time rate. That is quite good.
But ooof, the few times I had to cross the border to Germany by train were hell.
I appreciated the NS from that moment on more...
And I thought the Dutch Railways (NS, Nationale Spoorwegen) where weird.. We mostly have issues with trains not showing up, but then the next one arrives in 20 minutes so it usually isn't a big problem (unless you are cutting it close).
We had a lot of issues in the past with the first leaves falling on the track or a bit of snow. And they ordered trains without toilets. So also cattle trucks.
And have I mentioned that you pay a lot for this "service"? second class, normal costs: €18,80 to get from Utrecht to Amsterdam and back, 50 kilometers.
Clickbait.
The opening paragraph contains some factual errors (you can only get kicked off a train when you do something illegal) and the whole story lives by exaggeration and missing facts.
It is as moronic as saying people were kidnapped when a plane had to divert because of the weather. Also he would have been entitled to get a paid cab ride to his destination when that happens. But that is just one of the facts he did not mention.
This story should be ignored and tossed into the local legends garbage.
Kicked Off = we have to stop for some technical reasons that are further unspecified, and everyone has to leave the train because we are driving now in the opposite direction. a replacement bus is coming. Once every hour. With a capacity of 8 people. In some cow village 50km far away from the next city. With no cab service available. Thats was what i meant
What facts are missing in your opinion?
Of course there’s exaggeration. Nobody really believes this person was kidnapped by the German train company.
People do get kicked off trains, usually it’s the entire train that is being emptied. Happened to me in NRW. Happened to me in Brandenburg. When there’s a problem with the train, then sometimes it has to be evacuated.
He would have not been entitled to a cab ride by the way, he was travelling with Deutschlandticket. Your entire comment is not only pedantic, it’s also completely wrong lol.
Found the Deutsche Bahn PR employee.
Yes, you get kicked off. If the train is too full. I got kicked off myself and friends also told me they had to leave the train for the same reason.
Entitled to what?
He could try to do it on his own accord - they have leverage to decline and he'd have to take it through several other over burdened agencies.
He could also try getting into contact with DB, and good luck with that.
My own DB story was from Hamburg hbf where 3 huge DB employers was standing guard in front of reisenzentrum (the customer service counter) and yelling at every own being incredibly rude.
DB is a joke, and it is imploding on itself. Staff seems so stressed and embarrassed by being a part of it.
> Hello everyone. Apparently we were not registered at Troisdorf station, so we are on the wrong tracks. We cannot stop.
Of course the train could not stop. It was not registered!
> A journey of 35 kilometers, or, in DB units, somewhere between forty-five minutes and the heat death of the universe.
A bit like "no frills" airlines in the west.
The thing that stands out to me about this story and that confuses me the most about German life is the general passive acceptance of realities like this. I think it might be simply European.
I've been kidnapped by my landlord, who is working in cahoots with my employer with the support of the government and the banks.
I've been trapped inside my landlord's house and my employer's office and they keep trafficking me between each other using a train.
They take turns raping me mentally and financially. S.O.S. Help!
There is some dark joke to be made about being locked inside a German train, kept against your will and running towards who-knows-where.
Please, don’t go there.
Following inflexible procedures to the letters and not to the spirit reminded me Swissair Flight 111, any aircraft fire today would result in quicker decision to land nowadays. I think Swiss are even more strict than Germans (at least when I lived there and frequently traveled to Germany), it's a blessing and a curse.
The picture of the DB station should be the official logo of Germany.
I'd rather go through dante's inferno than live in Germany. What a bleak existence.
As a North American it's fun to read a story about trains "being bad". The light rail in my city routinely just breaks in the winter. Everybody is afraid to use it and drives instead. A 20-60 minute delay would be unexceptional, and it wouldn't even take you close to where you're actually going.
Can someone explain why, with Germany's reputation of being so well organized, great engineering, great manufacturing, they can't get the trains to run on time? It should be like Switzerland and instead it's like Italy. Doesn't compute for me.
At that point I wonder if it's reasonable to pull the alarm so they have an emergency stop?
Couldn't he just use the passenger brakes to stop the train while it was passing in Troisdorf?
He could, but that would be a very expensive stop.
DB is a lot better run than British trains... My God. Twenty minutes late is normal in the UK.
The author makes effectively the same comment that twenty minutes late is normal for Germany (below). I don’t have any statistics, but anecdotally I’ve had worse experiences with DB than in the UK. DB does not just run late, but has a bad habit of teleporting you to random German towns, from which you must quickly route find to your original destination (as is the exact story of the post).
> It is twenty minutes late. I consider this early.
The TL;DR is: regional trains are usually on time, long-distance trains usually are not. If you need to travel between cities, plan with an hour buffer time. Basically, "show some adaptability".
The one good thing about frequent long-distance delays is that you might be lucky and catch an earlier delayed train and actually arrive a bit earlier than planned ;)
(also JFC, does the author like to whine about nothing - I'm travelling frequently with DB for about 25 years now, and while shit happens from time time, most of it is merely a slight inconvenience).
Plan with a ~40% of travel time buffer if you ought be there, and travel the day before if you must be there.
I travel from Basel to Hannover and back every two weeks on DB. Trains south are almost always late, trains north usually late. Frequently the train is already late in Hannover having come from Hamburg. The worst was when I was kicked out in Frankfurt and had to stay in a hotel. The delays were so bad there were no more trains left that could connect me to the last train out of Basel.
Things have been getting better for the past couple of months I think though.
OP mentions "six minutes" as a DB metric. But the thing is that DB doesn't care about trains being late. It's absolutely normal to have an hour delay in Germany. You can be considered lucky if it's under an hour. What will usually happen is that you spend half a day in some village waiting for your connection and travel the rest of the way standing in the doorway with your bags.
I've been on UK trains that were an hour late, others that changed platform at least three times, headed to the wrong destination etc.
Many are cancelled without a decent reason being given. I rarely take British trains now they are so expensive and unreliable. Only long distance maybe because buses are unpleasant.
Competing on which system is more dysfunctional, is .. not a competition we should be in. Especially when there's 0 reason for it to be this way.
> Twenty minutes late is normal in the UK.
My biggest gripe with DB is not that it's late, but that it quite often cancels the trains. If you decided to go by regional trains with 1-2 hops instead of direct (bc you can go much cheaper with Deutschlandticket), there's a high chance that at least one of your trains get cancelled and things will not go according the plan.
Not my experience. I regularly travel by train and a 20 minute delay is unusual. Almost every train is on time in my experience.
Recently while driving an hour journey turned into a three hour journey, and not because my car broke down. I've never experienced any delay anywhere near that significant on British trains.
That happens very infrequently on my commuter service in the UK. I'd say not more than once every couple of months, normally due to someone committing suicide in front of a train.
I stopped travelling by train because of it. I live near a station and can see services have become far more infrequent, so there is that too.
I can't wait for Italo and Trenitalia to enter the German market, it can only get better. It's already at rock bottom for long distance. Short distance with foreign train companies is bearable (Westbahn, transdev, RXX...)
Meanwhile, Switzerland has started forcing DB trains to stop at the border. They are late so often that they were throwing our train system out of whack. Even the Italian trains are better.
Average experience with Deutsche Bahn.
I'm french, my first trip in this country was epic. First time going to Köln ( Cologne ), the train back to the airport never arrived, with no explanation. I was literally stranded in another country without money.
It's wild how in 30 years DB went from national pride to national embarrassment.
If you haven’t seen the datamining DB talk by David Kriesel, you absolutely positively should!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0rb9CfOvojk
Yeah, similar experience when I was in Berlin on vacation in 2023. Had a rail transfer to Amsterdam set for 16:30. Canceled without explanation or warning, and the replacement was: Berlin -> Duisberg, with a 13-minute layover Duisberg -> Viersen, with a 6-minute layover Viersen -> Venlo, with a 7-minute layover Venlo -> Eindhoven, with a 38-minute layover Eindhoven -> Amsterdam
As you can probably guess, this is not at all what happened. Shit started to disintegrate around Viersen, we did some shuffling and waiting for later trains, and wound up in Aachen around midnight. The hotel across from the train station was closed for the night, we weren't going to stay in the nearby hostel after seeing one too many horror movies, and so we walked over a mile to a nearby hotel. Staff was lovely. We got in to a room by 01:00, showered, plugged in all our devices, and passed out around 02:00. Up at 05:00 and back to the train station to catch a ride to Rotterdam (very full train), and then on to Amsterdam. We hit our hotel about 12 hours behind schedule, changed clothes and got on with it.
Germany and France had the worst trains. Italy was insanely efficient/on-time.
On the other end Germany has a great used-cars markets. So if you feel the train service is consuming too much of your time that you can allocate better, evaluate if buying a used car is an improvement.
There is one part of the world where nothing movies without rules. And then there's another where rules are joke and everyone optimises for personal efficiency.
What should be the sweet spot?
And here I was annoyed that the train going half the route (as in schedule, not coz of any accident) is named the same so I got on too early one by accident and had to walk a stop away.
The issue there is the comp. 1.5 euro doesn't make sense. should be O(50). If the compensation (which for DB is a fine in a way) is not high, DB has no incentives to do better.
Good news for you! 1.5 is in O(50) since they’re both constants! (It’s 1.50 because the author has the 58€-a-month flat rate ticket for all local and regional services in the entire country. If you buy a regular ticket, you get back 25% of the ticket price for delays over an hour and 50% for delays over two hours)
25% for 1h?? L O L
it should be 100%. A delay of 1h is extremely inadmissible. Try doing this in Japan
I do hope that sufficient humiliation will suffice for DB leadership to enact harsh measures. German precision and punctuality are still there in its people. It's not lost yet.
This has been the case since I moved to Germany, 6 years ago. National humiliation is apparently an insufficient detterent.
The millstones of the gods grind late, but they grind well. It depends where you're from -- there is always potential for dramatic change in a people as obedient as the German.
historically german railway had a track record of treating people like cattle, but one would expect that not even institutional culture changes would take that long
"I had been kidnapped at a loss."
German bureaucracy. They should just learn from the Swiss. Because the Swiss actually understand how to be effective in bureaucracy.
Your 2025 Train Delay Wrapped https://chuuchuu.com/2025wrapped
It is a remarkable change in attitude. Back in the day DB was one of the best train services in Europe. It had British Rail of the same era on the ropes.
Ahh... Chesterton's Fence anyone?
Is it possible that running a railway at a national scale is harder than people who merely travel on it reckon?
The population pyramid inversion and an artificially weak currency is destroying Germany.
Deutsche Bahn is a joke among Germans by now. It is THAT bad. It's utterly unreliable. We pretend everything is fine, that we have some functioning infrastructure, but it just pretends.
They have some policy that they need to give you a reason for a delay and they'd happily announce something like "we're late because of another train in front of us" and the irony is, of course, the train in front of us is probably late, too, and you never get to know the real reason. No, strike that. The real reason is because the entire system is completely messed up. Train time tables are fantasy by now.
> In DB’s official statistics, a train counts as “on time” if it’s less than six minutes late.1 Cancelled trains are not counted at all.2 If a train doesn’t exist, it cannot be late.
This is true and it is ridiculous.
As a Dutchman, I’ve come to love German trains. The joy of a first class ICE seat to with table service as the empty middle of Germany swooshes by at 250km/h is hard to describe. Those trains are very good. Super comfortable, super fast, and did anyone say “restaurant car”? Seriously, the little bottle holes in the tray in front of you seems perfectly designed to fit a .5L glass of Erdinger and I don’t believe it’s a coincidence. Freshly tapped Erdinger! On a train! I generally travel for the destination, but in Germany, I travel for the travel.
So as a fanboy, I am saddened by how bad DB has become. Once you’re on the train, and it actually goes, and it goes all the way to the destination, it’s still fantastic. All of the above generally still holds. But the many hours I’ve spent in the dark in cold windy places like Duisburg Hbf gleis fünf are uncountable, and it really does discount from the experience. I don’t remember the German trains being this late, this often, a ~decade ago. I really hope DB will get its shit together because there’s a lot worth saving.
> I don’t remember the German trains being this late, this often, a ~decade ago.
Except: they were - over 20 years ago, I did my „Grundwehrdienst“ in the German army, travel with DB from Nuremberg to Munich and back every weekend for 8 months.
The number of times the ICE was on time I can count on one hand. 15 minutes delayed regularly, sometimes more.
After a while we planned to use the last train to arrive in Munich, and having to go a bit further with S-Bahn, we most of the time missed the last one (on purpose).
We then went to the DB counter and got free coupons to head our final destination by Taxi.
Also already happening back then: broken aircon, often in comical ways - I.e. totally non working in one wagon, with everyone sweating at some 45 degrees Celsius or more, next wagon: freezing at 16 degrees…
By today's standards I'd consider "15 minutes delayed" to be pretty much equivalent to "on time".
It just destroys the "eco" image of deutsche railways.
Well, I'm all pro public transport, but please make it work first.
Tbh this is just another average trip using DB. I was on a RB from Munich to Kochel and the driver decided to stop in the middle of a field for reasons best known to them, the other time I took an ICE from Stuttgart we were marooned at Augsburg.
> Scheduled arrival in Bonn see that was your second mistake (first mistake was trying to use DB)
As a Brit I find Germans so strange sometimes.
I visited the Dachau concentration camp several years ago on one of the hottest days of the year. Me and my GF packed water, but on that day is just wasn't enough and we ran out towards the end of the day.
We got around the camp and just before leaving we went into the cafe and asked for a drink, but they said sorry the cafe was closed.
Okay, fair enough. In that case we'll just fill our bottles with some tap water then.
"No, you can't do that".
Huh? We really need a drink... We've been on coaches and walking around all day and we've ran out of water.
"Sorry, I can't help".
We have our empty bottles here, could you please just pour us some water?
"No, sorry I can't".
I get she probably wasn't suppose to serve customers after close, but we just wanted her to fill our water bottles with tap water. I may be misremembering now but I'm like 80% sure I asked if I could fill the bottle in the toilet, but she also refused to open to toilets because they were closed.
This whole situation would have been absolutely absurd in the UK.
Germans really seem to like doing everything as per the rules regardless of how inconvenient and ridiculous it is. Even things like crossing roads where generally most Brits will wait for a green light, but if in a hurry many will look for a gap in traffic and just cross. Germans seem to rarely ever do this and you get the sense you are being judged if you do it.
I had lots of weird little experiences like this in Germany but almost passing out from dehydration at a German concentration camp had a certain level of irony to it.
Are we green enough yet? Would’ve been nice to take the car instead of this, eh?
I'll take Deutsche Bahn over Amtrack anyday. They should expand here.
To all non-Germans who might get scared by this blogpost:
While there's valid issues to complain about, this blogpost is really hyperbole. And frankly, to someone who has lived in the area, it reads purposefully disingenuous.
Just enter the places he mentions on Google Maps. Everything in NRW is so close together that to travel between cities you can often choose between international trains, regional trains or even just public transport.
The connection he needed, is serviced several times per hour by several different train lines.
Why did he stay on that specific train when he heard his stop would be skipped? The only reason I can think of is to write this blogpost. Since he's local to the area he should have known better.
Also it's worth noting that driving that same route by car, at that time, just a couple of hours before everyone starts their Christmas dinner, might've taken even longer.
I'm not trying to deny common issues with the DB but the author tried to travel through the densest urban area in the whole of Europe during the busiest 2-hour window of the whole year. AND he made a bad judgement call. To leave the transportation hub, staying on a long distance train which was already being re-routed.
Funnily enough, the fact that every "Kuhdorf" needs to be connected by train is one of the difficulties the DB faces for which there is no easy solution. And if a long-distance train needs to decide between dropping some stops which can also be reached by short-distance trains or delaying the whole train, I think that dropping those short-distance stops is absolutely the correct choice.
> Why did he stay on that specific train when he heard his stop would be skipped? The only reason I can think of is to write this blogpost. Since he's local to the area he should have known better.
Because the train didn't stop?
Need to fly to Germany and take DB tomorrow to/from airport and dreading it despite speaking German.
Right out the gate 1st class tickets being half the price of standard tickets on same train does not fill me with confidence that this is organized in coherent fashion
Sounds like an average day on UK trains, particularly Northern Rail.
Come to slovenia, the buses here stop at every stop.
I know you bought a ticket for a train from the main station in ljubljana, and when you come there (and only then and there, not before, not online), you'll be notified that your train is leaving from a track a 10 minute walk away, because the station is being renovated.
And sure, you were a responsible traveller, came early, so a 10 minute walk is no problem... there are supposedly dots on the asphalt showing where to go, but they're already wiped off, so some granny or a college student will probably point you in the right direction.
So after you walk all that way to the right train tracks, and the train should already be there, you'll be notified that there is no train. Why? Someone jumped infront of the train somewhere. When? A few hours ago. But hey... there's a bus that will take you with your train ticket.
Where is the bus? Back at the main station, 10 minutes away. Surely you were very responsible and came not just 10 minutes early but 20 minutes early, because the bus leaves at the same time the train should leave.
The only thing worse were the international trains in the early 2000s through the balkans... you'd be in Zagreb, croatia, waiting for a nighttime international train towards ljubljana, slovenia, 5 minutes to departure, and dingdong, announcement, it says it'll be 10 minutes late. Wait 10 minutes, so 5 minutes until the delayed departure... dingdong, 20 minutes late. Ok.. 10 more minutes... the display shows 30 minutes. I mean... you could risk it and go for a coffee or something, but it's not worth walking all the way to a nicer bar and back if you only have 10 minutes until the train.
...and then, when the delay says 50 minutes, you get a phonecall from a friend, who's on that same train (travelling from thessaloniki), and she tells you that the train is ~6 hours late and that they just crossed the serbian->croatian border (5-6 hours away from zagreb).
Meh. I have lived here for 7 years, and get a bit tired of these sorts of complaints about DB coming from the US. Germans have exceedingly little, if any, patience for anything going wrong. DB is always painted as this evil, completely broken system when in fact it's been a joy compared to e.g. San Francisco.
I've only encountered flexibility and slight discomfort in a few cases where something has happened. I'm not entirely sure what Germans expect DB to do. A car had an interconnecting door problem and had to remove that car from the train. Everyone had to filter in to other cars to compensate for the lack of seating. Should they instead cancel those tickets? Or make them stand? It was a full train, and no answer is the correct one for everyone involved. I ended up giving my seat to an elderly gentleman and sat between cars on the ground. Mild discomfort but literally nobody was to blame for this. I suppose I could have gotten the next train but I didn't want to wait - that's also not DB's problem to fix.
Another time, my train was delayed for several hours. Of course I was quite annoyed but found out the reason was that someone had offed themselves in front of one of the trains before it, bringing the line to a standstill while it was dealt with.
Most of the whining I've heard about DB boils down to inconvenience in situations nobody could have predicted nor helped, and this almost insatiable attitude by some Germans that any inconvenience is an offense to Germany seems always to be directed at an otherwise highly reliable and robust trnasporation system whilst having zero other frame of reference. Seriously, come to the US or, from what I've heard, the UK. Then tell me Germany's is awful with a straight face.
This article reads exactly like that. You weren't kidnapped. You were rerouted. Don't dilute words like that, it just undermines your point.
> This article reads exactly like that. You weren't kidnapped. You were rerouted.
Obviously. There's a joking undertone in those words. If they were serious, they would've called the police.
DB has gained its reputation for good reason. In this case, taking someone away into another federal state without giving them the option to get out of the train to find alternative transport. Their reasoning for not stopping seems to be purely bureaucratic.
Maybe the UK is worse; the UK is famous for its extremely high prices. The US probably is worse with the way their trains are operated. That still doesn't excuse the absolutely awful service DB provides in a country as wealthy and developed as Germany.
The worst part is that DB wasn't always this terrible. It's now playing catch-up with itself, taking care of overdue maintainance causing seruous disruptions that should've been minor annoyances years ago.
I have been advised by rail enthusiasts to make sure my train is scheduled to arrive two to three hours before my transfer, because DB will be late. A foolish friend once tried to make their transfer with only an hour and a half of scheduled margin; they missed their connection and lost their (paid-for) seat reservations.
Then there's the government side of things: we, the Dutch, want to run more and better train connections to the rest of Europe. Germany just doesn't want it to happen, though. Even when the Dutch offered to pay to have a broken bridge upgraded, the Germans turned down the offer, leaving plans for their old, outdated single track bridge in place.
DB probably works fine a lot of the time, but you shouldn't accept DB's incompetence as normal. You deserve better.
Even when the Dutch offered to pay to have a broken bridge upgraded, the Germans turned down the offer, leaving plans for their old, outdated single track bridge in place.
Or how a bridge Friesenbrücke was hit by a ship in 2015 and the replacement is still under construction (supposed to be finished in 2026 now). As a result no train could drive between Groningen and Leer.
To make the whole thing more sad, the replacement bridge has to be open 40 minutes every hour because a shipbuilder has convinced the Wasserstraßen- und Schifffahrtsamt to do so, severely constraining train traffic. No one on the other side of the border understands why they haven't built a bridge that would allow ships to pass through without opening the bridge.
This kind of nonsense is very typical of German bureaucracy (I have lived there). Nobody has ambitions and nobody wants to stick their neck out.
> Most of the whining I've heard about DB boils down to inconvenience in situations nobody could have predicted nor helped [..]
I agree with you that there’s a lot of complaining and it does get tiresome. The German train system is one of the most complex in the world and works closer to an interconnected spider web than the typical straight line systems in other countries.
However much of this has been predicted in the past. I think that’s why a lot of people are annoyed. Here are some sources if you’re interested to read more:
(2006) Audit critique regarding the bad state of DB funding after privatization: https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/16/008/1600840.pdf
(2011) DB is not spending enough on the track network: https://taz.de/Investitionen-in-das-Schienennetz/%215117195/
(2014) State of German train bridges: https://www.zeit.de/mobilitaet/2014-09/deutsche-bahn-bruecke...
rerouted? it was a completly different destination, much further than he was originally. there is nothing "noone can do" about stupid burecracies like "can't stop at this station because we are not registered". First they had time to register the stop when they changed the itinery, Second if they failed that somehow, and most probably because of "there was no manual how to do it", in a sittuation like these, stupid rules like that should go out of the window and the passengers be let off as soon as possible and not 60km away. Somehow they can be flexible with the people's time but not with their stupid checklists.
The key explanation for failing to stop at the station is that the train was on the wrong track.
Many stations have a 4 track system: a left track and right track which are adjacent to platforms, and 2 tracks in the middle, which are designed for non-stopping trains.If the train was on the middle track, stopping would introduce risk and disruption by slowing/stopping the other trains travelling on the high-speed non-stopping line, and also endanger passengers who would have to dismount at height from the train onto an active track, cross the active track, and climb up to the platform.
Once the train was routed onto the incorrect track, correcting it was likely to be impractical (infrequent track transfer points) and stopping on the high-speed track would would be excessively disruptive and dangerous.
It was extremely easy for that train to stop in Bonn-Beuel, which is anyway far superior to Troisdorf for a train that was originally scheduled to stop at Bonn Central Station. Failing to stop there shows perfectly how little DB cares about its passengers.
Lame excuse. There has to be a better alternative than to take them an hour in the wrong direction. Stop and shunt to the right track. Stop at one of those other 15 stations they skipped. But the best would be to simply avoid these kind of unnecessary errors in the first place.
This is so typical for German bureaucracy. I used to work at a German university, which included teaching. I once had a small group of students who collectively plagiarized their coursework. Some of the group admitted doing so. I went to the examination office asking them to enforce the punishment for plagiarism (which would increasingly severe with the number of offenses).
They simply told me: this behavior ought to be punished. Which is a euphemism for but I'm not going to do it. They didn't want the hassle of potentially dealing with one out of many students filing a complaint or worst-case go to Karlsruhe (Germans know what that means). Which is exemplary of German bureaucracy, nobody wants to make decisions and carry responsibility.
I love Germany, but this is really something they need to fix going forward, because it stifles society and the economy in many ways.
The OP, judging by their site, lives in Germany. A lot of comments here are coming from Europeans (including Brits BTW). So, pray tell, why did you feel the need to get all defensive and blame the Murricans?
> Most of the whining I've heard about DB boils down to inconvenience in situations nobody could have predicted nor helped
Somehow doesn't happen in most other countries I lived. These things are easy to deal with with a bit of redundancy, which as I've heard is lacking in Germany these days.
I've had much better experience with trains in Russia despite much harsher weather conditions, much larger distances and much older cars. This problem is absolutely fixable, just let the trains go around problematic sections with redundant routes.
On the other hand, Russian trains are absurdly slow when conpared to Europe. The flagship "high-speed" service barely does 200 km/h.
That's true, but at this point I would prefer slow but steady over being disembarked at random *dorf or standstill in a middle of nowhere with zero signal and no clue when we'll get back on track.
Nothing here suggests that the author is American beyond his blog post being shared on an American website.
I never claimed the author was American.
I once took the train from Berlin to Netherlands.
Just after Hannover but before Dusseldorf and such the train stopped: fire next to the tracks. Honestly, not DB fault this time.
Luckily DB trains have a restaurant/cafe in them. I went to get some food but the man behind the counter told me it was closed.
I asked him how since he was the seller, he stood there, there was power and internet. What's the problem?
Well, he said. And I shit you not: my shift is up. I have worked 8 hours. I am done.
And he was serious. Never mind that he was stuck on the train, just like us. Never mind that the replacement obviously wasn't there yet since they were stuck waiting on the next platform.
Nope. He works 8 hours. 8 hours done. He done. A thousand thirsty and hungry (and annoyed) on his train. He has food, drinks and time. But he just didn't give a shit.
He just stood there, for 2 hours, waiting to get off.
To Dutch people German civil servants are like NPCs following a very narrow script. It's baffling.
Sounds extremely reasonable to me. Not all people want to work extra hours for free.
Indeed, but I guess that the seller got compensated anyways for the extra two hours of delayed arrival.
What is strange that NOBODY pulled emergency stop
Things like these happen _all the time_ with DB.
Kidnapper is likely not Deutsche Bahn but a regional subsidairy.
This is an effect of privatization gone wrong, with the national service, the infrastructure, the regional services (each), the network (not in infra), cargo and then some (sub)companies split for privatisation and an IPO that never happened. The highly segmented network is not digitalized in to any standard, so regional trains have to operate in policy frameworks and network cells that favor long distance trains. Its utter chaos on a daily basis.
I’d have pushed the red emergency button.
Are you ScotRail in disguise? Are you ScotRail in disguise? Top level bullying from the tartan army.
Plenty of people here will probably focus on the Deutsche Bahn debacle but the problem is larger.
You have to understand that Germany is currently led by a mix of trauma and economy as religion rather than reason to get a sense of what is happening.
To simplify, Germany is somehow convinced that any inflation and rules deviation is an unstoppable slippery slope towards a return to the 20s and paving the way to some kind of nazi apocalypse. They therefore follow a rigid economic system, ordoliberalism, which to put it nicely, doesn't have a strong academic following.
As a result, they have implemented a mercantilist economy using internal devaluation while shielded by the euro and stubbornly refuse to recycle their surplus in the union or even in the country. You get this absurd situation where they have enshrined a balanced budget in their constitution while their median household wealth is bellow Italy, their infrastructures is crumbling, a significant portion of their savings finance foreign debts - especially bad foreign debts judging by what they lost with the Lehman bankruptcy - their industry fails to invest and the country is basically non ironically saving itself to irrelevance.
Honestly, if it wasn't for the beggar thy neighbors policies and them mostly refusing transfers despite benefiting hugely from the currency at the expense of the poorer members, it would be amongst the funniest quirk of history.
I am suprised Germany has bad trains. I have only used U Bahn long time ago which was OK iirc.
U-Bahn is a closed circle so not much happens (except accidents). The issue is with shared rails and there is too much traffic. On the road there is also a lot of delay but it's more accepted because oneself is in charge. Using the train gives up control so you've got easier someone to blame.
should've just pulled the emergency brake and ran...
I guess a brave soul would have pulled the alarm at Troisdorf.
Obligatory link:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2023/oct/08/...
Didn't realize I should file a kidnapping charge every time the train I'm on randomly decides to go express and skip my stop. The MTA is apparently the largest kidnapper and human trafficker in history!
"Kidnapped", c'mon
“I don’t know how to say that in English, but this train does not exist”
That’s what you get when you stop seeing train service as a service and try to make into a business.
They stopped caring about their main customers and tried to compete with planes.
On top of that everything traffic related seems to be reserved for the least competent politicians.
Too much drama.
DB is a typical German moloch. Insane wages, a culture of anti performance. And being eaten alive by consultants. I know someone working there. It's a tragedy how they change once good people
[dead]
I wonder if people think they will be taken seriously with so much hyperbole and drama
> Only then I notice: the driver has been speaking German only.
Oh wow a German conductor in a German train speaking German oh how awkward...
No you were not "kidnapped" your train just stopped at a different station.
> “That’s a different federal state.”
Yes and if you go to many cities in Europe and the US you can walk from one country to another. Oh wow shocking I know /s
Of course this is Deutsche Bahn at its best (in getting hand and feet mixed up) and that compensation is ridiculous. It should at least get your ticket back to the place you intended to go.
Neuwied to Troisdorf is 1h by car or train (in a good day of course)
Watch the neoliberals feed off of rigid bureaucratic incompetence to pander for privatization and create for-profit bureaucratic incompetence. All with massive subsidies that citizens will pay through taxes or cutting of public services elsewhere.
Gotta love the "free" market and "democracy".
Why is DB worse than other operators of similar legal structure and funding, in terms of free markets and democracy, from your perspective?
I'm not gonna pretend I know about the specifics of DB, but tales of crappy public services are plenty around the world and a lot of the critique is aimed at enabling privatization.
My anecdotal evidence is that these public entities usually suffer from lack of funding or incompetence fueled by corruption, that usually takes a few forms: - the contracting of work to a third party with kickback (incentives to continously do sloppy work) - inaction due to lack of corrupting opportunities (leaders try but cant set up a good fraud scheme) - nepotism that leads to incompetence
And lack of funding can and has been weaponized to cause a shitty service to then set the pretext for privatization. Usually there are private interests behind this public policy decision.
The more menial reason for lack of funding is sometimes massive spending or subsidies for capitalists elsewhere which skews the budget.
And of course also the intense bureacracy needed due to lack of democratic control. Yes, im saying people dont actually have a say and they could have a say. IE delegate democracy.
These are just universal problems of modern capitalist economies and their bourgeois politics.
Quite possibly DB suffers from these more intensely than others.
This story, countless other stories. The fellow comments here. But then Europe wants us to drop our cars and rely more in public transport? Laughable.
Deutsche Bahn has a reputation even inside of Europe. It's not like this in other countries.
Your country would have to be laughably corrupt if it couldn't build out a public transit system that beats DB.
yes the US is laughably corrupt
It's not like this in Sweden I can tell you.
No accessible emergency brakes?
I guess that's what happens if you live in a failed state. It's like watching an accident happen in super slow motion. I live rather remotely and 90% of bus drivers don't even speak German so when they skip a station despite you pushing the button to signal wanting to exit, you basically can't even communicate, leading to having to walk up to 2km with all your grocery bags.
Did you really just blame immigration for the German railway's issues...?
wtf? No.
"failed state" coupled with "don't even speak German" seemed like dog whistles
What did you mean by failed state?
It's difficult having an honest discussion if participants claim to sense barely perceptible noises where there aren't any.
One attribute of a failed state is that it can no longer provide public services. German bridges are in dire need of repair, some just crumbled last year. Trains aren't on time if they ride at all. Bordering countries already complain about this affecting their schedules as well.
Another attribute is crime. We've seen a rise in knife attacks over the last few years. German cities try to curb this via weapon-free zones with no effect because making something illegal doesn't fix the root cause. Then there's this intellectually offensive and unnecessarily expensive security theatre at local christmas markets.
Next is state legitimacy. After last year's elections which followed a government collapse, the old (collapsed!) cabinet was brought back in to support a debt-driven military budget that the new cabinet wouldn't have approved. The Election Scrutiny Committee decided against a recount of the votes for a specific party that didn't make it into the Bundestag because of a missing votes to reach a requirement while there were many reports of votes having been mishandled - even in many previous elections. Not to forget the complete lack of interest in investigating critical infrastructure being destroyed that now affects the entire industrial core of the country.
Then there's corruption: Mask deals, Cum ex, Azerbaijan as just rather recent examples involving national and international scandals.
Economy: Barely any growth, inflation beyond the official numbers, rising energy prices (spot prices partially tripled in the ~5 years).
I could go on. I know it's a far cry from "gangs rule the streets" levels of "failed state" but compared to some slightly saner Western governments and compared to pre-2020 Germany, it's quite the failure with no signs for improvements.
I listed a public transport related experience explaining why Germany is a failed state. I'm not blaming individuals. To construe this into blaming immigration for broken public transport is reaching man.
This is the place where AI needs to take over, no more excuses!
For example in country 400k€ was spend on executives (200 hundred people) Christmas dinner for publicly owned company.
While the scheduling and company management is similar issues as DB. I think we ned a new word for this kind of clusterfuck!! They are "rulesfull", rules that hinder the system and make the user scream in pain and agony.
I don't tolerate this kind of thing. If you find yourself in a similar situation and want out - call emergency services, say chest pain, out of breath, and where you are.
You may find the train has now "registered" itself at the next station.
It will reveal driver to be using intentionally tricky language. "Cannot stop"
It's not that the train can't stop, trains can obviously stop wherever and whenever they want. It's not that the doors cannot open - train doors can be opened by the driver or by passengers, trains have emergency egress requirements.
The problem is that nobody actually wanted to get off that train. They wanted to complain about it. Comparing it to a kidnapping is offensive and absurd. That's now how people act when kidnapped.
It's not a fake emergency. Acute anxiety causes the same thing. That's for a hospital to decide, not a train company.
> If you find yourself in a similar situation and want out - call emergency services, say chest pain, out of breath, and where you are.
It is if you instruct people how to best lie to emergency services because your train was delayed.
I'm sorry for the second reply but the "hyperbolic rhetorical narrative device" - is a literal comparison to kidnapping. That is what the text says. I struggle to see how it would be the opposite, they're not comparing it to a kidnapping?
So you want to waste the time of an ambulance and emergency doctor just to be able to get off a train, which could mean that emergency services are lacking elsewhere?
Not a good idea to abuse EMS ever. But certainly given a sample size of enough people, some will invariably have mental breakdowns or panic attacks from being held against their will necessitating EMS. Judging and chastising people having real panic attacks as fakers is fucking idiotic bullshit. Pushing people to the breaking point with brinkmanship games will cause all sorts of unnecessary drama and workarounds as a matter of survival, and not all of the reactions will be positive or properly proportionate.
I'm abusing one government department due to suffering abuse from another. If that causes a different kind of staffing shortage - that's something I don't have control over, but has the same root cause as the DB incompetence.
In my case because I do have not mild but moderate autism and panic disorder, it would genuinely feel like a heart attack if that happened to me. I wouldn't be lying about my symptoms.
The problem with that is - why do I get access to this "out" by being able to call EMS to get off the train? (Provided you agree with me that I would be a valid call). Why does everyone else have to suffer?
My worldview is they don't. DB wants to take you past 15 stations? Here's a mechanism to stop them.
I'm agreeing it's an abuse of the system, but it's valid because it scales. If there was a flood of EMS calls every time DB skipped 15 stations - DB blinks first.
Maybe a better example from me would have been an emergency stop button?
Why is my time less valuable than an ambulance or doctor? You have to make a lot of assumptions and normative judgements for that to be true, which I reject.
Morally DB (through the driver) is the one lying and saying things like "cannot stop". They don't want to stop - that's different. They've already broken the social contract, I'm free to do the same.
The consequence of wasting a doctor or ambulance drivers time is depriving someone else of medical care, potentially leading to worse medical outcomes, up to death.
I’m sure you’re going to pose a hypothetical that you would be in the way to save someone’s life, but we both know that’s not true and even in that situation, you could raise that with the train company rather than faking a new, different medical emergency
I won't give you a new hypothetical, just complete the comparison.
It's true an EMS call might reduce QALY (quality adjusted life years). It's also true that taking a train full of passengers somewhere they don't want to go also reduces QALY.
Iterate this enough and DB changes their policy. Now we have a new equilibrium. The full game theory of this isn't as simple as wasted doctor time = bad.
EMS on duty vs you on a train, doesn't take a lot of assumptions to guess whos wasted time risks more lives. And it's not don't want to stop, it's not allowed to stop. Do you think it's the driver's decision when and where to stop. Unless in case of emergency there s strict rules they have to follow.
One simple rule for everybody is: Never ever waste the time of EMS.
What if I get 10 people off the train for one EMS call.
What about 100? If you bring an absolute like that to a philosophical argument you're backing yourself into a corner.
What if one person dies because of this call, what if other peoplre follow your example and more people die?
How about that? The driver asks for you to sacrifice your life then he will stop the train an let 100 people off the train. According to your logic a good choice.
There is a huge difference between wasted time and being dead escpecially for the relarives of the dead. Maybe you should tell your logic to someone who last someone because EMS was late.
It's probably less valuable because they're surely working, and their job is to save lives and it's time sensitive; while there are chances that you're not working and that your job is less time-critical than theirs.
However I second your idea that "if the train doesn't stop it's because they decided they didn't want it to stop"- and therefore they should be considered responsible for kidnapping their customers unless it can be proven that it was absolutely impossible to stop the train without catastrophic consequences.
Why not shoot the driver and take control of the train?
The ad absurdum of this situation would be DB escalating it into a full on hijacking scenario where they run the train in a loop, forever claiming the train cannot ever stop.
In that situation - you do what is necessary to stop the train, because nobody else will, which might involve killing the driver.
The reason you don't jump straight to shooting the driver is that doesn't achieve your goals. There is a long list of things to do before needing to kill anyone, so do those first.
Ok, I think I understand your viewpoint better. You will do the minimum necessary to make the outcome you want happen, regardless of what it might be. The goal you want and the actions needed to make it come about need not be proportional.
You're being downvoted because what you propose is an abuse of the emergency services system. And that's bad. I wonder who's conversely taking action on the badness of DB abusing every customer of most of their services.
I don't defend the situation as "good". I can agree on it being bad, but the whole situation is bad.
The premise here is kidnapping - I don't think using emergency services in a kidnapping is out of the question.
I think this just makes a bad situation worse. This can go two ways:
- the emergency services will wait at the station the train is going to anyway
- your health insurance realizes what you've done and make you pay the bills.
Faking a medical emergency emergency is both illegal and immoral.
In Germany in particular, you could be charged for all the expenses. A friend of mine did not fake, was in real panic, but still was at the end of the ”nothing” and had to paid the ambulance costs. Not cheap!
If you think you are being kidnapped or whatever, instead of lying and abusing EMS, you can call the police, and explain clearly what’s going on with the truth. If serious enough they will be able to act better in that case.
I find the downvotes to your comment absurd. The downvoters seem to me what Kaczynski called "oversocialized". They accept being taken against your will because the system says that's how it's supposed to work. And then rationalize their conformity with apparent consequences (medical emergency services not providing care elsewhere, you being penalized for a fake call, and so on).
It shows a concerning lack of agency and a concerning amount of conformity.
I agree that the decision made by the train here sucks, but I think it's pretty clear that the use of "kidnapped" is hyperbole. You are not "kidnapped" if the bus driver refuses to let you get down in the middle of the freeway. The situation is a little similar if the driver is taking you to somewhere you don't want to go, because that is also what a kidnapper does, but that's where the similarities end.
I'm not asking the bus driver to stop in the middle of a highway. I'm asking the bus driver not to go past 15 actual bus stops before letting me off. With the drivers rationale being - "This bus is not registered at any of those stops".
If you’re on an express bus it will do that though?
The use of "kidnapped" is hyperbole and a bit click-baity but that does not change the story much though.
I'd agree with you on this, but abusing emergency medical services like this is a step too far.
I'm disappointed that this deviancy is normalized and rationalized, and that more people aren't freaking out while being held against their will. The status quo continues because it's tolerated.
I often think about people in the USA, they might have some misdemeanor warrant for some traffic infraction they didn't know about on the other side of the country.
They get stopped for speeding near their home in Florida, the police arrest them, take them to the county jail where they are stuck without bond waiting for extradition to the county where the warrant was issued. You might wait a few weeks in a cell, then you can spend another five weeks stuck in the back of a van, pissing into a cup while they drive you 3000 miles to Seattle, stopping at 25 other jails on the way. Only for Seattle to give you a court date and kick you out of the door with nothing except the clothes on your back. Except it's 40°F and you were arrested in a t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops. The cops in Florida have your phone and wallet. You have no phone numbers. You have no money. You're 3000 miles from home. Good luck, champ!
(this is a real thing that happens regularly in the USA)
How does this relate to the post?
The DB service described is terrible, but the author’s language is really hard to get around.
The constant comparison to cows, for example, suggesting it’s ok and normal to mistreat non humans, instead of making the far more obvious connection that if a human who is understanding exactly what is happening goes through so much suffering with a slight change of schedule, the fear and suffering cows and other animals who are constantly being transported in far worse conditions with no idea what is happening may be going through.
The comparison to kidnapping is also really bad. I’ve taken a plane that had been diverted to the wrong, unfriendly, country and then been unable to leave a tiny terminal, with no to limited access to food, water and restroom facilities for hours, and the idea that we were being kidnapped never crossed my mind, although actual kidnapping by the state we were in was a remote but real possibility.
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